Technologies That Could Soon Enhance You in Body and Mind

Here comes the future! Are you ready for augmented vision, brain-computer interface and the end of personal computers and smartphones? From Elise Bohan, 10 Human Body Modifications You Can Expect in the next Decade: “Your smartphone enhances your mind, your spectacles enhance your vision, and your pacemaker (if you have one) regulates your heartbeat. Our … Read more

User Story Maps and Wireframes

In Agile, user story maps are a holistic view of your product backlog. A product backlog is a repository of requirements for the releases of the product. The user story map is focused on the user experience target outcomes and identifying the best way to ‘slice’ your product releases by minimal viable product (MVP). A … 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

Crafting Experiences for The Enterprise

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

Death of the Password with Better Authentication Design

I recently attended Jared Spool’s presentation “Insecure & Unintuitive: How We Need to Fix the UX of Security.” If you haven’t heard Jared speak then I recommend that you do. Jared is both highly entertaining and highly informative. In this presentation, Jared shared how organizations are losing millions of dollars because people don’t remember their … Read more

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

Experience Design Principles for Machine Learning

I find myself going back to Fabien Girardin’s excellent article, Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era, and mining it for more gold. Fabien shares: “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. If you would open the … Read more

Experience Design, Machine Learning and the Platinum Rule

The Golden Rule or law of reciprocity is the principle of treating others as one would wish to be treated. It is a maxim of altruism seen in many religions and cultures. Simply stated, “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.” As a child, I learned it as “Do onto others as you would want them to do … Read more

User Experience Insights Drive Better AI

In the Harvard Business Review article, AI Won’t Change Companies Without Great UX, Michael Schrage asked the question, “As artificial intelligence algorithms infiltrate the enterprise, organizational learning matters as much as machine learning. How should smart management teams maximize the economic value of smarter systems?”: “Strategically speaking, a brilliant data-driven algorithm typically matters less than … 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

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

Design Thinking: A Brief History

You could say the basic principles of Design Thinking have always been around. It was these basic principles that early humans built tools and drew on cave walls. It required observation, experimentation and prototyping. Learning from each iteration and evolving the design and our evolution as a species. Just as is does today. In his … Read more