There are many reasons that a product might fail in the market. One of those reasons is that your product solves the wrong problems. There are many ways to solve the wrong problems. This article continues the series on sources of product failure, exploring the idea that your product may […]
Book Reviews / Reviews
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Outside-In Software Development: First Look
A first look at Outside-in Software Development, available tomorrow (or pre-order tonight on Amazon.com). At the time of this writing, the book is #29 on the Hot New Releases list – and you can get it for just over a third off the price if you pre-order now. Take a […]
Interaction design / UX
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Overdoing Personas
Its easy for us to overdo almost anything. Kim Goodwin offers some good advice about how not to overdo it when using personas as part of our software development process.
Product Management / Requirements
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Inside Out is Backwards – Feature Focused or Goal Driven
Kathy Sierra has another great post on the problems people face when using products. One of the sources of the problems is when engineers think “from the inside out” and focus on features or capabilities. People have goals, and they want to achieve goals, not use capabilities.
Agile / Interaction design / Process Improvement / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / Use Cases / UX
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Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management (RDM)
Gartner has a research report available for $95, titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005). The report is 7 pages long and makes an interesting read. Gartner makes a set of predictions for 2009 about requirements definition and management (RDM) systems, and the software created with RDM tools. Gartner misattributes several benefits of good process to RDM tools. We give them a 3.5/7 for their analysis – check out the details here.
Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / UX
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Persona Grata
Different people approach the same goal very differently. When we don’t truly identify our users, we end up with software that dehumanizes, waters-down, and otherwise fails to succeed at anything more than grudgingly tolerated functionality. Even worse, we may ignore the needs of our key demographic, resulting in software failure. When we use personas instead of generic use cases, we can avoid both the misery of a failed product and mediocrity of marginal success.
Interaction design / Prioritization / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX
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How To Create Personas for Goal Driven Development
We mentioned the creation of personas in our overview of the interaction design process. In this post we will talk in more detail about how to create them. We will cover identification and prioritization of the personas, defining the corporate and personal goals for the personas, and creating the anecdotal stories that give each persona an identity against which we can make design decisions. Scenarios are also defined for the primary personas, which drive the creation of the functional requirements specification.