Skills & Methods

Why Do User Research & Gap Analysis?

• You lack clarity about who the users of your site or online application are and which of their aims it should address, in order to realize your own business objectives.
• You want to attract more qualified users to your site or online application.
• You want to improve the user satisfaction of your site or online application.
• You want to increase sales on your site or application (esp. relative to your competitors).
• You want to improve the quality of customer support on your site or application.
• You need clear site objectives to specify and design the site or application effectively.

Methodology

• Work with company personnel to research & define the categories of people whose aims could be furthered by your website and the products and services it supports.
• Identify their aims that new or enhanced virtualized business-functions (marketing, sales, service, delivery, operations, support, etc.) and other elements of your website or new digital product could address. Derive these from team brainstorming, market research (surveys, interviews, raiding databases, re-interpreting prior research), customer-support data, publications, and interviews.
• Depending on the complexity of the situation, conduct efficient field studies to elicit user aims and behavior.
• Research and assess significant alternatives and competitors to your products, services, and website.
• Exclude user aims the company is either unwilling or unable to meet.
• Analyze remaining user aims to identify significant ones unsatisfied by alternatives (competitors, but also any candidate alternative).
• Define these user aims clearly, specifying the benefits to users of achieving these aims.
• Specify the internal business benefits of users’ achieving these aims accurately: potential for increases in revenue, market share, brand penetration, and stakeholder satisfaction, etc.
• Consider marketability: how easy it will be to communicate these aims, your ways of helping achieve them, and the benefits to users, so that they will quickly and easily recognize them as ones they have, but are presently dissatisfied with alternatives for. (Sellability is considered at the concept innovation stage.)
• Facilitate group decision-analysis to select the user aims to try to meet, taking into account the costs, time, and risks of the means needed to address each aim. Include the options of designing and building parts yourself, customizing parts from off-the-shelf packages, & subscribing to online services for other parts.
• This list is the full set of user aims that your new or enhanced website will try to help users achieve.
• When design & development projects are to be broken into phases, group aims accordingly

Benefits of This Approach

1. Clarity about who the users of your website or online application are and which of their aims it should address, in order to realize your own business objectives.
2. More qualified users visit your site or online application.
3. Greater user-satisfaction.
4. Increased sales.
5. Better customer support.
6. Clear, adequate site or digital-product objectives needed to specify and design effectively.
7. Broad consensus and strong support of aims at the management level

Read my Case Study.

Why Do Product Strategy & Concept Innovation?

• You want a new, online product to sell. It is an application, information, or both. It may also include various communication functions, either interpersonal or intragroup. It may be available on your website, company network, or other means. Customers may run it on mobile or non-mobile devices.
• You do not have an effective, efficient methodology & process for product innovation.
• You believe there is an important opportunity for your business in using emerging technologies such as
  1. Smart mobile phones & hand-helds
  2. Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
  3. Social networking
  4. GIS-based maps with superimposed, dynamic information
  5. Convergent media (e.g., VoIP, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text)
  6. Cameras with dynamic-information overlays (also known as “Augmented Reality”)
• You want a more nimble and quick process than you can do in-house.
• You want a quality product, not a quick-and-dirty one just for the sake of speed.
• You want to have a variety of innovative product-concepts to choose from.
• You want the product to take full advantage of what the latest technology offers.
• You want it to make full use of the state-of-the-art in information and communication models and techniques—especially in its communication functionality and user interfaces.
• You need clear information about customer aims that the proposed products would address, how easily & effectively customers could achieve them, & the benefits customers would realize.
• You need to know how marketable, sellable, and competitive each product would be.
• You need reliable estimates of the practicality of developing each proposed product: costs, time, technical feasibility, and risks.
• You need reliable estimates of the ongoing costs of marketing, selling, & supporting each product.
• You need accurate forecasts of each proposed product’s sales, market share, effect on sales of other company products, and effect on the company’s reputation.
• You want to make a well-informed decision, based on ROI to the company, about whether developing any of the proposed products is worth going after right now, should be postponed, or should be abandoned as impractical.
• Before undertaking such a project, you want to make sure the concept, categories of potential customers, the selected customer aims to address, benefits to customers, other key characteristics of the product, and quantifications of the amount of direct and indirect benefits, costs, value (ROI), and likelihood of success are clearly and specifically defined. These will serve as the overall business-objectives for the project.
• You want to be able to set a realistic, appropriate, accurate budget for the project.

Methodology

• Work with company personnel to define the opportunity clearly & accurately.
  1. Identify the product’s potential customers.
  2. Research their aims to see which the product could address.
  3. Evaluate their alternatives to accomplish these aims.
  4. Consider which aims the company is willing & able to address.
  5. Select which aims the product should try to meet.
• Invent a number of innovative product-concepts, taking full advantage of emerging technologies, such as the following:
  1. Smart mobile phones & hand-helds
  2. Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
  3. Social networking
  4. GIS-based maps with superimposed, dynamic information
  5. Convergent media (e.g., VoIP, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text)
  6. Cameras with dynamic-information overlays (also known as “Augmented Reality”)
• For each product-concept
  1. Provide mockups & descriptions.
  2. Show how it helps customers achieve their aims easily & effectively, & their benefits.
  3. Assess its competition & other alternatives to determine its competitive advantages.
  4. Look ahead to future competition: barriers to entry & likelihood of being superceded.
  5. Demonstrate marketability by showing how easy it will be to communicate its customers’ aims, how it satisfies them, benefits, & competitive advantages.
  6. Demonstrate sellability by showing its quality, customers it appeals to, & pricing.
  7. Evaluate its practicality: costs, time, technical feasibility, & risks of developing, marketing, selling, & supporting it. Include buy vs. build choices.
  8. Estimate its sales, revenues, market share, & effect on company reputation & sales of its other products.
• Provide decision-analysis & support to help the company
  1. Evaluate these concepts & choose the one with the highest value (benefits divided by costs) to the company, considering direct & indirect business benefits, practicality, competitive advantages, marketability, sellability, and benefits to customers.
  2. Decide whether the product is worth developing right now, should be postponed, or should be abandoned as impractical.
  3. Clearly define overall business-objectives & success criteria for the product-development project.

Benefits of This Approach

1. Choose from a range of innovative product-concepts the one that will
   1. Produce the best value for the company (benefits divided by costs).
      1. Benefits: sales, market share, effect on company reputation & sales of other company products.
      2. Costs: developing, marketing, selling, & supporting the product.
   2. Satisfy the most customers by helping them achieve their aims easily & effectively.
   3. Capitalize on opportunities competitors have missed to help customers achieve aims.
   4. Stand up to future competition.
   5. Be easy to market successfully.
   6. Be easy to sell successfully.
   7. Be practical to develop, taking advantage of both build and buy options.
   8. Take full advantage of latest technology.
   9. Take full advantage of state-of-the-art in information & communication techniques.
2. Preserve your freedom and perspective to choose the best concept, before getting down into the details of the design where you may lose sight of the forest for the trees. This avoids doing premature design work.
3. Make a well-informed decision on whether to develop a new product at all right now.
4. Maximize ROI and minimize costs & risks from the design & development projects.
5. Get information needed to set a realistic, appropriate budget.
6. Receive a detailed list of categories of customers, their aims, benefits, key product-characteristics, direct & indirect benefits, costs, value (ROI), and likelihood of success.
   1. These serve as the overall business-objectives for the product-development project and help ensure that your product accomplishes its real business purposes.
   2. They also provide essential guidance to the conceptual designer, so the next step (Informational and Functional Blueprint) can be performed efficiently and successfully.
7. Obtain staff support and take advantage of company expertise through a highly collaborative process.

Read my Case Study for a New Product.

Read my Case Study for an Enhanced Product.

Why Do Analysis & Modeling?

• You have tried to engage design and programming teams to develop your ideas for an online-product/application or website, but the ideas are too vague and general to serve as adequate guidance for them to define the scope or estimate cost and schedule, much less to begin the project.
• The envisioned website or online-product lacks adequate definition of such parts of high-level design as user tasks, content, functionality, back-end integration, and organization. This is likely to lead to serious problems with schedule, budget, and software quality.

Methodology

• For the chosen product concept, produce a full conceptual-design and functional definition of the website or online-product/application in terms of user tasks, content, definition and organization of information, and logical functionality, all in enough detail so that the UI designer can detail the concept, and technical staff can plan out and design the software, network architecture, and hardware.
• Organize content and functionality according to Model-View-Controller paradigm, using UML as needed to flesh out the specifications and backend integration.
• Structure the site and organize content in a way that facilitates Search-Engine Optimization, and include functionality that rewards users for referrals or content contributions, or that has teasers or trials. All these factors will make the site online-product/application much easier to market online.
• Ensure that the online-product or website is of high quality: does a good job of helping users achieve their aims, produces genuinely valuable benefits for users, and is superior in these ways to most or all of the alternatives available to them. If it is a product, also ensure that it is quick and easy to buy. All these factors will make the product much easier to sell.
• I use a variety of effective formats to communicate the conceptual design.
• This service is sometimes referred by the industry as “requirements analysis” or “requirements gathering.”
• I avoid the term “requirements” because it implies a mere collecting of fairly obvious specifications (usually just by asking the stakeholders), whereas what is really needed is a creative and skillful working-out of the details of exactly how the site or application will achieve its business and user objectives. This requires a high level of expertise in information quality, organization, and design, as well as in functional analysis and design.

Benefits of This Approach

1. Needed to ensure that the design achieves its business and user objectives
2. A better organized, clearer, more complete specification than is the norm
3. Effectively bridges the gap between the concept and the UI and visual design
4. Enables UI designer to realize the concept correctly
5. Leads to a much better UI design
6. Provides framework for sound version-control
7. Minimizes design errors and problems by catching them earlier
8. Makes communication with other designers and programmers easier
9. Facilitates easy, successful online-marketing
10. Contributes greatly to sellability

Read my Case Study.

Why do UI Design & Prototyping?

• Your project is about to start or has entered the visual-design or the coding step, but your project team lacks a detailed, validated UI design to work from.
• As a result, visual designers and programmers will be forced to make UI decisions piecemeal as they go along.
• But UI is a specialized pre-visual-design skill that most visual designers and programmers lack.
• It cannot be done effectively at the same time as visual design or programming.
• Lacking a detailed, validated UI design is a recipe for terrible usability problems and a tremendous amount of unnecessary, time-consuming, expensive rework.
• UI’s and the functionality their communicate are usually too complex and fluid to define in static documents, especially for the purposes of stakeholder review and feedback, therefore you need an integrated online prototype that can be played with, inspected, annotated, updated, in real time, and spit out formal specifications automatically, as needed

Methodology

• Design a fully-interactive, dynamic prototype of your website or online-product/application. I can accomodate all emerging technologies, including the following
  • Smart mobile phones & hand-helds
  • Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
  • Social networking
  • GIS-based maps with superimposed, dynamic information
  • Convergent media (e.g., VoIP, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text)
  • Cameras with dynamic-information overlays (also known as “Augmented Reality”

• Includes individual screens, their elements, rules, and specifications.
• May include a technical proof-of-concept, if needed.
• Use advanced interactive online-prototyping tools with built-in review & revision capabilities.
• Produce easy-to-use, functional-specification documents, reports, & annoted UI screen-shots.
• Producs a UI design that is faithful to the product strategy, conceptual design, and specifications

Benefits of This Approach

1. A UI that allows users to perform all the tasks needed to achieve their aims
2. A UI that makes it quick and easy for users to perform these tasks effectively
3. Permits user-group testing and revisions prior to expensive coding & testing
4. Prototype allows you to try out and validate the UI, versus flowcharts & descriptions
5. Saves client’s time in deciding on and communicating changes needed
6. Avoids long, difficult, unproductive, and grueling review-meetings
7. Visual designers & programmers get exactly what they need to do a good job efficiently
8. Ensures a design that will work well with the chosen technology-platform
9. Contributes to code that has fewer bugs & is easier to test, maintain, and extend
10. Prevents unanticipated expansion of scope and going over budget

Read my Case Study.

Why Do Project Management or Troubleshooting?

Your design and development project is going badly: e.g., scope, schedule, and costs slipping or out-of-control; poor quality work-product; grueling review process; stakeholder’s participation in project poorly defined, organized, and managed.

You need a competent project-manager to manage an entire project consisting of design/redesign and development of your online application or website, from the beginning of the planning process to the final result. This includes bringing the right staff together to represent the company’s interests, forming an effective project team with the right representatives of the designers and programmers, good planning, facilitating productive meetings and discussions, resolving conflicts, and ensuring good progress and quality results.

Methodology

I provide management for an entire project or ongoing department, from the beginning of the planning process to the final result. I’m trained as a “real” manager as well as a project manager. Everything I know and have experienced in this field tells me that the largest source of software project-management failure is 1) lack of clarity about who the right stakeholders are (internal and external), 2) clarity about their prioritized purposes and unmet desires (from customer, CEO, to programmer), and 3) clarity about the right relationships and effectiveness of communication among them to help them collaborate to meet their purposes. Everything else – big M Methodologies, UML, Agile, PM tools, PMPs, and any other methodologies, tools, or certifications that the industry espouses — should always be for the sake of that, and that is what I focus on while demonstrating competent to expert skill in most of these approaches.

My approach offers the best of both worlds, in that I am an excellent researcher and planner, with a large repertoire of advanced methods and skills specifically adapted for software that obviates much of the need for trail and error down the road, and I am a huge proponent of short-interval scheduling with tight feedback loops, which is the heart of the Agile philosophy. I usually fly under the banner of Agile, while complementing it with more sophisticated methods as the need arises.

The full repertoire of my management/project management skills is outline below:

The Organization

Individuals

1. Hiring: Define requirements, locate & evaluate candidates, negotiate hiring, group interviews & decisions.
2. Retaining: Help employees with personal issues (e.g., satisfaction & careers) & supply what they need to work happily & effectively.
3. Firing: Decide on terminations, negotiate arrangements that work for both company & employee

Groups

1. Relationships: Build teams, resolve conflicts, promote team spirit & good relationships among team members.
2. Principles of Change-Agency: how to influence without offending
3. Methods for Conflict Resolution: psychology of conflicts; re-framing conflict resolution as joint problem-solving
4. Organizational Design: Structure your team, division of labor.

Collaboration

Information: the content team members need to do their jobs

1. Ideas: assumptions, facts, data, reasoning.
2. The criteria for sound ideas
3. Discussions: principles of brainstorming
4. Documents: reports, e-mail, databases, knowledge-bases, etc.

Communication: sending/receiving information-content.

1. Linking: Interface between your team, other teams, & the rest of the organization, other than at group meetings; e.g., coordinate with your manager or other managers.
2. Group Meetings: Conduct & participate in meetings of the team you manage & of the management team you belong to (led by your manager). Includes linking during such meetings.
3. Media: Effective use of the appropriate media for one-on-one communications: e-mail, phone, or face-to face.
4. Information Systems: IT & manual information systems to organize, store, & access information quickly, reliably, & securely.

Planning: What your team does for your company & why: Planning, working on, & tracking.

1. Define: Choose external goals/aims & define them adequately.
2. Criteria for the Definition of Objectives
3. Prioritize: Order them by importance & urgency.
4. Generate Possible Means: Design ways to achieve them.
5. Evaluate Means & Select: Use criteria you define.
6. Specify Details of Selected Means: Specific enough for implementation, coordination, & feedback loops.
7. Implement Selected Means: Work toward achieving external goals/aims.
8. Evaluate Progress: Keep track of your team’s progress on external goals/aims, including enter data, generate reports, quality control, check on stakeholder satisfaction, & evaluate progress on scheduling & budgeting.
9. Revise: Adjust external goals/aims & means as work progresses.

Benefits of This Approach

1. A sound project-plan
2. An accurate and reliable schedule for the project that you can count on
3. A high-quality result
4. An efficient project that minimizes time and cost
5. Staying within budget, avoiding surprises and change-orders
6. Minimized risks
7. Accommodate the aims of a large number of stakeholders and team members
8. Effective group decision-making
9. Greater satisfaction for the project team and the client’s team

Read my Case Study.