Written by Valle Hansen
As a user researcher, I’m always inclined to say, “Test everything, all the time!” when people ask, “What/when/how should we validate with users?” That’s my pie in the sky: the place where there’s all the time and all the budget in the world to get every last detail or spec just right for the good of the user, the product, and, ultimately, the business. But that’s not real life. Projects run on strict budgets and tight timelines, and there’s not always a lot of wiggle room.
So, in the absence of all the time and all…
Smartphone and tablet experiences are a major force influencing product development, irrespective of industry, according to an internal survey we recently conducted with our clients. Business users want to access their software applications from a myriad of devices, all behaving correctly regardless of form factor.
However, smartphones and tablets fall short in some situations, product managers acknowledged in our survey. For example, would you want a radiologist reading your MRI results on her phone? How about an investment advisor aligning a portfolio against Bayesian projected outcomes constrained to 480 pixels? Likely not. …
Trying to modernize monolithic legacy applications is hard. Yet, moving to a public or private cloud can dramatically reduce operational costs and speed up delivery of key features. But how do you get there from here? In this seminar we’ll jump into pragmatic ways to improve the way legacy applications are built and deployed as well as how to take an incremental approach to modernize those applications.
- Staff spend time keeping it working or engineering around IT constraints instead of building new features.
- As the application’s components get out of date, team members are harder to hire and spend more…
We all know how awesome user personas are. They help all the king’s men — designers, researchers, product owners, stakeholders, investors, on and on — understand a particular user type’s behaviors, needs, goals and motivations. Personas also focus everyone’s attention on the bigger picture rather than the minutest of edge cases. Further, they empower us to empathizewith our end-users, to the point that we want to make Rob the Accountant’s life not only easier, but also happier, more successful, more exciting.
As a user researcher, I am, of course, an evangelist of all things research. I love research! I love reading everything and learning everything and understanding everything I possibly can about a subject. Infographics are neat but I want more more more information! Give it to me — all of it!
As a user researcher, I also, of course, realize that not everybody feels the same way. Often including clients.
Do We Have to Research?
Clients don’t like to do research (okay, many of you do; you don’t have to keep reading). They have protests and excuses and comments that expose more a lack of…
Property graph databases (PGDB) are gaining popularity as users discover the benefits of this approach for certain uses cases. People appreciate the simplified data modeling and querying that a PGDB provides when dealing with connected data. Despite these benefits, after 10 years plus of existence, even the most senior property graph offerings still lag behind many of the relational database (RDBMS) offerings when it comes to schema support. Some of this is by choice and in other cases, there is just a lot of engineering catch-up to be done.
Today we’ll describe the schema definition options in three popular PGDBs…
Lean UX and the Agile mind-set are all about efficiency — emphasis on forward progress, no project management bells and whistles, cut the deliverables, go-go-go.
Even so, fancy Lean tools have cropped up all over the place to help manage sprint cycles, track progress, collaborate more, better, faster. And that’s cool — the designers and developers and stakeholders probably need those tools. But for Lean User Research — well, we can stick to the basics and still get what we need.
Web Conferencing Tool
Our go-to web conferencing tool for remote Lean User Testing is GoToMeeting, but WebEx and even…
As Agile principles and Lean methodologies continue to take center stage in product management and strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in daily scrums and design iterations and shoot right past the user research (UR). Everything’s moving so fast and we’re seeing big improvements (we think) on a daily basis. Surely user research isn’t as important as full-steam-ahead?
In fact it’s more important than ever not to let user research fall by the wayside. …
Software and web developers often wear many hats, including the UX/UI hat. But some developers lack the knowledge to design UIs or to collaborate effectively with UX designers and researchers.
This can lead to a bad user experience, low user adoption, low sales, high support costs, unhappy customers, and the need to spend time and money reworking the UX/UI.
As experienced UX and software development consultants, Expero knows how to bridge the knowledge gap. In this online seminar, Chris LaCava and I share some of that knowledge.
The seminar presents short case studies and several things front-end and back-end developers…
Large, industrial-strength graph problems require the massive parallel processing ability and robustness that is naturally provided by DataStax Enterprise (DSE) Graph, powered by the industry’s best version of Apache Cassandra™. However, just because you can configure a 500 node cluster, doesn’t mean you should. It’s easy to get mired in the technology and forget that mere mortals will need to be able to use your software to complete real work. A well architected underlying architecture is pointless if your product isn’t being used.
When it comes to data-driven user interfaces, like those utilizing graph data, it’s vital to understand your…
Expero
Experts in complex solutions, custom software, cloud-based architecture, & scalable UX across all industries. Solving a problem? — info@experoinc.com 5123281212
