Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2016

Project Management Basics

What do Project manager do According to Wikipedia, project manager (thereafter, “PM”) is  the person in overall charge of the planning and execution of a particular project.  Project managers are first point of contact for any issues or discrepancies arising from within the heads of various departments in an organization before the problem escalates to higher authorities. Project management is the responsibility of a project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress, mutual interaction and  tasks  of various parties in such a way that reduces the risk of overall failure, maximizes benefits, and minimizes costs. What is Project manager also known as Project manager: Implementation manager, Project leader Senior Project Manager:  Management consultant; Programme manager; Portfolio manager; Head of projects; Director of projects What is a Project A project is  temporary  in

How to Create a Good Diagram

Yesterday I was reading some Mckinsey articles on how machine will impact differrnt types of works, the article was made more professional by the beautiful diagram it has. And I relate that to my experience of demonstrating user journeys to the business, if is true, a good picture speaks a thousand words. So are the rules to create a good diagram Color plays an important role in creating a good diagram; while the actual color we select does not matter too much (and please do not use too much time trying to match the color meaning with the audience culture); I find the following guidelines very useful: Use same color for objects that belong to the same concept (say, if I am showing the male and female population by age group, I will use one color for all bars representing female and another color for male); Use a color scheme that provides contrast between different objects. Take the same example before, I will probably use Pink for female and Blue for male in stead of two Pink or B

Using UberEat, I can't Get My Food

Food delivery platform pop up like mushrooms in Hong Kong, first there was only FoodPanda, then Deliveroo and recently, UberEat. I had good experience with Uber, the Ui is very pleasant to use, and there is always a car around. So I guess UberEat will be fine as well. I am next to my computer, so I decide to try their website first. I want to order from a Kabab restaurant in North Point, I selected the dishes and put them into my cart, everything seems fine. But I can't find the PROMO CODE column.  I am a bit frustrated, but as a product manager, I am not surprised. It can be the company had been focusing on the mobile application and not enough on the website. Some features get reprioritized. It is likely that I can find this feature in the mobile. So I download the mobile application and start logging in my account. It asks me to use the verification code to verify the mobile number, although I have already verified this number on the website.

Unti-Procrastination Design

Why people go to buy gift at the last minute; why we want until the house price all raised up to buy a house. While we can credit the reason to being too busy; to too risky etc. I would encourage you to look at these phenomenon from the procrastination point of view. It simply is the action of delaying or postponing something, or postponing the decision to do it or not to do it. I’ve found this concept critical in the digital design world as often, we want the users to take certain action, it can be to subscribe to our newsletter, to buy certain product, to donate to charity, to click on and watch a video. And we certainly don’t want them to delay what they are going to do. To make effective design, we have to design against procrastination. First, let’s understand procrastination, what happened and why it happened: A non-procrastinated brain does what it should do.  But the reality is, the rational brain coexist with an instant gratification monkey. The monkey wi

5 Things I do to Make User Test Part of the Culture

Most of the times, the usability test requests come from the marketing team, shortly before a product or a major release is about to launch.  It goes like this: About the time when the product is about the launch, the marketing team comes to the executives, everybody is having these little butterflies in their stomach. We have all too business on everything we have to do, planning our marketing events, developing all the features, that we forget our users. We did the user tests, well, focus groups actually, and we found a long list of problems users encounters when using our products. And we prioritize them based on the time needed from the development team to fix the issue: if it is the change of a label, priority high; if it is changing of an interaction, priority low etc. Everybody is frustrated with the process: product team knew the test is too late for the current release, it should have been done much earlier; marketing themselves are upset as they are worried t