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The Catalyze Community July 23rd Webcast features two design experts sharing their thought on Personas:
Catalyze July Webcast – Wednesday July 23rd at 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!
The Catalyze July Webcast features design experts, Elizabeth Bacon of Devise and Steve Calde of Cooper talking about Personas. Elizabeth and Steve will address the misconceptions around the use of personas and share some best practices for leveraging personas during the research and design phase.
- fluffy
- expensive to create
- non-actionable
- limiting
- counterproductive to innovation
If you can’t wait for the webcast to learn more about personas, check out these two resources:
- Steve Calde’s article for the Cooper Journal called “Using Personas to Create User Documentation“
- Bill Cooper’s essay on the Origins of Personas
And here is some background information on our speakers:
Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise, a boutique interaction design and software development consultancy. She began her career at Cooper, where she researched and designed products and also helped to refine methodology. She subsequently worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 500 company where she designed solutions for implantable medical devices and clinical systems. She is also presently the Vice-President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, an international organization for advancing the profession of interaction design
Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).
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What are Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and how can your organization use them?
Maurice Martin, iRise President, COO and Founder, wrote an article recently that answered these questions for Hotel Business Review Executive magazine.
I’ve summarized some key points below and you can get a copy of the article from the iRise Website.
“RIAs represent a real opportunity for companies to improve their online offerings because they are the tools that provide Web designers the greatest flexibility in meeting the needs of your brand. But added richness will not always equate to an improved (or even a good) experience. At every point, you must think about what the best possible experience is for your customers.”
The article also included a discussion of the five pitfalls of adopting RIA:
- Not understanding customer needs
- Implementing for technology’s sake
- Creating a distracting experience
- Reduced web site performance
- Limited metrics tracking and reporting
If you are interested in learning if RIA is right for you and how to avoid the risks, be sure check out the article.
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Emmet Keeffe, iRise CEO and Co-founder, had an opinion piece published this week in SandHill.com. SandHill.com is the premier destination online destination for strategic information on the software business. The site and its newsletters are read by thousands of top software industry executives every week.
Emmet talks about “The Requirement Challenge” and why ”Accurate Specs are Key”. He finishes with “The Benefits of Visualization” which I am paraphrasing below:
- Business people can fully experience the product and make changes early in the process, saving significant time and downstream costs.
- Developers can catch design and functional errors before an application goes into production.
- The process can speed through multiple rounds of functional visual edits to quickly reach decisions on business needs and customer experience.
- Managers can increase final adoption of system with upfront agreements of the application’s process flow, experience and visual look and feel.
- User experience professionals can rapidly iterate proposed designs directly in front of customers, dramatically improving customer experience.
- Software sales teams can demo potential products to customers to get feedback before actually developing the application.
- The professional service teams can test a potential product for possible needed changes to speed implementation and integration.
- Sharing visualizations with global sourcing partners is not only easier but cheaper. Visualizations eliminate confusion with global development teams because everyone is speaking the same language.
- Resellers can sell a solution by showing a visualization of what a specific application could do when integrated into the customer’s environment
He wraps up by repeating his vision, “by 2020, all business software will be visualized before its built, just the same way that every car, airplane and semiconductor are visualized today.”
The entire piece is worth a read and can be found at SandHill.com.
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I’ve spent some time over the last few months pondering the idea of design thinking. Part of it was driven by the webcast that Linda Yaven gave on “Making Thinking Visible” for the Catalyze Community and part of it was driven by what I see are the key competitive pressures in marketplace. It seems that more companies and organizations are starting to talk about increasing their innovation and improving time-to-market instead of cutting costs and reducing errors in their software development process. But there seems to be a gap in the discussion about how they’re going to get there – which brings up design thinking.
What is Design Thinking? Design thinking is a creative process of ‘building up’ ideas (vs. critical thinking which is generally associated with ‘breaking down’ ideas). Design thinking is inherently collaborative as groups of people from different disciplines get together to brainstorm, communicate and develop new and creative solutions to problems. Since there are no judgments or fear of failure in the design thinking process, design thinking encourages maximum input and participation.
In Linda’s webcast, she noted that design thinking is not a genetic trait, but that all of us are capable of learning how to be design thinkers. She also pointed out that design thinking is a method and a mind-set, and involves learning by doing or what she referred to as immersive thinking. While design is subject to personal tastes and whims, design thinkers share a common set of values that drive innovation. These traits include creativity, curiosity, ability to visualize, neutrality, environmentally centered, optimism and teamwork.
Why is Design Thinking Important? Design thinking improves collaboration and will drive innovation. Companies that apply design thinking will become the market leaders that develop new and innovative products and services. Since they will be able to test and experiment with many ideas, they will have a built-in evolutionary advantage over companies stuck in a purely analytical mindset. As noted in an article on Design Thinking by Tim Hyler (referenced below), “Design as an innovative problem-solving methodology is fast becoming an imperative business strategy.”
How Does Design Thinking Relate to iRise? Design thinking includes the following processes or stages (courtesy of Wikipedia):
- Define
- Research
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Choose
- Implement
- Learn
iRise fits squarely in the middle of the design thinking process as we enable companies to rapidly prototype or simulate different ideas and alternatives. In fact, it could be argued iRise is the tool that makes design thinking practical and possible for most companies.
Where Can I Learn More About Design Thinking? Design thinking is just starting to gain mainstream visibility in the business world and there are many sources with additional information. Here are a few to get you started:
From the Catalyze Community:
- Making Thinking Visible webcast and presentation
- Design Education Applications for Business article by Linda Yaven
- Intro to Design Thinking article from Red Hat Magazine
iRise Blog Entry – Are You A Design Thinker?
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Are you taking advantage of design to generate strategic business differentiation?
I got turned onto the topic of design thinking from Cone Johnson - an iRise user who helped organize an event around design thinking in Dallas today.
So what is design thinking?
From the Design Thinking event site, they talk about design thinking as follows:
“Classic business models are threatened—the economics of competition have changed. Quality, efficiency and price are quickly matched. Being different requires flexibility—it’s squishy. Squishy seems to imply risk.
Such is the conundrum of the balance between science and art—a balance readily facilitated by Design Thinking, fundamentals for strategic business differentiation.”
At the Corante blog, Paula Thornton describes design thinking as “leveraging implicit elements of design practices, as a means to approach problem solving” and calls it a “critical factor for innovation”. Paula also notes that “Good Design Thinking is the ability to see things not readily apparent to others (that’s where market differentiation can occur).”
The Noise Between Stations blog provides 6 building blocks of design thinking:
- Collaborative, especially with others having different and complimentary experience, to generate better work and form agreement
- Abductive, inventing new options to find new and better solutions to new problems
- Experimental, building prototypes and posing hypotheses, testing them, and iterating this activity to find what works and what doesn’t work to manage risk
- Personal, considering the unique context of each problem and the people involved
- Integrative, perceiving an entire system and its linkages
- Interpretive, devising how to frame the problem and judge the possible solutions
The net-net is that design is good – and that design can and should be leveraged to even greater heights by coupling it with business strategy to generate new innovations. I’d love to hear comments about how others are using design to solve problems.
(For some additional background information, here are some del.icio.us links on design thinking provided by Cone. This entry was originally posted in the Catalyze Current Wisdom blog.)
10/25 update – Here’s some more information I ran across this morning on Design Thinking from Bruce Nussbaum’s blog (NussbaumOnDesign) where he compares Design to Design Thinking.
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