Alexei@Nitobi

Presentation:
How user research can be use to effect change in an organization with Bryce from Navantis.

The Design Maturity Continuum

1. No conscious design
2. Design as Style
3. Function and Form
4. Problem Solving
5. Framing

There is a problem with just stuffing more features in your product.. its about understanding what users what.. the customer experience. and the lifecycle of a customer using a product for a specific purpose.

Example: Dell used to compete directly with Apple on MP3 players (harddrive based).. but then Dell decided to only sell flash players, make them really simple, and sell them as accessories to other hardware purchases.. fewer features found a niche. Nobody can price compete with them now on these.

“Innovation in Process trumps Innovation in Product”

One of the problems when organisations measure their users is that they do it for a specific project, but there is no knowledge transferrence to other projects.

A lot of decisions in business are made basically by the seat of our pants.. we lack enough information to know definitively what people want and what to do based on that.. but what consumer research does is allows the organization to build concensus, reduce dissention, and move forward definitively.

Also another issue in software organizations, is that communicating with and getting buy in from engineers and other technical resources is quantifying and supporting business decisions that are otherwise made from experience, tacit understanding of the market and other less quantifyable information sources.

Here’s another idea.. for usability testing.. use people inside the organization. gets buy in because people recognize the names of the participants.

Here’s another idea!! Guys at nForm, when they start a software project, they create a box for it (an actual cardboard box with graphics on it etc).. because it helps focus the attention of developers and designers on the finished product that the customer will see.

Forrester reports are great for 3rd party validation.. supports your findings.. yes they are super expensive ($400 ish) but it can be quite impactful to validate your decisions.

Great discussion! Thanks Bryce.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 1:34 pm and is filed under User Interface, events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.