Day 78 - Value FOR Your Customers

Five ways for creating value for your customers:

1. Focus on value.  What pain point are you solving for your customer.
2. Compete on value not price.
3. Be empathetic. Walk in your customer's shoes and see the world through their eyes.
4. Satisfy your customers by making them successful.  In other words, satisfy their needs.
5. Delight them by giving them something extra.

Day 77 - Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

Jakob Nielsen's 10 most general principles (or heuristic rules of thumb) for interaction design:

1. Visibility of system status.
2. Match between system and the real world.
3. User control and freedom.
4. Consistency and standards.
5. Error prevention.
6. Recognition rather than recall.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
10. Help and documentation.

Day 76 - System Usability System (SUS)

SUS is a series of ten questions. It's a quick and dirty usability scale to give your users once they've completed testing your service.  Users are asked to rate statements from 1-5 depending on how much they agree with them.

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the system was easy to use.
4. I think I would need the support of a technical person to use this system.
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use.
9. I feel very confident using the system.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.

Day 75 - Value from Your Customers

Value comes from customers in four different ways.

1. They can pay you money.
2. They can create content for you.
3. They can give you their eyeballs.
4. They can give you other users.

Day 74 - Problem Solving Using the Five Whys

Problem solving requires getting to the root causes of the problem. To figure out the root causes you need to dig deep into the underlying sources and symptoms of a problem. But how do you clearly discover and articulate the actual problem?  Use the "Five Whys" iterative question asking technique. Each subsequent question forms the basis for the follow up question.

When asking the five whys make sure you write down the specific problem/s and answers to your questions. The real problem is likely to change or come more into focus the deeper you dig.

Classic example of the 'Five Whys'.
The problem: the car won't start.

1. Why? The battery is dead (first why)
2. Why? The alternator is not functioning (second why)
3. Why? The alternator belt has broken (third why)
4. Why? The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and wasn't replaced (fourth why)
5. Why? The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule (fifth why, a root cause)

Day 73 - Five Tips for Multi Screen Context

When you design a software product always think of the larger context of the multi-screen world.  Designing for context means aligning your customer requirements at any given time at any given place.

1. Understand how context affects usage for a smartphone, tablet, desktop, watch, smart TV, car etc.
2. Think about how your user shifts between multiple devices and form factors while using your software or app.
3. Think about how the context of each device experience compliments the other.
4. Synchronization and continuity of the experience between multiple devices is important to your user. Without the continuity the experience becomes jarring.
5. Accommodate for the user on the go as well as the user in a specific location.

Day 72 - How Do You Design for a Global Audience?

In an interconnected world, the internet allows you to reach a global audience.

So how do you design for a world in which there are cultural differences?

UX godfather Don Norman says to Design for the task. So try task-centered-design instead of human-centered-design. If you design for the task it will fit nearly all cultures.

There are many examples of this. Think of a violin or a refrigerator...they're the same all over the world in the places that have these objects.