UX Maturity Model and Strategy Scorecard

Your products and services are delivering an experience to your customers regardless if you are consciously managing them. A good experience delights customers and generates a steady revenue stream while a poor experience sends customers to the competition and can be the demise of an organization. Savvy organizations understand their experience design maturity, invest in … Read more

How to Get Your UX Team a Seat at the Table: Building UX into Business Competency

I have grown several UX departments from little or nothing to global highly efficient and effective teams. In every case, it was the same – we had to prove ourselves to the decision makers that we were worth investing in. We needed to get a “seat at the table” with the executives team that determined … 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

How to Hire the Right User Experience Talent

Over the years, this is the most consistent question I get asked is “How do you hire the right User Experience talent?” Here are my guidelines: Understand Your Vision and Strategy What is your organization’s vision and strategy and how does the experience you deliver to your customers support it?  Your vision is probably to … Read more

Plans Don’t Fail. People Fail to Plan

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower In the Agile Manifesto, it is stated that the value of Responding to Change Over Following a Plan. The Agile movement seeks alternatives to traditional project management like waterfall and traditional sequential development that cannot adapt quickly enough … Read more

Take Part in Actuation Consulting 5th Annual Study of Product Teams

These annual ongoing studies share information that is meaningful to executives of product organizations in general and product executives in particular. Once the survey is complete, the data is shared with an independent statistician who conducts regression analysis. The result of this regression analysis are factors that are highly correlated with high performance on product … 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

Customer Satisfaction, Customer Effort and Net Promoter Score: Different Metrics to Measure Different Aspect of your Customer Experience

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a measure of how products and/or services meet customer expectation. Organizations ask their customers whether their product and/or service have met expectations using a rating scale to measure. It is essential in today’s experience economy for businesses to effectively manage customer satisfaction. CSAT is now a key differentiator and increasingly becoming … Read more

25 Best Practices to Employee Engagement

The Temkin Group recently published The Five I’s of Employee Engagement. As recent research has shown us the direct correlation between employee engagement, customer loyalty and profitability, this report spells out the 25 best practices based on interviews with companies that lead in this area. Here are the results: Inform 1. Follow a thorough communication … Read more

To Maintain Quality, We Must Do Some Pruning

Jason Fried, of 37 Signals, wrote this in his recent blog, Pruning: Making room for something new: “It’s so easy to create (because creating is fun), but it’s also easy to ignore (because ignoring doesn’t involve work). Over time, if you create too much and don’t clean it up, you can lose control over quality. Quality, … Read more

How Much User Experience Effort by Types of Release

The level of user experience effort that is practical for a given release depends, to some extent, on the type of release—that is, whether it is a major release, a minor release, or an update. Table 1 provides a summary of guidelines for the UX effort that is recommended for each type of release. Table … Read more

How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take for Large Versus Small-to-Medium Companies

Many large technology companies like Apple have invested heavily in user experience for many years. Successful companies have well-established UX departments and have set the standard for ease of use. Such companies have defined many aspects of the user-centered design process we follow today. These companies have the capital to make big investments in user … Read more