Winning in the Marketplace with Usability Testing

Once you have validated that your product’s overall workflow meets customer and user needs, do usability testing to evaluate individual tasks to ensure they are easy to complete. Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which users can operate a system and their efficiency and satisfaction when using the system. Such evaluations validate that tasks are … Read more

Reviewing Designs with Your Customers is the Key to Designing Easy-to-use Solutions

Developing prototypes and reviewing them with target customers and users is key to designing easy-to-use solutions. You must spend some time validating workflow, navigation, information grouping, information hierarchy, terminology, labels, and interactions to ensure they meet the needs of the market and your users. Your understanding of various customers’ needs, users’ workflows, and content overlaps … Read more

Winning in the Marketplace with User Experience Design

During User Experience (UX) design, develop diagrams of various users’ workflows, noting where they are similar or different. Next, based on your findings, group your customer and user types by similar roles, and create profiles or personas that synthesize users’ skills, patterns, and goals to better understand their needs. Companies in mature markets may not … Read more

Winning in the Marketplace with Market and User Research

market research

The first step in developing solutions that are easy to use is understanding customer and user needs within the context of the market and existing competition. It takes market and user research to: define the problem your product must solve and design an optimal solution understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ solutions in comparison … Read more

Conduct Usability Evaluations to Ensure Your Solution is Easy to Use

Once you have validated the workflow meets the customer and user needs, evaluate the tasks to ensure that they are easy to complete. Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which the system can be operated by its users, the efficiency of the solution and satisfaction. These evaluations validate that the tasks are easy to complete—a … Read more

Designing the Customer and User Experience

Designing a user experience may be easy to you, but remember that customers and users don’t know what they specifically want in a solution. They know that they want efficient, effective solutions and they have ideas about how to improve the workflow, but it is up to the software solution provider to bridge the gap … Read more

Define the Customers’ Workflow and Users’ Tasks

To design user experiences that are easy to use for your customers and users, become familiar with the customers’ workflows and the users’ tasks. When conducting your research, establish a list of users by companies, departments, and roles. The company contact is usually the “customer” and the department contact is usually a manager. In enterprise … Read more

Understand Your Customer in Context of the Market

Researching the customer and user needs The first step in understanding the needs of customers and users is to understand their marketplace. Put the customers and users needs in context of the market, competition, and other customers and users. How does this solution serve its market? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the competitions’ … Read more

Product Management and Design: Analyze the Requirements and Design the Solution

Product Design conducts an analysis of the market, technology, and competition, in terms of the user experience and interface design, early in the product lifecycle to determine the user interface (UI) design direction. Partnering with Product Management, the Product Design group conducts surveys, focus groups, reviews, and other activities to better understand the market, customer, … Read more

Product Management and Design: Writing Requirements and Validating Solutions

Product Management writes requirements that identify the problems in the marketplace and quantifies opportunities for their solutions. Product Design assists Product Management in validating the solutions. Information Architects or Usability Specialists develop, conduct, and analyze surveys, interviews, and/or observations. The data from these studies helps identify problems and opportunities that are realized in the requirements. … Read more

Product Management and Design: Identify Problems and Quantify Opportunities

favorite design thinking tool

Product Management identifies problems in the marketplace, conducts analysis, and quantifies opportunities for solutions to the problems. Product Management develops a better understanding of the market, customers, and the customers’ end-users, to create Buyer and User Personas. Personas are a stand-in for a unique group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes … Read more

Develop Visual Designs that Support the Brand and Enhance the Ease of Use

Once you’re confident you understand various customers’ workflow, activities, and tasks, it’s time to develop visual design—color scheme, fonts, iconography, branding, and all graphic elements. Visual designers develop the visual design elements that support the company’s brand and enhance the ease of task completion and efficiency. Medium-fidelity prototypes are developed based on wireframes and visual … Read more