Customer Experience, User Experience and Agile

I was recently interviewed by Carlos Marquez, CEO at Connexa. He was looking for clarity around Agile development and the roles that Customer Experience and User Experience play. Here’s what I shared: According to the latest definition of Agile software development on Wikipedia: “Agile software development describes a set of values and principles for software … Read more

Use Error – NOT User Error

While attending San Diego’s Medical Device and Technology Network meetup, the always wonderful Dr. Joely Gardner, author, speaker, and industry leader human factors and usability testing expert in medical devices, software, and web-based applications, shared with us insightful, real-life stories from the field. One of the things that Dr. Gardner shared is the FDA change from “User … Read more

Experience Makers are Memory Makers: Products are now Props and Services are the Stage

memorable experiences

In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore explain how we are in a new economic era in which mere goods and services are no longer enough and all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers. Joe Pine, shares in this video how in this new economy we are in that products are now props … Read more

The New Relation Between Humans and Machines

“The experiences powered by machine learning are not linear or based on static business and design rules. They evolve according to human behaviors with constantly updating models fed by streams of data. Each product or service becomes almost like a living, breathing thing. Or as people at Google would say: ‘It’s a different kind of … Read more

Viability, Feasibility and Desirability

IDEO has been leading the charge on an innovation model built around Design Thinking. In this model, there are three key perspectives: Viability. Is it viable. Does it have a reasonable chance of succeeding? Is it capable of producing a profit or achieving your goal? Feasibility. Is it feasible. Does the technology exist or can … Read more

Design Sprints with Sean Van Tyne on Portofino Media

I joined host, Armond Merhabian, and co-host, Daniel Spencer, to discuss how Design Sprints can accelerate Product discovery and development. We discussed how Design Sprints take the five stages of Design Thinking and do them in five days. This is not done in the Development phase, but earlier in the Portfolio phase, to determine if … Read more

Google Design Sprint

Google Design Sprint takes the Design Thinking process and compresses the five stages into five days. Developed at Google Ventures, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, and behavior science. The idea is that working together in a design sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. … Read more

Agile UX Remote Usability Testing

Usability evaluations assess the degree to which your website, application, product or service can be used by your customers, the efficiency of your solution and the overall delightfulness you deliver. These evaluations are to validate that the tasks are easy to complete. It is a test of the ease of use of your offering not … Read more

Joint Application Design

IBM formalized the Joint Application Design process in 1974. In JAD, customers and end-users jointly define and design their solution with the solution provider that is developing and delivering it. It closes the gap in time and cost around understanding requirements early and throughout the application development lifecycle. In the JAD process, sessions are held … Read more

Easy to Use: Icons

Ever visit a website or store or see a sign in a public space that you had no idea what the icon meant? There are a lot of reasons for that. One, of course is the ethnocentric aspect – we know what we know based on our prior experiences. So, if the image of the … Read more

Marty Cagan and Continuous Discovery and Delivery

Marty Cagan gave a talk on The Root Causes of Product Failure at productcamp la. Many things that he shared resonated with me. Here are few ideas about the big difference between how most product teams work and the best product teams work: The Product Team. If you want to make great products, the product … Read more

Calm Technology

The terms “calm computing” and “calm technology” were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. He felt that the promise of computing systems was that they might “simplify complexities, not introduce new ones.” Principles of Calm Technology Technology should require the smallest possible … Read more