The Right Color Palette for Data Visualization

While visually appealing (harmonious) color palettes are easy to come by these days, finding the right color palette for data visualizations is challenging. Things are made more difficult, as we need to convey information across thousands of unique data sets in many different types of visualization layouts. And then there are issues like accessibility, enough … Read more

Design and Data Science: Creating Meaningful Experiences in the Machine Learning Era

With the advance of machine learning and “artificial intelligence” (AI), it has become the responsibility of both designers and data scientists to understand how to shape experiences that improve lives. As Greg Borenstein argues in Power to the People: How One Unknown Group of Researchers Holds the Key to Using AI to Solve Real Human Problems: … Read more

Experience Design Principles for Machine Learning Solutions

“Nowadays, the design of many digital services does not only rely on data manipulation and information design but also on systems that learn from their users.” – Fabien Girardin, Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era Behavioral data – human interactions (transactions) with systems – is fed as context to algorithms that generates knowledge. An … Read more

Minimum Desirable Product

Andrew Chen shares in Minimum Desirable Product: “a business-driven company might try to assess viability upfront, thinking about metrics and revenue and market sizes. A feasibility (engineering) oriented organization might try to pick a super hard technology first (P2P! Mapreduce! Search!), then try to build a business around it. And a desirability-focused team might focus … 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

Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation

Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation is one of the four statements of the Agile Manifesto. If you are a small software company or you are working in a JAD with your customers, then customer collaboration is the actual customer who is purchasing your solution. If you are large organization, the customer may be your internal customer … 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

Plans Don’t Fail. People Fail to Plan

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower In the Agile Manifesto, it is stated that the value of Responding to Change Over Following a Plan. The Agile movement seeks alternatives to traditional project management like waterfall and traditional sequential development that cannot adapt quickly enough … 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

Value-Driven Design to Value-Centered Design

Value-Driven Design is a process where the design choices are made to maximize system value rather than to meet performance requirements. Value-Driven Design grew from a collaboration of three Technical Committees of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA): the Economics Technical Committee, the Systems Engineering Technical Committee, and the Multidisciplinary Optimization Technical Committee. … Read more

Minimum Viable Product

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) center around the business perspective. It asks the question “what is the minimum product I have to build to figure out whether I have a business?” You might do that from testing signups on landing pages or putting up price points and collecting payment information to helps assess the true … Read more