Headless possibilities

More and more solutions are coming in the headless space. It is great to have more options, but you need to understand the pros and cons of each solution to find the best fit.

Ivo Lukac shares his insights and a few recommendations:

  • consider your overall strategy, where are you going with your project(s)

  • analyse what kind of architecture you need and research which products fit (unfortunately there is no better way than to try it yourself or find someone insightful you can trust)

  • try not to reinvent the wheel

Don’t lose your head

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Expert of the month: Gurdeep Singh

“When you are on the customer side, you need to really own the problem and the actual solution. “

This quote stuck with me in my recent conversation with Gurdeep Singh from Danish insurance firm Tryg. He has previously worked for over a decade as a consultant in various roles at Accenture and Genpact and sees himself as an enabler between business and IT.

In late 2017, he moved to the customer side and joined Tryg, where he now is Product Manager, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. He currently leads the Robotics Center of Excellence, where he spends much time working with his Indian-based team. Gurdeep is our expert of the month.

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Chatbots during COVID19 at Danish insurance firm Tryg

With 3 chatbots in production and one more launched during the height of COVID19 in April, Danish insurance firm Tryg saw a substantial usage increase and also learned a few valuable lessons.

Aiste Hoffbeck is digital front runner at Tryg in Copenhagen and recently joined our member conference call series to share insights on their chatbots.

Read my notes from the call, including some additional perspectives from the Q&A.

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Why are most organizations stuck solving the same content problems as 20 years ago?

It seems content management has been dealing with the paradox of opportunity and frustration since the inception of the World Wide Web.

Douglas Adams was right - it is fun for nerds like us. To our credit, we spend a lot of time discussing these problems at length, and actually trying to build products and practices to address them - and in many ways, the underlying technologies and frameworks are vastly more effective to what passed for state of the art only a few years ago.

However, despite these advancements in technologies and methodologies which have made scaling these operations cheaper, faster, and far more capable, it’s clear from the research in the market; over time a similar percentage of organizations still have sub-par customer experience and despite falling prices for tools and services, overall costs for customer experience delivery still remain high.

In this post Mark Demeny from Contentful tries to break these problems down from a wider, strategic view, to a more tactical level.

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The power of self stories to drive behavior

The stories that we tell ourselves drive behavior. The stories help us understand who we are and why we do what we do, but how can you actually get people to change their self story?

In our recent member conference call, Susan Weinschenk joined us from rural Wisconsin for a conversation on the power of self stories to drive behavior. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and in 2013 she published "How To Get People To Do Stuff" where she describes the seven basic drivers of human motivation. Susan focuses on how to use human behavior research to dramatically improve the impact of your products and services.

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Expert of the month: Pernille Tranberg

Data ethics might sound like an esoteric topic, but in our digital world, it’s increasingly something that both individuals and organisations are making a part of their key decisions. Data ethics or perhaps rather lack thereof have already had dramatic impact on the world scene with far reaching implications towards democracy and probably more aspects of our daily lives than we think.

I recently spoke to Copenhagen-based Pernille Tranberg as she talked about data, privacy, digital self defence and what you can actually do as an individual. Pernille is co-founder of the European think-do-tank Dataethics.eu and our expert of the month.

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UiPath raises more money - what does it mean for customers?

Fast growing technology firm UiPath secured another $225 million investment last week. UiPath is used by several of our members in the automation & robotics peer groups. Many of which have not forgotten that it’s actually less than a year ago, that UiPath was bleeding cash and had a huge layoff wave.

While the investment clearly is exciting to some, it’s also a big gamble that increases expectations. What does it really mean for customers?

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Expert of the month: Emily Corace

A few years ago, it finally dawned on me, that our focus as a community had shifted. From the original roots in bringing together web and intranet professionals, to a much broader scope. Suddenly, it became clear, that the work we were doing, the lessons we learned, had a much bigger impact.

I was reminded of this, when I spoke to Seattle-based Emily Corace and listened to her talk about her work on user-centered design. As she said:

“To create something that is naturally understood we need to focus on the behavior of the user. By designing experiences that are understood intuitively, we can create a positive impact through our work.”

This is clearly about much more than just creating a pretty website!

Emily is an Experience Designer with The Garrigan Lyman Group and our expert of the month.

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Design leadership requires community management skills

If you want to make sure that your design system doesn’t get left behind, you need to create a community around it, so that many can participate and keep it alive.

This was one of the key messages in a recent member conference call with Torstein Aas-Hansen, who is a design leader at the Norwegian insurance firm Gjensidige.

Based on his experience as Product Owner Gjensidige.Design, Torstein shared his insights on design leadership, Design Ops and how they manage design at the insurance firm.

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How enterprise leaders can streamline their website program

The effects of physical distancing have created a lot of opportunity to increase loyalty from existing customers, and capture new ones, via your website. There's also the risk of losing customers and brand value if you can't accommodate their shifting expectations.

That all means companies need to do more to support their customers via their websites. And the economic impact of everyone staying indoors means that a lot of companies are cutting budgets and staff. They need to do more, with less, in a complex environment.

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Expert of the month: Andrew Pope

In my recent conversation with UK-based Andrew Pope, he shared his insights on how the changes brought by the pandemic is impacting work, leading to what he terms the new modern workday.

We’ve quickly gone from a workplace, to working from home. And despite the tools generally being able to support this, it’s not as flexible as it should be. Many are working more and there’s clearly an element of digital overload.

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Greetings from a Solo Dev

I’m not one to take selfies. Trust me, I’m saving everyone the grief of looking at my mug. But I wanted to document my state at 6PM as I was about to leave the office last Friday night.

I’ll sound like a broken record if I say it was another long week. But look at that guy. It was indeed another long week.

To bring you up to speed: I’ve been working in 7,500 square feet of loneliness at the Solodev headquarters in Orlando for the last two months, standing guard and collecting mail so our team could shift to a fully remote mode. Our company has always been distributed by design, so we were able to pivot quickly and provide support from the safety of our homes.

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