Found this great quote by Steve Jobs: “Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people […]

Continue Reading: Looking for a word

In order to align a company around delivering great experiences, Peter Merholz says, “there are (at least) six components that need to be aligned throughout the organization”: The Why and The How of Organizations that Deliver Great Experiences They are: value, vision, goals, incentives, processes and capabilities. My experience agrees with this…you need both vision […]

Continue Reading: The Why and How of UX

A great little list by Cindy Alvarez: » 10 Things I’ve Learned About Customer Development (2014). The overriding lesson in this list (and in customer research in general) is that you can’t simply trust what people say during an interview…because people being interviewed are biased to please you (or not look stupid). Instead, you must […]

Continue Reading: Customer development notes

When building something is expensive, like a physical object, prototyping early and often becomes the obvious way to improve the product cheaply. If you’re designing a new chair, for example, it makes sense to prototype, test, and prototype again before sending the final design off to the manufacturer. The workflow of physical products is naturally […]

Continue Reading: There is no later for your customers

As software becomes more embedded in our everyday lives customer research becomes more important…we need to really understand the problem we’re solving before we can build a great solution for it. Since design and development processes are getting faster every day it makes sense that research needs to get faster too…but research tends to conjure […]

Continue Reading: Faster design research

From this interview with Jonathan Ive on Apple’s design process: “One of the values of things I learned absolutely directly from Steve was the whole issue of focus. What are we focusing on: focus on product. I wish I could do a better job in communicating this truth here, which is when you really are […]

Continue Reading: Focusing on product