Thinking of user experience as how a webpage functions, or how customer support handles enquiries, means missing out on today’s largest competitive advantage.
Read moreThe story of Boye & Co - and our move from J. Boye
As you well may have noticed, we changed the name. And yes. It is about you.
While our aim of bringing the best networking and learning experience remains the same, we want to highlight one crucial thing. That thing being you.
Goodbye middle management, hello collaboration: How we will be working in five years
The workplace of tomorrow is long overdue. It sounds like an anomaly, but think about it. Today's workplace runs still largely according to Victorian values. We come to a workplace where we are managed in hierarchical structures, kept in one place for set hours every day, then go home to our 'other' lives.
Read moreHow umbraco needs to change to survive
This year the popular Umbraco Festival in Germany invited me to host a session with the thought-provoking title: “Umbraco: How it needs to change to survive”
In the talk, I listed 7 areas & themes where the umbraco project needs to change:
Marketing wants this. Development wants that. What is a digital leader to do?
When you look at how to speed up a complex digital project and deliver high-quality end-user experiences, the palette of options placed in front of you is daunting. It’s never a binary decision what to do next.
What I’m seeing experienced digital managers do—when their organizational challenges get too wild—is to put shared tools in front of di!erent teams with di!erent needs. That way, they nudge their divergent teams to work together on advancing projects.
Read moreCoredna – a digital platform vendor built for speed and scale
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.
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