Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking and Design Making

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

Building the Right Thing, Building it Right, Building it Fast

Markets are changing faster than ever. We are living Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore predicted that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Although the pace has slowed (the number of … 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

Design Thinking: Divergence and Convergence Cycles

  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

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

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

Viability, Feasibility and Desirability

IDEO has been leading the charge on an innovation model built around Design Thinking. In this model, there are three key perspectives: Viability. Is it viable. Does it have a reasonable chance of succeeding? Is it capable of producing a profit or achieving your goal? Feasibility. Is it feasible. Does the technology exist or can … Read more

Personas, Journey Maps, Service Blueprints, and Innovation

Personas Personas help you specify the context of use by identifying the people who will use your solution, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it. They help you to create a point of view that is based on your target audiences’ needs and insights so you can see … Read more

Jeanne Bliss’s Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience

Jeanne Bliss shares with us in her post Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience: CUSTOMERS AS ASSETS Your focus is to get leaders to make a defining performance metric – the growth or loss of your customer base. The purpose is to shift to a simple understanding – knowing what customers actually did to impact … Read more

Value-Driven Design to Value-Centered Design

Value-Driven Design is a process where the design choices are made to maximize system value rather than to meet performance requirements. Value-Driven Design grew from a collaboration of three Technical Committees of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA): the Economics Technical Committee, the Systems Engineering Technical Committee, and the Multidisciplinary Optimization Technical Committee. … Read more

Experience Design and the Sixth Sense

When designing experiences – regardless if it is for a place or event or product or service – you think about how it will be experienced across the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. All of these are important but what about the sixth sense? I don’t mean extrasensory perception or ESP but … Read more

Small Companies can Deliver Great Experiences just like Apple

Did you get a chance to catch me on Real Talk San Diego1700 AM Friday, December 3 from 11 to 12? If not or if you want to hear it again, you can download the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/realtalksandiego/sean-van-tyne-12-04-15 It was a fun and lively discussion. We discussed how User Experience encompasses all aspects of your … Read more