Joy Busse
The Power of Design Vision Prototypes in ...

In the dynamic landscape of modern enterprise, the challenges of achieving alignment and progress between teams are all too familiar. In this article, I would like to take you on a journey of VMware’s Tanzu design team, a journey marked by ambiguity, setbacks, resilience, and the ultimate discovery of the transformative potential of design vision stories and prototypes in steering product success and fostering team cohesion.

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The Power of Design Vision Prototypes in Achieving Product Success and Team Alignment
Joy Busse
The Simplicity Paradox: Streamlining Enterprise ...

In the world of enterprise products geared towards an engineering user base, striking the right balance between functionality and usability is paramount for success. To ensure a seamless user experience and quicker time to value, it is essential to prioritize core functionality in the product GUI while reserving advanced capabilities for the API and CLI interfaces. This approach offers numerous benefits for product development and enhances the overall engagement of enterprise users with the product. Let’s look at five tenets of design geared toward realizing the simplicity paradox in your design practice.

The Simplicity Paradox: Streamlining Enterprise Product Design for Savvy Engineers
Application Design, Device Interface Design, Mobile Design, Usability
Joy Busse
"Sorry, I Don't Know This Yet..." An In-Depth ...

In an earlier glossary post, we discussed “VPAs”or Voice Personal Assistants. We thought this topic deserved further analysis considering the massive adoption of devices with “always-on” listening and a responding voice functionality. Considering these rapid developments in the era of voice interactive objects and AI in general, we should ask ourselves these crucial questions. 

  1. How will this affect you, your organization and your products? 

  2. How can your application use these powerful neural networks and machine learning based systems to intuit more precisely what your customer wants? 

  3. How can your customer service improve by leveraging the new forms of networked intelligence in the cloud? 

  4. In a world where touch, type, and swipe have been the primary modes of input, how can voice interaction provide a more natural access to your product? 

  5. How can this be integrated and at what cost?

It’s been 50 years since Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian thriller 2001 was released, where Hal,  the disturbingly calm onboard yet ill intentioned computer, frightened us with the possibility of computers taking over humanity and making decisions that may not preclude destroying the whole lot of us sloppy, imperfect humans.

"Sorry, I Don't Know This Yet..." An In-Depth Analysis of the State of Virtual Personal Voice Assistance
Joy Busse
How Great Web Design Grows Your Business
How Great Web Design Grows Your Business
Application Design, Device Interface Design, Mobile Design, Usability
Joy Busse
Customer Experience: Doing It Right

🔈  We all know that the work doesn’t end when someone becomes a customer; yet, many businesses are not organized to bring the best experiences to their customers. Our client, John Zimmerer at Top Down Systems, recently wrote a series of blog posts analyzing how businesses can avoid pitfalls in the way of a great customer experience. He takes a look at several industry reports and analyses, and discusses how businesses can move from a siloed customer experience approach, which is rather common, to one where the customer experience fits into the very fabric of an organization.

Customer Experience: Doing It Right
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The Lead UX Designer – Because Every Project Needs a People Person

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The Lead UX Designer – Because Every Project Needs a People Person

The User Experience (UX) Lead’s job is to understand users. She’s the person on the team who’s responsible for translating the project vision into a product that end users can use easily and happily. This is not just about creating a product that’s beautiful to look at. It’s about conducting user research, testing and trouble-shooting in order to understand the end user’s goals and motivations, so the team can design a product that improves the user’s experience. The main job of the UX Lead on any project is to identify a product’s problem and create an elegant, intuitive and optimized solution for it. Without the UX Lead, the design team is merely guessing at what end users want/need, and most often end up solving the wrong problem, albeit in an aesthetically pleasing way. In other words, you end up with a pretty product that is of little value because it’s not focused on the exact goals of the end users. Through research, testing and design iteration, a good UX Lead makes sure that the product will increase conversion and/or advance the mission of the company. So how, exactly does the UX Lead make that happen?

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Customer Advisory Boards – The Perfect Project Think Tanks

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Customer Advisory Boards – The Perfect Project Think Tanks

If you want to know what customers think about your product, the best way to find out is to ask them. Why do unnecessary guesswork when you can ask the customers directly? The customer advisory board, or CAB is a group of about 10-15 customers who meet regularly on behalf of your company to discuss their views on a particular product, of which they are end users. The discussions, which are based on the board member’s firsthand experience with the product, include thoughts on customer desires, motivations, and values, as well as information on competing products and industry trends. The CAB ultimately creates a list of actionable items for your company, which will facilitate product improvement, and in a more general sense, will help to assess prospective business priorities and direction. Assessing and using the data from CAB meetings is a great way to ensure that your company’s vision is kept in alignment with customers’ desires, safeguarding product profitability.

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Every Successful Project Needs a Spirit Guide, Introducing the Product Manager

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Every Successful Project Needs a Spirit Guide, Introducing the Product Manager

The world of tech is filled with groundbreaking products that inspire us with their ingenuity, elegance and utility. These products are created by diverse teams collaborating on a shared vision. From engineers and designers to business development and marketing gurus, these teams of talented individuals would be lost without the invaluable Sherpa also known as the Product Manager. The Product Manager takes the CEO’s idea, communicates it to the team and helms the ship that will journey through the creative storm of product development. During their journey, the design team will encounter shifting icebergs and treacherous sea monsters. The PM will keep the project on course in the face of these obstacles, ultimately ensuring that at their final destination, the team has executed the company’s vision. The PM knows that achieving this goal is paramount because the vision represents the objectives of the CEO and founders, and most important, serves the company’s users.

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Bootstrap – The Benefits of a Front-End Framework

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Bootstrap – The Benefits of a Front-End Framework

Bootstrap is an extremely popular, open source, front-end framework. First released in 2011, and currently in its third version, it's the #1 download on GitHub. Bootstrap seems to be everybody's favorite. We love it too, but there was a time when we were skeptical and wondered whether or not we should use a predefined library, so we'd like to share our evolving experience here, just in case you don't believe the hype.