Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. Unlike traditional market researchers, who ask specific, highly practical questions, anthropological researchers visit consumers in their homes or offices to observe and listen in a non directed way. In the HBR article, Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy, Ken … 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
The term “Lean” was first coined by John Krafcik in his 1988 article, “Triumph of the Lean Production System” based on his experience as a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California. Adapting the principles from Lean manufacturing, Mary & Tom Poppendieck wrote Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (May 18, 2003). … Read more
Prototype your ideas before you develop them. Use prototypes to solicit feedbacks from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. Before you write your requirements, create a “prototype.” This could be a sketch – or sketches – on a … Read more
According to Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University and the Fogg Behavioral Model, persuasive technology uses seven strategies to influence behavior: Reduction – Simplify the task the user is trying to do. Tunneling – A step-by-step sequence of activities that guides the user through the behavior. Tailoring – Provide feedback … Read more
In the Harvard Business Review article, AI Won’t Change Companies Without Great UX, Michael Schrage asked the question, “As artificial intelligence algorithms infiltrate the enterprise, organizational learning matters as much as machine learning. How should smart management teams maximize the economic value of smarter systems?”: “Strategically speaking, a brilliant data-driven algorithm typically matters less than … Read more
While helping BD Medical Technology redesign their intranet, I got the distinct honor and pleasure of working with the Nielsen Norman Group. NN/g conducted card sorts and tree studies with UserZoom. This also led to me doing a NN/g Design Thinking and Agile online seminar. UserZoom has been one of the primary sponsor of UX … Read more
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
John Knight posted this a few months ago. I believe that that these 10 trends are worth paying attention to: “…underpin digital transformation across mobile, tablet, desktop and the wave of new UI technologies such as wearables… these changes will shift the focus from consumer to co-creator and from metropolitan chic to global reach, thus … Read more
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