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
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
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
Easy to Use was a good book. It covered much of what I have learned over my many years of creating great user experiences with agile development for enterprise software. But there were a few more things that I that I wanted to say. Easy to Use 2.0 covers new topics like user experience myths and … Read more
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
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
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
Design Thinking is an iterative process. In the larger context, we understand then explore then materialize our solution. Every step of the way is iterative. What we learn in one step of the process may cause us to go back and refine what we learned in a previous step. Especially when we prototype our ideas … Read more
In the creative process, you start with an idea. You explore aspects of that idea – go wide – and diverge into many directions to better understand and define your problem. You follow many paths – some lead to dead-ends, some stray too far off from your vision and some lead to the same … Read more
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
My favorite toy as a child was a broken single reflex camera. It served as everything from my Star Trek tricorder to a spaceship for my little toy men. My parents would have never guessed it. I wouldn’t have guessed it either. But if my parents had observed my play and asked me a few … Read more
Design Thinking is a powerful tool to innovate your strategy, organization or next disruptive product or service. But getting your organization to adopt Design Thinking can be a challenge. Here are some of the challenges that I have seen and ways to mitigate them: Executive Buy-In If your executive team doesn’t see the value in … Read more