Fit4Life - A Daily Warmup

How many times have you or someone you know suffered some surprise, random injury doing something they do every day? Maybe they "tweaked" their back picking up their child or "did something" to their shoulder while rearranging a shelf.

A well-rounded fitness routine can help avoid this, but a lot of people struggle to find the time for that. My solution is simple - a warmup routine that is quick, accessible, and well-rounded enough to help protect us from these little, avoidable injuries.

Staying Fit While Staying Home - A "Prison Workout"

Staying fit can be a challenge when we are stuck at home. It's even more tough if you have no equipment. The good news is that there are many solutions. Let's take a couple of minutes to discuss one, a "prison workout".

Thinking Critically Without Killing Creativity

Photograph by Lex Augusteijn

Critical thinking is wonderful tool for progress. It helps guide us to make better decisions and avoid pitfalls. But it can also be a destructive force for ideation and creativity.

The trick is how to harness it.

Embracing TL;DR

If you spend any significant time consuming content on the web, you have probably come across the initialism tl;dr. It stands for "too long; didn't read." It means pretty much what it says. Whatever message you were trying to communicate was not received, because you demanded too much of the reader's time, attention, or focus.

Now, some may read that and think, "sheesh, people have such short attention spans today!" I would challenge you to flip that thought on its head. More often than not, tl;dr is a symptom of poor presentation of content, not the consumer of that content, i.e., the product/content is the  problem, not the user.

Don't Make Users Struggle

Steve Krug is a thought leader in the area of user experience, especially web usability and human-computer interaction. The title of his most famous and popular book, Don't Make Me Think, is a concise summary of what's in the book and it is a wonderfully elegant philosophy in itself.

While this is a great starting point, I have found that a slightly broader philosophy serves me well - don't make users struggle. I'd like to share a few key principles that have served me well with this.

Effective User Interviews and Product Development

Good user input may seem a bit like a magical, mythical beast at times, but it is a very real and realizable goal.  That said, the path to it passes through a minefield of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and unintended biases in thinking. But we can effectively navigate this with a human-centered approach and it is worth the trip, because the results can be nigh magical for your product and your users.

A powerful tool in our toolbox is the interview.

The Use of "Customer", "User", and "Human" in Design & Development

Proof that I am not a professional cartoonist.

Customer. User. Human. These words get swapped around in product design and development in ways that can be confusing and seem equivocal.

Let's start easy.  Human. We know what that is. You, me, and that guy at the karaoke bar singing "I Will Survive". Human is an inclusive term. Your users and customers both fit under that umbrella.

So, if it is such an inclusive term, why do we have Human-Centered Design (HCD) and User-Centered Design (UCD)? Couldn't you just use HCD and be done? That depends.

Shaping Your Message Through Keyword Analytics and Data-Driven Content

As promised in the last post, the discussion of Google Analytics continues with discussion of how to acquire and apply data to make your product more successful. As with the previous post, we will look at the obvious bits and then dig a bit deeper to identify a not-so-obvious trick.

In the early days of web analytics, people seized on keywords for search engine optimization, to try and drive more traffic to their web site or application. The value of that is declining for various reasons, but there is a greater value you can obtain from keyword data - understanding your customers better and shaping your message to deliver what they want through data-driven content.

And it's from a place you might not think to look.

Google Analytics - Acquisition Channel Data for Better Targeting and Product Improvement

As promised in the last post, the discussion of Google Analytics continues with discussion of how to acquire and apply data to make your product more successful. This time, let's focus on acquisition data, the information that tells us how people are finding your site.

Combine this with analysis of your referrals, and you can artfully sculpt more successful customer engagements and conversions, but you can also find some great information to help improve your product, engage your customer, and produce data-driven content. Let's talk about how.

Google Analytics and Product Intelligence - Web Site Traffic & Page Views

About a month ago, I explained how to get started with Google Analytics. Now that a month has passed, there should be enough data to populate the various analytics pages (analytics pages without data are not very informative).

The sheer amount of information and options can be a bit overwhelming at first, so let's start with the thing people most commonly want to know about their site - traffic in the form of page views and how we might turn that information into useful, actionable product intelligence.

Design Thinking, the Elevator Pitch

Design Thinking is still a concept that suffers from 1) misunderstanding and 2) being dismissed as a new word for an old thing. Because of this, all design thinkers, at one point or another, are put into the position of evangelizing for design thinking.

So, let's think about how we might create an elevator pitch for design thinking and, along the way, we will probably give ourselves lots of great material for evangelizing the concept as well.

Setting Up Google Analytics For A Website

Google Analytics is just about everywhere, and it's a powerful tool for understanding your audience and the content they care about.  However, it may not be active for your site. When you create your own site, you need to do a few steps so insure its active on your pages.

The good news is that it's pretty easy.  Let's get started!

Personas - Buyer vs. Customer vs. User

The other day, I was talking to a friend about the important difference between the buyer, customer, and user of your product.

For a product to be successful, we need to not only understand our personas, but we also need to understand their relationship to acquisition and usage of the product. While the end user of your product may be your ultimate customer, they may have almost no say in the decision making process of the purchase. So, to give your product the opportunity to be their amazing solution, it's good to take a moment to decide who the "real customer" will be at given stages.

Running A Convention - What Is Your Product?

[Why? I have been helping run conventions in my volunteer work since 2001.  The goal of this article is to communicate my experiences so that they might benefit from them.]

The Field of Dreams tells us, "If you build it, they will come."  That's a nice thought, but they have to want what you build. Continuing the Product Management exercise, we need to figure out what our product is.

Your convention is a product and your attendees and staff are the customers for that product.  To be successful, you need to give them a product that they want.  All of the best intentions in the world will not make a mismatch work.  So, let's figure out what should go into this product.

Running A Convention - Understand Your Customer Personas

[I have been helping run conventions in my volunteer work since 2001.  The goal of this article is to communicate my experiences so that others might benefit from them.]

So, you may be asking yourself at this point, why are we talking about conventions? Well, aside from knowing a lot of folks that need this information, it's an illustration that products are not just things you buy off a shelf, they are just about anything you are trying to sell to a customer. So, as we plan a convention, we can benefit greatly by approaching this as a Product Management effort.

Before we start to roll up our sleeves and really dig into planning our convention, we need to first understand our audience.  Any successful product needs a customer base that wants that product. Otherwise, we run the risk of building a convention/product that no one wants to attend/buy.

Personas are, essentially key archetypes of your customer base.  By fleshing them out, we can better understand our intended audience/customer, e.g., for a customer-facing healthcare application, one persona might be a patient and another might be a caregiver.

Let's consider what personas we might want to define for a convention.

Running A Convention - Scheduling & Dates

[I have been helping run conventions in my volunteer work since 2001.  The goal of this article is to communicate my experiences so that others might benefit from them.]

When planning a convention, one of the early key decisions is when you should hold it.  Choose poorly, and you can sabotage your event before it even starts.

Clearing Out Your Facebook Timeline/Activity

Facebook is fascinating application that is part of a suite of transformative social technologies.  It's a great way to share thoughts, feelings, moments, memories, and knee-jerk reactions.  However, as well-designed as it is for ingesting that content, it's not so good at letting you clear it out.  Some might argue that Facebook is actually well-designed to make it hard to clear things out, because it would certainly be easy for them to code mass deletion tools, given the remarkable development skill they have demonstrated.

Some folks put a LOT of information into Facebook.  And there are a host of reasons they may want to turn back the clock on that decision and clean some things out.  For me, I just like to keep the amount of info cluttering up my timeline as lean as possible.

Good news, I like solving technical problems.  So, follow me down the rabbit hole of cleaning out your Facebook activity and maybe Arnie will be able to tell you, "Relax, you've been erased".

Basic Browser Troubleshooting With Minimal Pain

A while ago, I suddenly became unable to create LinkedIn "posts", on one specific computer, in one specific browser.  I knew it would be a bit like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, but I figured it would be educational.  It was, and the problem was solved.  Based on my experience, here is my basic advice on troubleshooting browser issues for Chrome, Internet Explorer (IE), and Mozilla's Firefox.

Can Optimism Kill You?

Image source

It has been said that humans are "hard-wired for hope".  It is generally true and, while it can have many positive benefits, and most certainly helped us survive this long, it can also be a dangerous thing as can any bias to our perceptions and thinking.

Community Chronicles - The Value of Community College

I firmly believe that community colleges are a vital part of the American dream and keeping our country strong.  If not for community college, I am not sure I would have a PhD or have had the chance to conduct research with a Nobel Laureate.  There are many reasons for this, most of them are personal. Time to share...