With consecutive quarterly growth in both print and digital advertising sales, The Atlantic has emerged as a vanguard in an industry harassed by declining ad revenues and falling circulations. And the credit, its executives say, belongs to the ‘digital first’ strategy it embraced four years ago.
Inside The Atlantic: How One Magazine Got Profitable by Going ‘Digital First’
Deep-Dive™ is the name of a technique used to rapidly immerse a group or team into a situation for problem solving or idea creation. This approach is often used for brainstorming product or process development.
Originally developed by the IDEO group (a learning design company) for rapid product development, the Deep-Dive technique is now widely and increasingly used for innovation not only in product development, but process improvement and customer service strategies. The method used by IDEO was documented by Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer (of International Institute of Management Development (IMD) business school), who latterly further enhanced the process and sold the rights to Deloitte Consulting in 2006.
The intranet manager is one of the most important people in an intranet design project. Many times the effort that goes into such a project is on the same level as that of a major organizational change initiative. It is therefore important that the manager is thoroughly prepared for the journey. If you are managing your first redesign project or are new to intranets or just love intranets then we have the resource to get you started: Manager’s guidebook to intranet design projects.
This 64-page guidebook takes you through eight stages of a typical intranet design project. Each stage has many activities that go under it. The activities described and insights included are those gathered over the years by PebbleRoad.
Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects
Disclosure: I work for the company that released the ebook. Of course, it’s included here because it I think it deserves to be here.
As Don Norman wrote “The Invisible Computer,” he was struck by a paradox. On the one hand, there is very substantial agreement that ease of use and understandability are important. Similarly, good industrial design, simple, short documentation, and convenient, pleasing products are superior. While ease of use and understandability seems to be important, on the other hand, much of the computer technology today violates all these things, and yet the companies prosper. In fact, Apple Computer, the one company that tried hardest to make products that were easy to use, understandable, with sophisticated aesthetics driving both graphical design on the screen and industrial design of the products, failed.
So why is it that good products can fail and inferior products can succeed? The story is complex: it takes a book to explain. But there are three themes.
One: A successful product must be balanced: marketing, technology, and user experience all play critical roles, but one cannot dominate the others.
Two: There is a big difference between infrastructure products, which he calls non-substitutable goods, and traditional products, substitutable goods. With traditional goods, a company can survive with a stable, but non-dominant market share. Coke and Pepsi both survive. Cereals and soaps have multiple brands. With infrastructure goods, there can be just one. MS-DOS won over the Macintosh OS, and that was that. MS-DOS transitioned to Windows, and the dominance continued. VHS tape triumphed over Beta. Most infrastructures are dictated by the government, which assures agreement to a single standard. When there is no standard, as in AM stereo or digital cellular options in the US, there is chaos.
Three: Different factors are important at different stages in the development of a technology. In the early days, technology dominates. Who cares if it is easy to use? All that matters is better, faster, cheaper, more powerful technology. In the middle stages, marketing dominates. And in the end, mature stages — where the technology is a commodity. User experience can dominate, user experience and marketing. As in soap and cereal. As in watches. Swatch sells its watches for their emotional appeal, not their accuracy: accuracy is taken for granted.
The life cycle of a technology: Why it is so difficult for large companies to innovate
This document has been created as a reference for senior management in product groups who wish to learn more about incorporating user centered design practices into product ideation, design, and development processes. The terms ‘user experience’ and ‘user-centered design’ are used interchangeably in this document.
The four main sections of this document provide the following information:
The authors propose two metrics to demonstrate the impact integrating human-computer interaction (HCI) activities in software engineering (SE) processes. User experience metric (UXM) is a product metric that measures the subjective and ephemeral notion of the user’s experience with a product. Index of integration (IoI) is a process metric that measures how integrated the HCI activities were with the SE process.
Both metrics have an organizational perspective and can be applied to a wide range of products and projects. Attempt was made to keep the metrics light-weight. While the main motivation behind proposing the two metrics was to establish a correlation between them and thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of the process, several other applications are emerging.
The two metrics were evaluated with three industry projects and reviewed by four faculty members from a university and modified based on the feedback.
User Experience Metric and Index of Integration: Measuring Impact of HCI Activities on User Experience (PDF, 163 kb)
Six ways to be more agile and better integrate user experience and information architecture into agile development teams.
Summary
As their usability approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research. An organization that reaches the managed usability stage still has far to go to reach usability nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.
Stage 1: Hostility Toward Usability
Stage 2: Developer-Centered Usability
Stage 3: Skunkworks Usability
Stage 4: Dedicated Usability Budget
Stage 5: Managed Usability
Stage 6: Systematic Usability Process
Stage 7: Integrated User-Centered Design
Stage 8: User-Driven Corporation
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8
As a user experience consultant, a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading any existing user research reports. These reports help understand the user research history of the project (i.e. the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration). For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that the author recommends including in a user research report to help build a user research history for the project.
User Research Reports: Six Data Points to Create a ‘User Research History’
Summary
Enemies of usability claim that because “the experts disagree,” they can safely ignore user advocates’ expertise and run with whatever design they personally prefer.