I’ve been hearing an excuse lately for avoiding experiments and “getting out of the building”: It boils down to this: “if the results don’t have clarity and repeatability then why test in the first place?” Or put another way, “if you can’t perfectly design the experiment and isolate a single variable, and if you can’t have absolute confidence in your …
Strategic UX vs Tactical UX
There are strategic UX leaders, and then there are tactical UX implementers. To be a strategic leader, one needs to broaden thinking beyond design and usability, and start thinking holistically about critical business goals and risks. As the broader UX profession moves from being artifact-based to results-based, this is going to be critical. However, I see the online UX community …
The hardest thing about user testing and 5 tips to help
There are two established New York tech companies who do a great job of getting close and staying close to their customers: Meetup and The Ladders. Andres Glusman (VP of Strategy, Meetup) and Jeff Gothelf (Dir of UX, The Ladders) established regular, lightweight usability sessions at their respective companies (that’s them above giving Lean Ignite talks — see bottom for …
Waiting for Perfection
My former colleague Jerry Paffendorf, who is off re-inventing Detroit, shared a great clip of Pixar’s Ed Catmull talking at Stanford, via Protoshare’s blog. At around the 6 min mark, Catmull is discussing Pixar’s constant “peer sharing” process: “In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. …
The Enterprise and Lean Startup: outsourcing app development
(aside: I’ve made a promise to myself to try to blog more often. It was tough to find the time over the winter, but I’m going to start with something I meant to write months ago) Big corporations aspire to innovate with web and mobile products, but their end results are too often bloated or uninspiring. The list of common …
MVP is a State of Mind, not a Version Number
I am not the heaviest of Quora users, but last week I saw three game designers I like and respect (Daniel James, Chris Carella, and Adrian Crook) answer the question, “How can we apply the idea of “minimum viable product” to online games? … What and where is the “minimum” of MVP reached for games?” Definitely check out their answers, …
TBPP
What on earth does that title “TBPP” mean, you ask? I received a nice surprise last week when Jeremy Horn, organizer of the 700-person strong “Product Group” meetup, said that I had been awarded “The Best Product Person of 2010” (after being nominated by Ty Ahmad-Taylor, so TY Ty). As much as I am proud of what Liz and I …
Post-mortem on a UI “input” screen
Today I am working on some UI/UX changes to our product, and thought I would quickly talk through a UI example (soon to die under my axe) from our beta. Some context: in the spirit of getting a beta up as quickly as possible, our first user experience (FUE) was pretty crude. After registration (also soon to disappear), the first …