A picture is worth a thousand words. A prototype is worth a thousand lines of code. Two key elements of product management – and of agile development are elicitation and feedback. Low fidelity artifacts can significantly improve both. Polished, codified prototypes can create problems that prevent you from getting the benefits of communication.
Category Archives: Interface Design
Posted in Agile, Business Analysis, Business Rules, Interaction design, Interface Design, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements gathering, Software development, UX, Uncategorized
Tagged agile interaction, Communication, process prototyping, prototypes, prototyping, uml as prototype
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Design-Free Requirements
Design-Free requirements are important for two reasons, and hard for two other reasons.
Design-free requirements are hard because you “know what you want” when you should be documenting “why you want it.” Writing design-free requirements can be hard when you don’t trust your development team to “do the right thing” even though it is not your job to design the solution.
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Agile Prioritization: Which Widget?
Your company is building out a toolkit to support third-party developers. You’ll need a bunch of different types of widgets – combo-boxes, text entry fields, domain-specific controls, etc. You’ve got a long list of desired controls from your customers. You’re agile. What do you build first?
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Modeling User Competency
Perpetually intermediate (competent) users. Users who briefly exist as novice users and never become experts. Most of your users are competent, and you should design for them. Competent users have different needs and different expectations than novice or expert users. How do you know your user’s competency levels, so you can design for them?
User Goals and Corporate Goals
When defining requirements, you always start in the context of a goal – either a user goal or a corporate goal. You need to be aware of both. Having a positive user experience is important, and requires a user-centered understanding. Achieving your corporate goals might be in conflict with some user goals.
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Freemium Business Model
Ever scratch your head and wonder why you can use your favorite application for free? How can a business actually make money (and stay in business) when they offer their product for free? This article looks at the freemium business model, to see when it makes sense for a company to offer it. The freemium model is one where the company offers two (or more) versions of a product. The basic version is free to use. You have to pay for the premium version. The goal of this article is to answer the product management question, “Should you create a freemium business model?”
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User Adoption ROI
You want your software to be used, not to sit on the shelf. You can’t achieve the ROI of your software if people don’t use it. And you can’t achieve the ROI of your software by forcing people to use it either. Some will fail to achieve the benefits, and others will delay using it or refuse to use it entirely. You have to make them want to use it, and you have to design the software for the users who must use it. Otherwise, you won’t achieve the ROI.
Posted in Business Analysis, Interface Design, Product Management, ROI, UX, Usability
Tagged managing data, ROI, Usability, usability metrics, user adoption, user adoption metrics
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Global Actor Hierarchies and Personas
We use actor hierarchies to organize the different users of a system. Different people play different roles, and thus do different jobs. We use different actors to identify and organize those people. When deploying a system globally, we usually discover people that do the same jobs, but do them differently. Incorporating the notion of personas lets us deal with this.
Posted in Business Analysis, Interface Design, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, UX, Usability
Tagged actor hierarchies, actor hierarchies and personas, actor hierarchy, actors, actors and persona, actors and personas, global actor hierarchies, global actors, global hierarchies, global personas, managing data, managing requirements, persona, personal goals, personas, Requirements, requirements management, use case to actor, use cases
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Interface Design: Visualization Methods
Visualizing complex data can be very difficult. There are almost as many ways to visualize data as there are data to visualize. The Ralph Lengler and Martin J. Eppler at the Visual Literacy Organization collect many of them for us in a periodic table.
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