Everyday UX and Product Inspirations

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...

General Assembly task of “Organizing my wardrobe” I am planning for the UX Immersion course at General Assembly Hong Kong, the entry task is to write your thoughts on designing a mobile application that help people solve key problems about their wardrobe.  So what are the key problems people have about their wardrobe, I need to figure it out in order to prioritize the functions in the application and the actions that are available in each case. I set my target audience of adults who have a smartphone, there is no further categorization needed. The best I would plan is to have the ability for users to adjust the font size for elderly people.  I started sketching down a list of questions I want to figure out in the research and set the research time to be 4 hours. I will use online search as the primary research tool and observe some cases of how people use their wardrobe. Of course, it could go on for days or months in another project and include survey and foc...

I often have problems about administrative communications, for example, emails to help you to reset your password; to update an application since I did not pass the approval etc. There seems to be a general lack of attention to these communications, and it is very understandable, after all, they are not frequently used function nor they make money for the business. And they work anyway, maybe after several failed attempts, users find their way out (solve the problem or leave the site for good).  Nevertheless, there is a positive correlation found between sales conversion and easiness of maneuvering on a website. In Steve Krug’s book "Don't Make Me Think”, he emphasized the importance of visual clues for users to know where they are at anytime, and otherwise they may abandon your website and go for somewhere else. You may be saying, wait a second, I read that book, there is nowhere mentioning administrative communications, it is all about navigation, articles,...

4 years of PhD in performance management and 5 years of product management has taught me many things, one of which is how to do good UX research. To summarize, to do a good piece of research, 4 things are important: Know the audiences and how to creates value to them For example, as product manager, I am doing a piece of research on open-source chat bot platforms for the management team to make decision on which to integrate and for development team to design system architecture around it. Funny enough, although the questions these 2 teams wants to find out are to certain extent the same: cost and benefits, the information needed to make meaningful judgement are dramatically different. Moreover, each will find what the other team want to be non-sense. Management wants to know the financials, if additional resources are needed and if needed, where do they come from, any risks; Development wants to see the documentation, technical support, does it work w...