Software architects work with business leaders to design software based upon business requirements. A common problem is that our customers sometimes provide a specification of how the software should work instead of what it is supposed to accomplish. Providing a functional or technical specification limits our flexibility to do design. A good way to avoid… Read More »
This entry is part 10 of 10 in the series Strategic IT CapabilitiesThe IT group is usually tasked with designing new applications. I am not sure I advocate that but that is what I have seen in practice at banks. Therefore, I categorize User Centered Design as an IT Capability. The following diagram lifted from… Read More »
Dear Bank of Mine, you have an app on my phone. I just went from KL to NYC and my phone knows all about it. Do you? We need to be thinking of mobile phones as sensors. Not just so that mobile apps can be context sensitive–but so the entire enterprise can be. Any transactions… Read More »
This entry is part 29 of 31 in the series Defining wordsWhen designing a mobile app we want to look for ways to account for the user’s context. This includes the person’s identity and location, travel speed, active apps, the weather, the task are they performing, gestures, sensor inputs, asleep or awake, etc.
This entry is part 22 of 31 in the series Defining wordsStudying customers is of concern whether you are formulating a business strategy or designing a mobile app. It helps to have a clear understanding of profiles, personas and archetypes. Archetype is hands-down the most interesting word. So let’s start there! Archetype analysis studies customers… Read More »
This entry is part 21 of 31 in the series Defining wordsAccording to Wikipedia, Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. www.servicedesigntools.org/ provides an open collection of tools useful in… Read More »
Good news! I found another great resource for connecting customer loyalty to customer experience! Forrester: The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012. A comment in the first paragraph sums it up: “Years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a firm’s customer experience (as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index [CXi])… Read More »
One of the most important issues I deal with regularly is how to estimate the business benefits of improving customer experience. One good source that I turned up is IDC’s Business Strategy: Digital Services Impact on Customer Retention and Acquisition resulting from customer and bank surveys in Europe and the U.S. An interesting idea is… Read More »
Strategic Design can be used to redesign organizations to improve how they are experienced by people. A primary focus is on customers, of course. The point of doing that is to increase the benefits customers perceive they are receiving from the organization. The point of doing that is to increase customer loyalty. So a primary… Read More »
This entry is part 10 of 31 in the series Defining wordsIronically, the most common request I get from business people nowadays is to explain the business benefits and/or value of some course of action that we are proposing. In the past, business leaders wanted to accomplish some goal for good reason and we were… Read More »