Have you ever put a new CMS, marketing or e-commerce tool in place to address a specific problem, only to find an ever-increasing workload and new problems emerge?
Read moreScaling design thinking
The promise of combining new ways of collaboration with design thinking to come up with important innovation sounds almost too good to be true.
This was at the heart of a popular session at the Boye Aarhus 17 conference where Maren Christin Huebl from German software giant SAP gave a talk on fostering a culture of innovation with design thinking.
Read moreArtificial intelligence: How to capitalise on the huge potential
If you’ve been working with digital for the past years, you have probably heard of mobile-first. When mobile-first was introduced by Google in 2010, it had a tremendous impact on how solutions were developed. Programmers and others started to think about smartphones and tablets before thinking about desktops and this required a huge change in thinking and also led to a fair share of confusion.
Read moreThe end of the beginning of a totally new financial system
Volumes have been written about bitcoin, blockchain and cybercurrencies, in particular recently given the hype and immense fluctuations in the value of bitcoin.
Read moreNavigation is for losers!
The digital game is seemingly always changing and today there’s yet another major shift happening in the way we design websites and apps. I’ve been in endless meetings with heated discussions over website or app navigation and information architecture. Should the navigation be aligned following departmental structures, product lines or copied from the competitors? Should it be on the top or to the left? Should we have 8 navigational items or 22? And so it continues
Read moreTowards better experiences
“We are all entitled to our opinion, but we share the same facts”
This was one of my key take aways from an inspiring session led by industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe at a recent Boye peer group meeting in Boston.
Read moreInformation is a business-critical asset of any organisation
Every organisation knows how many chairs it has, how many hand driers, how many people it employs, how much stock it has and how much money it has in the bank or is owed.
Read moreWhat really matters in a persona?
By Janus Boye
In June Susan Weinschenk guest starred at a Boye peer group meeting in Copenhagen and shared some of the typical mistakes often made when working with personas. These include:
they are created based on job role
there are high-level personas for customers
personas describe variables (age, income, and so on) that are not critical for the project at hand.
Susan Weinschenk is a US-based behavioural psychologist, who has published several books including How To Get People To Do Stuff and 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. I asked her to elaborate and she generously agreed to share some of her insights on the topic.
How to do personas right
According to Susan, to have an effective persona you have to look at the people who are actually going to use the particular product or service you are working on — and those people may be different from your “usual” target audience.
For example, you may be interested in a different geography or age or customers who have more or less experience with the subject matter than usual.
So don’t just use personas you’ve used before or those that someone in marketing research did for you. You have to ask:
Who is my target audience for this project/product?
What are the critical variables to describe them, which are relevant for my project or product; depending on what you are working on, this might be any number of things. Don’t just use “typical” variables. It may make no difference to YOUR project how old someone is, whether they are married and so on. What are the variables that are relevant to your project?
What are the different personas on those variables? Are there differences among the critical variables you have identified? If so, then those define your personas.
In her work, Susan has found that each project often has different personas than another project for the same company. This is because the particular product she is designing is for a specific subset, so she has to redefine that with new personas.
The key question behind a good persona
Do I know who I am designing for? And how many different groups am I designing for? How do they differ? How are they the same? Which one is the most important? If you can answer these questions, you are on the right track according to Susan.
One more thing: Don’t forget unconscious and emotional variables too… their self-story, their fears, what will motivate them; not just “demographic” variables, but “psychographic” ones too.
New perspectives and new possibilities
From time to time we invite industry experts to join Boye peer groups to share their experiences and expertise and to have an open, unscripted and confidential conversation with the group. If you think this sounds interesting, you should check out the benefits of joining, perhaps one of our design leadership or digital project management groups.
The entire Boye community has a get-together in Aarhus, Denmark in November for the annual international Boye conference. Here you can meet peers and expand your network.
What really matters in a persona?
In June Susan Weinschenk guest starred at a Boye group meeting in Copenhagen and shared some of the typical mistakes often made when working with personas. These include:
Read moreThe Making of ERS 2.0
There are many ways to launch a website and even more ways to use modern tools, frameworks and systems to build the underlying technical platform. Each with di!erent strengths and weaknesses. Thanks to Samuel Pouyt at the European Respiratory Society for sharing the below extensive and detailed technical case study of their new website at shared at a recent group meeting in European CMS Expert Group.
Read moreA one-page look into the CMS marketplace in 2017 with Jonathan Phillips
As a technology buyer, the marketplace for content management systems might seem somewhat mature by now, but with requirements shifting and plenty of confusion, it is always good to attempt a fresh look.
Read moreGive the employees the tools that they want
Who rules the digital workplace of the future ?
One of the good questions asked at our “Shaping the digital workplace” masterclass held today in Frankfurt.
Many crucial topics covered and useful inspiration from those leading the way. Really pleased that we managed not to have a lecture day, but instead did plenty of discussions, workshops and even some role playing.
Read moreThe Future of CMS
I worked in marketing today with Christian Köhler and the German speaking Umbraco community at their annual festival.
Impressed to see how far Umbraco-founder Niels Hartvig has taken his open source software project since the initial appearance at the Boye conference in 2005.
I shared my take on the direction of the marketplace and learned quite a bit at the intersection of content, commerce and community.
Read more10 Employee Experience Professionals to Watch in 2017
Most organisations are undergoing radicalchanges on many fronts. Rapid evolution onthe digital and technological fronts andchanging demographics within theworkforce are challenging conventionsacross sectors and industries. Thecombination of a new generation enteringthe workplace with fresh skills, approachesand expectations and experienced seniorsstaying on for longer means that we need tofundamentally rethink the workplace – and how we design the employee experience to make the best of this new reality.
Creating a harmonious workplace is not a new discipline, but it takes more focus and cross-departmental e!ort and coordination than ever before to get it right – given the rapid pace of change. Creating good customer experiences and mapping smooth customer journeys have been ways of gaining market share across sectors and industries for ages. Many organisations are becoming acutely aware of the importance of creating equally good experiences for their workforce if they are to attract and retain the best talent now and in the future. This growing focus on the employee experience requires skilled and experienced professionals to take the lead, bring together the may strands and pave the way ahead.
We have identified 10 pioneers who in their respective ways are making waves in terms of improving employee experiences. Some lead software start-ups, some are independents and some work for complex global organisations – privates as well as NGOs – where they are making a notable difference.
We’ll be watching these bright individuals
Read moreWorking out loud to achieve your goals
Being well into 2017, take a minute to ask yourself:
Which goals would you really want to achieve this year?
I recently had the pleasure of a first-hand introduction to Working Out Loud by John Stepper. As a special guest star at a recent Boye peer group meeting hosted by Deutsche Post DHL in Bonn, John took us through his approach as outlined in the book by the same name and made me realise that we need to think differently about achieving our goals.
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