Tag / development
Comparative Research Done Right
Kate Rutter Leads a Comparator Research Discussion
or, Competitive Research the Creative Founder Way For a long time, I’ve been disappointed by competitive research approaches. Most strike me as a bunch of bumbling around and seeing what you see… sometimes you write it down in a spreadsheet. Designers fixate on widgets, product managers take screenshot of pricing pages — without a diagnostics framework, it‘s haphazard and sub-optimal. I knew important things were being missed.
Over the years, I’d developed my own tricks for understanding the competitive landscape, but I wasn’t doing much better. It took co-teaching with Kate Rutter to show me the grand picture.
Kate uses The Molecule as a framing model for startup success. This was developed at LUXr, the first Lean UX firm, founded with janice fraser.
Learn more here https://www.slideshare.net/intelleto/luxralnlean
The molecule acts as a guide to answer three questions for your startup: who are your customers, what problem are they ..
Taking Risks, Earning Trust and Including Co-Workers: User-Centred Design at Deutsche Bahn Operations
In 2016, Andreas Bürgler heard the term “design thinking” being tossed around left and right. “There was a lot of discussion about design thinking, everybody used it as a buzzword, and I felt that few people really knew what it actually meant. I saw some charts, but that was too little for me. I wanted to really learn it myself.” During a three-day Open Course in design thinking at the HPI Academy with Katrin Lütkemöller-Shaw, he realised that this way of user-centred working inspired his “mind and heart”: “This was my thing: to work on topics that are interesting for the users and help them. To build a prototype quickly, and to learn what fits and doesn’t fit immediately.” At the same time, interviewing real users came as an unusual experience: “Having this direct, immediate contact with the user was a challenge”, Bürgler says, and adds with a smile: “You are suddenly talking to the customer – alert!”
The Need to Innovate Topics of disruptive innovation have already become central un..
Feeling in Control: Bank of America Helps Customers to “Keep the Change”
The bank hoped to bring a human-centered angle to an industry which is hardly known for innovation. They were especially interested in the customer segment of boomer-age women with children. To conduct the ethnographic research, a team of five BoA employees partnered up with four agency designers. In their user research, the group conducted interviews and observed families in Atlanta, Baltimore, and San Francisco. According to IDEO designer Sally Madsen, the team was “talking to people who were great at saving, and people who struggled with it, taking inspiration from some of the existing, every-day habits people have around savings“. They observed a dozen families, and followed mothers around when they went shopping or dining. Soon, they realized an interesting pattern: In many families, mothers were in charge of managing finances. An extreme group in this pattern turned out to be single mothers: They are often on a tight budget and have to keep track of their spending meticulously.
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Government’s Content Strategy is the Linchpin of Citizen Experience
The future of good government hinges on content strategy.
This is important for everyone to understand because not just government employees and consultants who work with dot-gov websites are affected by the way agencies deliver content. Ultimately, content planning, organization, usability, and governance for online systems — and the human-to-human interactions they facilitate — affect the lives of people who use them every day. If the content strategy is bad, so goes the citizen experience.
We all can relate to the need for governments to deliver a better customer experience, whether it’s getting the right envelopes in your mailbox or connecting veterans with healthcare commensurate to their selfless sacrifices.
And while content strategy alone can’t fix broken business processes or improve the quality of healthcare, it’s absolutely critical to helping citizens locate, understand, and connect with public services. It’s a tool to help government employees better deliver the right i..
Beth Comstock: The Future is for Creatives
Beth Comstock wrote Imagine It Forward for one pressing reason. “We need more people in our organizations who are leading with imagination,” she says.
It’s a call to action any creative can agree with. As the machine mind squeezes imagination out of our organizations, we’ve all got to partake in a creative revolution. “The future depends on it,” says Comstock.
Imagine It Forward is about more than navigating organizational change. Comstock shares her personal career story, as she rises from leading NBC’s corporate communications department to becoming GE’s Chief Marketing Officer, then, ultimately, GE’s Vice Chair. One theme throughout is Comstock’s “job crafting”—taking on new responsibilities in current roles that paved the way for her to take on the next role. “I’ve done it in almost every job I’ve had because I am curious,” she says. “My best example is when I went into marketing at GE.”
At GE then, marketing was seen as what you do at the end of a product cycle. “A group of us ..
Les Entreprises qui recrutent dans la Tech: Business Development Manager France, Journaliste Economique, Développeur Node.js
Découvrez les offres d'emploi de la semaine
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Rethinking disruption: User empowerment
First in a series
The idea that incumbent businesses and even whole industries can be unexpectedly disrupted by newcomers to the market is a powerful one, and we have Clayton Christensen and his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, to thank for this insight. In the over 20 years since the publication of Christensen’s seminal work, however, we have seen violent disruptions that were not predicted by Christensen’s description of disruptive innovation. This article begins to explore how we might update our understanding of disruption in a way that is more useful to businesses desiring to either disrupt or ward off disruption.
Seeking a meaningful definition of “disruptive innovation”Professor Christensen says on his website:
Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.First Edition, The Innovator’s DilemmaBut ..
Collaborative Agile Activities Reduce Silos and Align Perspectives
Summary: All members of an Agile team, regardless of design skills, can contribute to the design of a product or feature during the development process.
If you're working in an Agile environment, you already know that it's not easy for UX and there is a lot to get done in a short amount of time. Sometimes, you may be lucky enough to have multiple UX professionals on your team, but other times you're flying solo . If you find yourself dreading your UX to-do list, consider bringing other members of your development team into your design process . Doing so not only will lighten your workload, but it will also introduce multiple perspectives and ease further collaboration processes (for example, if you need signoff from other departments).
In this article, I discuss three go-to collaborative activities I like to use with Agile teams to brainstorm design ideas: 6-up 1-up, whiteboard session, and telephone. These activities foster ideation , collaboration, and involvement w..
Full-stack UXers: Who They Are and How to Find Them
Within the user experience community, there’s been an increasing push toward finding individuals whose skill sets extend beyond those of a typical UX designer. Specifically, businesses are looking for leaders who can carry a project from initial design to front-end development.
These leaders are called full-stack UXers.
But when it comes to filling this in-demand position, there’s not a lot of clarity about what qualifications a full-stack UXer should bring to the table – or how to find them.
What is a full-stack UXer? Perhaps the best entrypoint into understanding a full-stack UXer is to explain what they are not. Contrary to what the title might suggest – and what certain job postings may unrealistically demand – the role doesn’t call for someone with a deep mastery of every part of the design trajectory. In practice, there are very few UXers who are as skilled in programming languages as they are in pixel-perfect design.
While full-stack UXers don’t need to have in-depth experie..