As promised in my July post “Are Your People Happy?”, I am sharing our own company wide happy survey experience with our trusted readers. The happiness metric has always been maintained in product development but I received buy-in from leadership to administer to all members of our company community. We followed all the guidelines in the July posting and ended up with an overall score of 4.4 out of a perfect 5.0 with an accuracy level of about 86% confidence. In addition to the ratings, about 80% of the members that did participate in the survey results provided suggestions on what we should either ‘stop doing’ or ‘start doing’ in order to benefit the team and/or company overall.
Monday, October 1, 2012
User-Centered Design: Part 1 – New Software Development
The majority of our consumer market today expects software to be a service along with cloud access to data on any mobile device platform. As software provider’s, we must extend our user-centered design approach to include mobile device views out the gate. Most credible resources on interactive graphic design will use software providers LinkedIn, Google and Facebook as examples of great mobile user experiences. I agree, but would these web leaders have made the same design decisions had they started out with a device-centric approach?
When Are Agile Requirements Ready For Development?
As a product owner on an agile development team, I am responsible for populating the product backlog with a list of user stories to communicate the product direction. In layman’s terms, a traditional lengthy requirements document is broken down into small parts that are formatted into a simple story told by the end user in hopes that anyone should be able to comprehend. For example, “As a product owner, I need to add an attachment to a user story so that mock-ups are available for team members to reference.”
Eliciting Honest Employee Feedback
In the office I spend part of my time researching the ROI on employee happiness. One of the toughest parts to figure out before culture shocking your company is to establish the current situation as told by each employee, not the HR Director or the CEO. The simple method of initial discovery is through a company wide survey or a couple of poll questions.
10 Heuristics of User-Centered Design
Lately the hot topic is UX (user experience) techniques and how to apply the best one to mobile. This week I want to bring attention back to the ten timeless heuristics of user centered design as written by Jakob Nielsen. In college we spent one full semester memorizing and applying them to our senior class project. They are called “heuristics” because they are actually rules of thumb rather than specific usability guidelines as provided by iOS. Please the following items as a checklist for any design you release.
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