User Experience Insights | Experience Dynamics

5 Steps for aligning persona research to design

By Frank Spillers

on October 8, 2017 - 3:17pm

Summary: Personas have very practical value, not only as tools to unify organizational understanding of the end-user, but also as specific instruments to make your designs more precise. An important ultimate step in your persona research will be to translate user data into design requirements. Since design personas are representations of end-user or customer behavior, it is important to capture and continuously transfer user needs to the design team throughout the design phase.

In our experience, the design phase is usually where the most difficult decisions are made with regard to the intended user experience, and the one that actually results. Good persona research will help prioritize and manage constraints that are beyond the design, such as technology legacy issues that exist in large organizations.

The following 5 steps will help ensure your personas help by-pass organizational obstacles and transfer in-tact to your design outcomes:

18 Usability Musts for Ecommerce [VIDEO]

By Admin User

on August 6, 2017 - 1:01pm

Ecommerce usability best practices recording

Sumamry: Here's a 60 minute VIDEO RECORDING of a webinar from Frank Spillers, Chief Experience Officer at Experience Dynamics.

Keywords: Ecommerce usability: Ecommerce best practices; ecommerce UX; shopping cart abandonment; ecommerce social UX; mobile ecommerce; ecommerce content usability

What are known usability best practices for ecommerce? What has changed in ecommerce that you should be looking at? How does mobile play into ecommerce? What are common issues and mistakes that impact ecommerce user experience and bottom line conversions?

Topic:

Ecommerce is changing for many and stagnating for others. A decade and a half into ecommerce, and usability issues that have plagued conversions still exist. Yet new innovations are being introduced to deal with pesky issues like shopping cart abandonment or weak conversions on product pages.

What's wrong with Focus Groups and How to Fix Them

By Admin User

on July 31, 2017 - 3:34pm

Summary: Focus groups are innapropriate as a research technique to gather usability or user experience requirements. This is due to the fact they are opinion driven and not behavior driven. As a research tool they have a place in market research or early on "market idea" testing. As a way to influence usability or user experience projects, they are useless and misleading. To fix focus groups, they should be either: a) Abandoned in favor of ethnographic field studies or, b) Blended with behavioral research aka user interviews and observations to provide richer insights.

The Power of Ethnography

By Admin User

on June 27, 2017 - 10:59pm

Margaret Mead- Ethnography applied to UX

Ethnography is a technique developed largely by anthropologist Margaret Mead. It involves behavioral observation, contextual interviewing and analysis of users in their work, home or play spaces. The key strength to ethnography is context. Context provides insight into not only who users are (demographics) but what is important to them and what causes them to act and make decisions (psychographics).

Ethnography goes by a few different names. The most common include: Contextual Interviewing, Field Studies and Task Analysis. My personal contribution to the field, called "Cognitive Archeology"(PDF) involves an analysis of user behavior and environment with an emphasis on understanding decision-making, problem-solving and the interaction of tasks, values and beliefs.

[Part 2]: 12 Things Managers Need to Know about Running an Outside-In Design Org

By Frank Spillers

on May 26, 2017 - 2:56pm

Summary: Outside-In design organizations live and breathe user experience. The main differentiator between a technology driven organization and a Human Centered design approach is in decision-making. With Outside-In, design, business and technology decisions are gathered, validated, measured and infused into the Sales, Marketing, Business and Technology fabric. This post (in 2 parts, see part 1 here) explores those key organizational behaviors we've discovered and worked with for over 15 years. We've included to-do items for managers to action these insights.

A piece of our mind / our blog