If you see it, just don’t buy it. It won’t cure your disease. — Okay, so customer experience is about delighting your customers, right? Just map the journey, and find opportunities to delight your customers, to exceed expectations. Ideally at the end of the journey, because that’s great for loyalty. Extra points if you do a quick NPS measurement right after the “delighting moment”…

Validating design concepts with Problem-Solution-Fit — Quite often, clients ask us to validate ideas, concepts, or design solutions of any size from business models through service and product concepts to UX ideas. So I have set up a simple framework for concept validation. We call it the Problem-Solution-Fit framework. It’s not only the solution we test First of all, we never really test…

Implementing customer-centricity when there’s a shortage of resources — A couple of days ago I had a really inspiring meeting with the service design director of a national telecommunication company. In the past couple of years, in an industry where everyone is struggling to make even the smallest changes, she was able to change the everyday operation of a…

Introducing the Innovation Pressure Mad Libs — Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me over an article from Bloomberg about Dyson (the vacuum cleaner company) planning to develop and release an electric car by 2020. As I read it, I had two thoughts: I totally see it as a viable idea to by an electric car from…

Some exercises to get the team going — Let’s say you have everything set for a great Design Thinking workshop. You have great methods for all the modes, a great diverse team, a good workshop room, 30.000 pieces of Post-it. What could possibly go wrong? One thing novice facilitators often forget about is stokes. These are little activities…

What a stage improv course can teach about design — In the past couple of weeks, I took a stage improvisation course at Grund Theater. I did that for two reasons. First, I spend a lot of time in “speak in front of a lot of people, say smart stuff” situations. Conference talks, university classes, working as a design professional…

For a while now, I have been starting my university courses by asking students: “What is your favourite product and why?”. What I just found out is that I’m not really able to answer that question because there are just so many great products out there. The list would be…

Human-centered companies do — UX, product design, service design — they are everywhere in the past couple of years. Really, every company wants good design for their products, websites, apps, services, systems. Still, very few of them actually succeeds in it. And I strongly believe that this doesn’t have much to do with the…

They will just slow you down — A couple of weeks ago, with some fellow teachers we hosted our very first product design camp for our MOME IxD students. We got together almost 20 of our most talented alumni, who mostly spend their time creating websites, mobile apps, and all kinds of digital products, and gave them…