User Experience Design Simplified
May 4, 2009 at 4:34 am | In Business, Design, Process, Product development, User Experience | Leave a CommentA product management colleague recently asked me for a concise explanation of user experience design. Here goes…
- Product UI designs should be based on real-world use cases & customer needs
- There are multiple possible solution spaces for any design problem—each one has relative pros & cons
- Design assumptions & decisions should be VALIDATED with users (and your sales team) BEFORE “beau coup” dollars are spent on implementing them
- This point is somewhat orthogonal to the above, but is important if you are designing a suite of products; in this case you should be leveraging design patterns & standards across those tools in order to ensure transfer of training, ease of learning & use, and coherence within the suite
This doesn’t mean that Ux design is easy or trivial, or that by simply following these steps you will end up with good products. However if you don’t follow these steps in your process you can pretty much be assured of ending up with products that suck.
The Skipper, The Boat & The River
November 26, 2008 at 10:17 pm | In Business, Design, Process, Product development, Strategy, User Experience | Leave a CommentThe concepts for this post were taken from an interview given by Erica Payne on KPFA radio. Payne holds an MBA from Wharton School of Business and is founder and principal of the Tesseract Group–a boutique consulting firm that specializes in strategy and communications for foundations, philanthropists and organizations engaged in the public policy arena.
Payne’s interview focused on the US presidential elections of 2008. She described politics as essentially a supply chain problem. Payne went on to describe how we ought to conceptualize political change through the metaphor of the skipper, the boat, and the river. Her message has a direct application to User Experience teams.
User Experience Strategy
August 12, 2008 at 4:05 am | In Business, Design, Process, Product development, Project management, Risk management, Strategy, Usability | 1 CommentI recently posted the following question to a group of Ux professionals: What is the single most important activity that a user experience group can do to increase its effectiveness and influence? I asked everyone to draw from their real-world experience, NOT theory or ideals.
There were a number of thoughtful, practical responses…
User Experience & Risk Management
June 14, 2008 at 4:13 pm | In Business, Product development, Project management, Risk management | 2 CommentsTags: Business, Product development, Project management, Risk management
Risk mitigation is one of the many benefits that a well run User Experience practice brings to technology development companies. There are several dimensions to be considered:
Effectiveness: Understand Users
Does your company talk with and observe the end users of your products as part of its design research program? If not, it could be introducing serious risk into the business. Neglecting end users in design introduces a number of potential problems:
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