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

Product Management and Design Working Together

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

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

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

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

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

Better Metrics for Measuring Agile Development Success

The term agile was first coined for this in 2001, in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.  According to the manifesto Twelve Principles of Agile Software, their highest priority is to “Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” Which is a good thing, especially in today’s rapidly changing marketplace. Another one of their principles … Read more