Archive of Software development Articles

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March 1st, 2010

Measuring Great Design – Mad Libs Input Form

image of mad libs pads

I came across a really interesting article LukeW.com, showing how making changes to the way an input form on a website increased interaction by 25 to 40%. The changes reflect the value of thinking outside-in, investing in user experience, and performance measurement.

Bonus: the idea is cool.

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January 5th, 2010

Most Engaging Articles of 2009

Engagement – that’s what this whole product management blogging thing is about.  Check out what Tyner Blain readers found to be the most engaging articles in 2009.

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November 3rd, 2009

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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October 19th, 2009

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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October 13th, 2009

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?

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August 3rd, 2009

Concise Requirements

Concise requirements give your team a useful, easy to read and easy to change understanding of what must be done.  Great requirements exist to do three things:

  1. Identify the problems that need to be solved.
  2. Explain why those problems are worth solving.
  3. Define when those problems are solved.

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June 30th, 2009

Agile Maturity Model – What’s Next?

The maturity model approach to describing organizations and processes comes and goes out of fashion.  It is a repeating framework de jour.  In the game of agile jargon whack-a-mole, the agile maturity model is poking its head up again.

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June 22nd, 2009

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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June 18th, 2009

Advanced PERT Estimation

Creating a PERT estimate for a single task is both easy and straightforward. Creating an estimate for a set of tasks is still easy, but requires a little bit of math. Combining PERT estimates for tasks is easy, but not as obvious. Roll up your sleeves and dive in.

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April 29th, 2009

Personas Make Blue Ocean Strategy Proactive

Blue Ocean Strategy provides an interesting reactive analysis of companies and markets.  Personas are used to understand your customer’s needs.  Combining the two provides powerful proactive insights when positioning your product for market success.

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