We are now living in the ‘Age of the Customer’ where the pace of technologic advancement and customer empowerment continues to disrupt today’s business models. The key to competitive survival is data and insights-driven customer obsession. Customer obsession means constantly listening to customers and continuously testing, enhancing, and personalizing the customer experience. According to The … Read more
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
You are providing solutions for your customers. Are you meeting their needs? How do you know? You know that Sales decreased or renewals went down or they left before they made the purchase. But why? If you want to know – if you want to do something about it – then you must measure it. … Read more
It is crucial to ensure that your products and services meets the needs and capabilities of your customers, particularly in terms of the experience you deliver meets your brand promise. Today’s rapidly changing markets requires a more lean and agile approach towards understanding your target audience earlier and reviewing your designs more often with them … Read more
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
You could be measuring a ride experience at Disneyland, the driving experience of a Tesla, a medical device in the operating room – or your website’s experience… You may think that you want to measure satisfaction or delight, learnability, effort or event time on task. These are all important factors, but the most important thing … Read more
The term “Lean” was first coined by John Krafcik in his 1988 article, “Triumph of the Lean Production System” based on his experience as a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California. Adapting the principles from Lean manufacturing, Mary & Tom Poppendieck wrote Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (May 18, 2003). … Read more
A product or service feature will drift over time from a delightful innovation to a basic need. The drift is driven by customer expectations and by the level of performance from competing products. For example mobile phone batteries were originally large and bulky with only a few hours of charge. Over time we have come … Read more
Every day, we fill out forms. At the office to get our work done and at home to take care of our domestic needs. Forms are the lifeblood of digital information sharing. A couple of excellent guidelines on forms: Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design Best Practices shares guidelines on input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, … Read more
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO Amazon emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way. Bezos shares … Read more
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
In 2007, I wrote an article for Pragmatic Marketer magazine entitled “Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software.” I opened the article with: “Enterprise software is only easy to use if the customers and users think it is easy to use. To determine “ease of use,” first understand … Read more