Last thursday, I popped over to Meetup’s HQ to talk to Anna Howell and Brenna Lynch, two researchers on their team. They have been using the “Jobs To Be Done” framework, from Clayton Christensen, to organize their qualitative research. Currently, they are studying two critical moments in their customers’ lives: “first joining meetup.com” and “creating a new group”. Behind their …
Even the experts didn’t feel like experts
“I knew I was never going to be an expert—even the experts were always making clear that they didn’t feel that they were experts—and so I simply had no choice but to try and make that a strength.” That is Rivka Galchen, who wrote about quantum computing for the New Yorker and is quoted in this article Explaining the Inexplicable. I …
11 Customer Development Anti-Patterns
Update: check out my book on customer development Talking to Humans Steve Blank always liked to say, “In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” The lean startup movement encourages that you get out of the building with a mixture of experiments and qualitative research. Doing qualitative work gives you several benefits. It helps you learn …
Group sketching, yes! Groupthink, no!
I am a big believer in the necessity of sketching for good product design and product-team interaction. So, I was nodding my head vehemently when it came to Joshua Porter’s latest post, “The importance of sketching in product design“. Group sketching allows a team to get on the same page very quickly. In addition to preventing confusion or conflict, group …
Book review: Lean UX
The Lean UX book arrived on my iPad last night, and I’ve just finished reading it cover to cover. I thought it was great. That judgement is not actually because I work with the authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. I find most business books to be pretty banal, and I promise you that I would just stay silent if I …
What is a Product Designer?
Ross Popoff-Walker asked me on Twitter, “What do you feel is the key difference between a UX Designer and a Product Designer?”. The answer, of course, depends on whom you ask. I use a very expansive definition of the word “design”. Pretty much everything is a design decision. UX, like “product management”, is loosely defined in our industry, but to …
Wufoo’s customer support insight
From one of LukeW’s Warm Gun summaries. It was too long to tweet but I wanted to record it as an interesting insight: “Wufoo asked people about their emotional state when filling in a customer support request. This resulted in less emotional language and clearer descriptions of issues in customer support tickets.” – original post
Improving the mobile failure rate
Like much of the tech community, I find mobile incredibly exciting. It brings new use cases and design/tech/marketing challenges galore. But you have to raise your eyebrows at the sheer number of new apps being created right now that only collect dust. There are plenty of startups with dead-end ideas, and that comes with the territory, but especially egregious to …
Pair interviewing isn’t just for devs, it’s also great for UX and product
I just wound down a project where I spent 6 months working hand-in-hand with Pivotal Labs, the respected agile/XP dev shop. It was a fabulous experience that had a strong impact on how I think about product development (more on that later). It also has changed how I interview product and UX people. Pivotal helped our mutual client interview developer …
Increase Collaboration Through Sketching
“treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone…” – Paul Cezanne, 1904 Effective Agile UX turns product design into a collaborative, cross-functional process. A great way to do this is to pull non-designers into a fast-paced, fun sketching workshop (I’ll post more notes from the Agile UX conference on this soon). One of the first things you …