“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” -Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. When the Web meets this goal, it … Read more
Persona-driven Agile Development is a methodology that combines the human-centric focus of personas with the iterative and flexible nature of Agile methodologies. This approach helps ensure that the products being developed align closely with the needs and goals of the target customer by keeping them at the center of the development process. 1. Create Personas … Read more
Contextual inquiry is a semi-structured observational and interview (inquiry) method to understand how and why a prospect or customers uses (existing) or may use (prototype) your solution in the environment that they use it (context). This could be using an appliance in a kitchen, a tool on the shop floor, a device in a lab, … Read more
“There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and Test it.” – Rik Higham, … Read more
Lately, I have been hearing a lot talk about design thinking and human-centered design. What are they? How are they different? Are they the same? It reminds me of the old debate around user experience and “usability. You may have missed that one… The usability folks felt that “usability” was a hard science with an … Read more
Mental models are psychological representations of real, hypothetical, or imaginary situations. They were first postulated in the late 1800’s by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce but it was the Scottish psychologist, Kenneth Craik, in 1943, who describes mental models as the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality that it uses to anticipate events, to … Read more
As previously discussed, Design Thinking means thinking like a designer. It is not so much a process but a mindset. There is a process that designers follow… in the simplest of terms, it is research, design and test. Designers do have a bias to designing. They want to create elegant solutions that make peoples’ lives … Read more
To innovate, you must observe and talk to the people for whom you are designing your solution. Observe them in the place that they will using your solution and hear from them in their own words. The goal of an Interview is to really understand their experiences, needs, and desires. Here are few tips for … Read more
I started developing website in the 1990’s – HTML 1, before CSS, basic JavaScript and the beginning of the dot com boom. Now there is HTML 5, CSS 3 and all sorts of libraries and frameworks to create sophisticated websites. One thing hasn’t change about websites – they still need to be easy to use. … Read more
Interviews are one of the basic methods of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, one of the questioning technique is non directed interview, sometimes called unstructured interview. Mike Kuniavsky, author and a twenty-year veteran of digital product development shares in … Read more
We are now living in the ‘Age of the Customer’ where the pace of technologic advancement and customer empowerment continues to disrupt today’s business models. The key to competitive survival is data and insights-driven customer obsession. Customer obsession means constantly listening to customers and continuously testing, enhancing, and personalizing the customer experience. According to The … Read more
You are providing solutions for your customers. Are you meeting their needs? How do you know? You know that Sales decreased or renewals went down or they left before they made the purchase. But why? If you want to know – if you want to do something about it – then you must measure it. … Read more