Design Thinking, Lean and Agile Better Defining Customer Problems and Solutions

In today’s experience economy, successful companies don’t stand out because of their efficient production or their better engineering. It is their dedication to understanding their customers and their strong commitment to solving customers’ problems and servicing their needs. In the article, Why Design Thinking is the Future of Management, Stefan Link shares: “Design Thinking helps … Read more

Five Tips for Non Directed Interview

Interviews are one of the basic methods of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, one of the questioning technique is non directed interview, sometimes called unstructured interview. Mike Kuniavsky, author and a twenty-year veteran of digital product development shares in … Read more

2017 Designer to Developer Ratios Trends

One of the questions that I get all the time is “What is the best Designer to Developer ratio?” As you can imagine, this can vary depending on marketplace and business goals. If you developing an engineering tool for engineers then your engineers who are developing it probably have a good idea of who is … Read more

What are the Top 5 Behaviors of Design-Driven Organizations and Why Do They Matter?

This article first appeared in LinkedIn November 14, 2017. Written by one of my heroes, Tim Brown, CEO at IDEO: Some of today’s most successful companies—Airbnb, Nike—have CEOs who are also designers. And leading organizations across industries, like Apple, 3M, and Pepsi, have highly influential Chief Design Officers at the helm. Making design a priority isn’t just … Read more

Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking and Design Making

Human-Centered Design (HCD), as the name implies, is designing solutions around people. HCD involves the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process by observing the problems within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing, and implementing a solution.  It is the process that innovators like Apple and IDEO follow. In this process, you first need to clearly define the problem then … Read more

Before You Write Your Requirements, Create a Prototype

Prototype your ideas before you develop them. Use prototypes to solicit feedbacks from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. Before you write your requirements, create a “prototype.” This could be a sketch – or sketches –  on a … Read more

Product Management and Design Working Together

The best product development experiences I have had have been when the Product, Design and Development work together. One experience that comes to mind, is when the Product Manager, Development Manager and myself were working on a solution for a new market. We visited our main prospect, the largest organization in this market, with a … Read more

Data Science Meets Design Thinking

In the O’Reilly article, Design thinking and data science: Solving problems with data necessitates a diversity of thought, Dean Malmgren from Datascope and Jon Wettersten from IDEO shares: “Problem solving not only requires a high-level conceptual understanding of the challenge, but also a deep understanding of the nuances of a challenge… Solving problems with data necessitates a … Read more

UserZoom Sponsors UX Boot Camps

While helping BD Medical Technology redesign their intranet, I got the distinct honor and pleasure of working with the Nielsen Norman Group. NN/g conducted card sorts and tree studies with UserZoom. This also led to me doing a NN/g Design Thinking and Agile online seminar. UserZoom has been one of the primary sponsor of UX … Read more

Service Design Trends for 2017 – Agile Meets Design Thinking

John Knight posted this a few months ago. I believe that that these 10 trends are worth paying attention to: “…underpin digital transformation across mobile, tablet, desktop and the wave of new UI technologies such as wearables… these changes will shift the focus from consumer to co-creator and from metropolitan chic to global reach, thus … Read more