Many Ways to Think About Your Personas

Ten years ago, I wrote in “Product Design: Bridging the Gap Between Product Management & Development” for Pragmatic Marketer that: “Personas are a stand-in for a unique group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes based on the users’ behaviors, attitudes, and goals.” The concepts of a persona have been around for … Read more

Group Personas

In some cases, you may only need to define a limited set of primary and secondary personas. It may be important to make the distinction between your buyer, user and influencer personas. But as you think through your scenarios, if you find groups of personas interacting with the environment or with other personas, you may … Read more

Delivering Experience Design as a Service: An Interview with Steve Craig, Director, Products & Experience at Mitek

Steve Craig, Director of Products & Experience for Identity at Mitek, is a product leader known for creating and executing product vision and driving technology roadmaps in entrepreneurial environments as well as in Fortune 500 companies like HP and Intuit. He joins us today to talk about Experience Design as a Service (XDaaS). Thanks for joining … Read more

Defining and Developing Your UX Strategy and KPIs

I recently helped a large enterprise software organization define and develop their UX strategic objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). We held a two-day offsite. On day one, in the morning, we discussed how they did Agile and UX. Agile was a big part of their operation. We also talked about how they did UX … 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

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

The Partnership Between Designers and Data Scientists

From Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era, Fabien Girardin shares that with a behavioral data-driven experiences, we exploit thick data, the qualitative information that provides insights on people’s lives, big data from the aggregated behavioral data of millions of people and the small data that each individual generates. Traditionally, designers focus on defining the experience of the service, feature or … 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

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