I gave a keynote at Lean Startup Week 2017 in SF, early in November about some of the most common problems that large companies have implementing Lean Startup. Here's a little blog post I wrote up for the Business Talent Group blog summarizing the talk.  If you’re responsible for launching new products, you’ve probably come across Eric Ries’s best-selling book, The Lean Startup. The Lean Startup methodology—which was created to help founders in Silicon Valley build better products—is incredibly useful for new companies and entrepreneurs who are trying to create innovative products an ..read more

Once upon a time, I worked with a designer who refused to use any tool except Illustrator. Everything got made in Illustrator, whether he was building a visual design mockup, a task flow, or a discussion guide for a user research session (seriously). All of his deliverables were gorgeous. He was also the slowest designer in history. Every single thing he did took five times as long as it would have taken anybody else, and much of it wasn’t very usable or useful. Pretty, though.  While the visual interface, if your product has one, is an important part of the user experience, it’s not the ..read more

For this installment of my series on good user research practices within companies, I spoke with Adam Nemeth, UX strategist at UXStrategia.net, a UX research firm based in Hungary. He shared his perspectives on how teams should think about user research and when they should get help. Why You Should Be Doing Research Yourself There are a lot of reasons that your team should own and run user research. Most importantly, research is deeply connected to the product. “Design is essentially a plan for a product,” Adam says. “Whoever is responsible for bringing the product on the market should be held ..read more

This post appears in full on the Rosenfeld Media blog.  Those of us who conduct user research as part of our jobs have made pretty big gains in recent years. I watched my first usability test in 1995 then spent a good portion of the 2000s trying to convince people that talking to users was an important part of designing and building great products. These days, when I talk to companies, the questions are less aboutwhy they should do user research and more about how they can do it better. Believe me, this feels like enormous progress. Unfortunately, you still don’t see much agreem ..read more

I wrote a thing recently on LinkedIn. I’m reposting it here, as well. For reference, here’s one of the many articles about the policy that I’m writing about. As with all tech reporting, I have no idea if the policy is accurately reflected in the article, but I’ve seen lots of similar programs, and I’m writing about how they can be implemented badly. Recently DoorDash announced that they were going to make all their corporate employees do at least one delivery per month. Companies do this sort of "eating their own dogfood" or (my preference) "drinking their own champagne" as an empathy building ..read more

In my last post, I walked you at length through the creation of a pretty simple task flow. It was exhausting! This time, I’m going to walk you through an even simpler one, but this one has a few interesting twists.  In this flow,, we’re going to design the Create Playlist module I talked about previously. If you recall, the final flow looked like this:  You see that box with lines down the side? That’s a module, and as I mentioned in the previous post, it indicates that a whole bunch of things are going to happen there. It’s shorthand for “Jump to a flow called Create List here”. We ..read more

This is a post I wrote for the Rosenfeld Media blog in preparation for the PM+UX conference. Some of the research I did will also be covered in more detail in my upcoming book, Build Better Products.  When we started talking about putting on the PM + UX Conference, the first thing we asked was, “What sorts of things should we talk about?” Since the folks at Rosenfeld Media are, not surprisingly, extremely user-centered, the obvious answer was, “We’re not sure. How about we do some research and find out what questions our attendees might have?” So we did. The most interesting thing to ..read more

When you’re done here, Read Part 2 in the series! In our podcast, Kate Rutter and I talk a lot about task flows and how helpful they can be when designing a product interaction. The problem is, I’ve rarely met a designer or product manager who understands how to make them well, and I haven’t found a very good guide to building them online. So, I guess I’m writing one? You’re welcome. Please note, this post is not about how great task flows are or why you would use them. I’ll probably write that up later, or you can listen to the podcast. I’m just going to show you an example of how to mak ..read more

A few years ago, I wrote a book called Build Better Products. This is a lightly edited excerpt from Chapter 5. You can buy it at Rosenfeld Media. If you buy it before June 30th 2020 and use the code BBP20, you will get 20% off! There is a persistent myth about Silicon Valley that great products spring fully formed from the brains of geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. There is a constant search for The Next Big Thing, and venture capitalists spend their days trying to separate out great ideas from terrible ones based on a PowerPoint presentation and whether they happen to think that t ..read more

I'm interviewing researchers, designers, product managers, and other people in tech about their opinions on how user research should be done within companies. This is the second post in the series, and it appeared in full on the Rosenfeld Media blog.  If you'd like to be featured as part of the series, contact me.  As part of my ongoing series of posts where I try to get to the bottom of who owns user research, I reached out to Tomer Sharon, former Sr. User Experience Researcher for Google Search and now Head of UX at WeWork. He also wrote a book called It’s Our Research&nb ..read more