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 [...]

Great news for Switzerland, another global leader in technology (besides Google and IBM) is opening a Research Lab: Nokia (See press release). The research lab will be located in Lausanne and the research program itself is with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH Zurich). [The Nokia Research [...]

Sohrab Vossoughi, Founder and President of ZIBA Design, writes in BusinessWeek that "It’s all About About Experience". Many businesses understand that being "new" or "different" is no longer a differentiator. Countless companies are elbowing their way to the top with designs that are also "feature-rich" or "patent pending." Innovation in product design has lost its [...]

How is it possible that customers are more loyal after failures of products or services than they have been before? Excellent service recovery is the key and with the right activities, companies can fully utilize the service recovery paradox. The “service recovery paradox” states that with a highly effective service recovery, a service or product [...]

One of the key success factors for designing new services is not just the world’s best brainstorming technique but even more important are deep consumer insights that look beyond the obvious. Using the right set of methods for market research the task to uncover consumer needs, motivations and behavior becomes very doable. With this [...]