Part of the Process

First day of a new conference - SofaConf 2020 "A stay-at-home conference"  - that came about in reaction to COVID-19 and lockdown/travel restrictions. Overall very good content so far, lots of sessions that speak to real issues in doing product development in the real world. Slight technical issue with quality of Andy Budd's broadcast that was quickly sorted. The Secret Weapon to Finding Focus - Melissa Perri Melissa explained the build trap, where features are not seen as "what is the business value I want to provide" but rather "here are some features we want as  output". Netflix realised that they were in the build trap with Roku, and getting into competition with hardware companies that they could partner with. So they spun it out and so that they could then double down on their core competency. Now is the time to focus, what can we do to win? .... first you need a good product Strategy framework. alignment builds autonomous teams. The right level ...

This week I've been having a bit of think about products for an older audience, prompted by this tweet by Tom Peters ("The red bull of management thinking") Old people get short shrift in the marketplace. STUPID. Old people have the money—effectively ALL the money. AND, these days, years and years left to spend it. Virtually none of marketing budgets are aimed at the oldies. REALLY REALLY STUPID. #ExcellenceDividend — Tom Peters (@tom_peters) June 12, 2018 which prompted questions about how appropriate it was to target digital products and services to older people. I then contributed my (non-scientific) observation Well, just 1 data point but my grandad was in first wave of computer usage in UK accountancy and my grandmother LOVES Skype for talking to her grandchildren, has a better tablet than mine, and is always on the lookout it upgraded her phone, plus I have loads of 70+ FB friends — Neil Chalk (@_neilch) June 12, 2018 The response to that was about ho...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Riku Lu  on  Unsplash Onboarding is an important part of B2C and pure "pay to play" SaaS. With so many tools to use, why would any user put effort into getting up and running? With B2B SaaS platforms that include professional services to get up and running then this isn't important. The same impact comes through the service that accompanies the product. I have been lucky to experience a great onboarding experience when evaluating product management software for work. The best by a country mile was ProdPad. This had two elements, the first was the trial and flow to get up and running. The second was the emails the accompanie...

This post is the story of a personal journey. It starts with a legacy product. Both powerful and flexible having grown to meet needs over time. But it is my view on steps to improve the process in my context - so your mileage may vary. Phase 1: Transactional DB as source Started with looking at the transactional data. Some things were obvious, one option in the UI is recorded as true/false in the DB. Some were more complicated and required more investigation. To back this up we conducted a user survey. Followed up by a workshop to find the most important user journey to concentrate on. This highlighted three related journeys. The key characteristic of activity in this phase was mining different structures of data. The format of the data coming from custom reports. Getting to the questions to ask was guided by a user survey to almost the whole user base, a smaller workshop looking at the "job to be done" for the platform. Other than that the skills needed where accessib...

I have been struggling to write a summary of The Lean Event and Phocuswright Europe as they both packed in so much content, I have so many notes to read through! Taking the two together it's clear to me that they are natural complements. Indeed Umesh Pandya's talk on "Learing to build wayfindr: independant travel for blind people" would not have been out of place at Phocuswright, just as Gary Morrison's afternoon keynote on Expedia Worldwide could have been a Lean Event session on lean in the enterprise. So i'll pick a couple of sessions from each to talk about. From The Lean Event  There were so many good sessions over the two days, but I'll briefly talk about Jared Spool's keynote on "Building a winning UX strategy" for this insight on Innovation alone - innovation is the space between current experience and aspirational experience. The simplicity of looking at innovation as gap between frustration and aspiration/delight was qui...

In the run up to a 15below customer conference I always seem to attend another event with some similarities elsewhere. This year was no different with the Travel Technology Initiative Spring Conference in London around the topic of the "UX revolution" that has been occurring in travel over the past couple of years. The first of the stand-out talks for me were Anna Chomse, Industry Head - Travel at Google who showed the process going from exploring holiday options to booking, with the different needs at each stage. She then showed a few examples of good design reflecting those needs, and how sea r ch terms used or platform (such as mobile) can make a difference to the experience of using the site. Thomson holidays was one example of how to do it right. (The Hoover website with its search terms not in the user's language and confusing mobile experience was an example of how not to do it) Next Sam Crowther, Head of Creative at Bauer Radio then took us on journey throug...

This week I have been purchasing the photos from the running events that I've taken part in this year. One thing that I like, about getting several sets at the same time, is that it allows me to look at the user experience I come away with from each photo solution. So here I'm going to briefly compare two sites and think about any lessons I could draw for the travel industry, since that's where I work. The first experience I just wanted to discuss two different sites that left me quite different feelings. The first looked like a user forum from about 10 years ago. The search on race number takes you to page dominated by the search tool and other screen furniture about the gallery. This is followed by thumbnails of the matching photos. Clicking on any of these photos then takes you to the screen below, with various purchasing options including confusingly "All my images". There are some Google ads, which when looking at a friends images had an amusing...

Recently I've been thinking about e mpathy in product development and how often in commercial software development that you are not the user. One area that I see a lot of people focus on is separating the problem from a potential solution in requirements.  Empathy Map by Oliver Quinlan User stories especially attempt to do this, unfortunately I don't think that the "As a ..." format as practiced is helpful, from my experience it's too easy to make it a justification exercise for a solution, it doesn't really help promote empathy or show that the user has really been taken into account. (Your mileage may vary and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who thinks that the "As A ..." user story format is the best available) In Innovation is not magic   Aly and Fernanda make the point "Innovators can get excited about things they can do and can become dazzled by the splendor of  their own creation. When someone has an idea,...

Recently I have been doing some spring cleaning and unsubscribe from various newsletters that I've collected over the past year. One thing that has struck me is the very different user experiences that you get from such a simple task. So I thought I'd quickly run through the good, the bad and the ugly ... London Gatwick airport's page says a simple "your request has been processed", what does this mean? how are my expectations being managed? (they aren't). Which newsletter was this again? Oops, how do I sign back up I didn't mean to click on that! This page looks particularly lazy, possibly not even a web page with any formatting. What makes this worse is that it is from a third party mail list management service ... it doesn't look like the whole user journey is considered equally. Next up was Sweatshop with the confusing "been taken into account" ... 5 days later I was still receiving emails. That is a minor irritation but it cr...