One common practice when testing the marketing potential of a product is to ask customers if they are satisfied with a product or service. Focus groups are the favorite method to invite customers to provide feedback. One should think customers will buy your products or services because they are satisfied with them, right? Well, [...]

“There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible and wrong” H.L.Mencken Found in the May 2008 Issue of Harvard Business Review. I think you can easily translate it into something else as well: “There is always an easy answer to every question about your customers – neat, plausible [...]

Consumers buy products and services to reach a certain outcome or get a specific job done. You buy a car to drive to work and maybe improve your status (if you chose BMW, Audi or a similar premium brand) and you buy a BlackBerry to be able to do your email during a business [...]

This is a picture of a prototyping set-up for an innovative mobile device that a team of students from the University of St. Gallen and the University of Stanford have built in the course "E310: Global Team-Based Design Innovation”. I really like this approach to prototyping and the students have done a great job, [...]

Jensen Harris recently gave a talk at MiX08 titled “The Story of the Ribbon”. He told the story of the development of the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface. There are great insights on how Microsoft solved the challenge of “menu clutter”, various methods to collect user insights and how to setup an iterative prototyping [...]

Creating questionnaires is an art in itself; an even higher art is creating questionnaires about customer satisfaction. A recent experience with a satisfaction survey during a train ride reminds me that it is important to understand customer satisfaction in order to be able to create a questionnaire about customer satisfaction. The questionnaire included questions regarding [...]

Information about IDEO is rare and even though this presentation is already from 2005 it is still highly interesting and provides a good overview of IDEO’s design practice. Making a valuable contribution to many types of business is the story of IDEO. The application of their expertise is moving from the more traditional product design to [...]

User centered design is receiving increasing attention in recent years. Various methods and tools are used within organizations to improve the understanding of user and task requirements, support the iteration of design and evaluation. Identifying the most important and most used user centered design methods was the goal of the study “The State of User [...]

The April issue of UXmatters magazine is out and Dirk Knemeyer has written an article titled “Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon“. The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing [...]

With all the buzz around service design, customer experiences and the focus on "intangibles" I feel that I sometimes forget that there is still product innovation where new designs of tangible products turn into radical innovations in the respective field. The article "Speedo: Innovation in the Aqua Lab" in BusinessWeek is a nice reminder [...]