You may not need a persona right now. But you absolutely must be user-centric. Explore a pragmatic approach to understanding your users – particularly when scaling agile or transforming from waterfall.
Why Do Products Fail? – Picking the Wrong User Goals
Continuing the series on root causes of product failure, this article looks at the impact of focusing on the wrong user goals. Even if you have picked the right users, you may have picked the wrong goals – creating a product your customers don’t really need, or solving problems that […]
Why Do Products Fail? – Picking the Wrong Users
Exploring the reasons that a product might fail in the market is a useful way to triage and assess what you need to do to prevent the failure of your product. Instead of taking the “do these things” approach as a prescriptive recipe for product managers, I’m approaching the exact […]
C.R.A.C.K. Users Are Addictive
Barry Boehm, inventor of the spiral model of software development, may also be the originator of the CRACK acronym for the type of users we want on our projects. When defining (and executing on) projects, we don’t just want CRACK users, we want CRACK stakeholders. And we want them to […]
Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-10-13]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Managing Stakeholder Goals
A couple weeks ago we wrote about Outside-in Software Development, by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer. One of their ideas about stakeholders and goals has got us thinking about traceability.
Customer Service and Software Development
Sometimes we forget that people use our software. Neil Mix reminds us that we should treat our users like people. For anyone who’s worked retail or food service jobs (like yours truly), we shoud treat our customers like customers.
Competent Users and Software Requirements
We were all student drivers at one point. But no one stays a beginner indefinitely. Almost no one becomes an expert driver either. Most of us are competent drivers. Driving skill probably even follows a bell curve distribution, with most drivers being OK, some “bad”, some “good”, and very few experts or beginners. We’ll show in this post how to apply this pattern to software requirements and design.
The same is true of our users
Top five usability blunders (and fixes)
Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold. Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users. Interrupt the […]