My Favorite Toy and Design Thinking

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 Adoption Challenges

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

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

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

Create a Brilliant Product Roadmap

Full disclosure, I love Aha! Product Management road-mapping software and have introduced it to several companies. When I saw this post by Brian de Haaff, Aha! Founder and CEO, I had to share it. Here’s what Brian shares on how to create a brilliant product roadmap: Define your strategy. What is the market potential, and … Read more

What is UX Debt?

The term “UX debt” comes to us from the term “Technical Debt” coined by Ward Cunningham. Technical debt (sometimes called code debt) is “a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution” … Read more

Design Sprints with Sean Van Tyne on Portofino Media

I joined host, Armond Merhabian, and co-host, Daniel Spencer, to discuss how Design Sprints can accelerate Product discovery and development. We discussed how Design Sprints take the five stages of Design Thinking and do them in five days. This is not done in the Development phase, but earlier in the Portfolio phase, to determine if … Read more

Lean UX

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX focuses on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables (an updated edition came out this month). This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. It shares how to drive the design in … Read more

Agile UX Remote Usability Testing

Usability evaluations assess the degree to which your website, application, product or service can be used by your customers, the efficiency of your solution and the overall delightfulness you deliver. These evaluations are to validate that the tasks are easy to complete. It is a test of the ease of use of your offering not … 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