I did a talk recently for the UX craft meet up ion Caep Town about designing for behaviour change. It’s a kind of glorified book report covering Dan Ariely, Nir Eyal and Stephen Wendell. All squeezed into 45 minutes. People seemed to like it! Designing for behaviour change from Phil Barrett
Author archives: Phil
A unified product management framework
If you want to succeed as a digital businesses you need product management. But understanding what product management is, or what a product manager does, can be difficult. I thought a diagram might help. Part of the problem is that product managers need to adapt their approach based on context. You might be product managing …
Designing journeys from the hamster’s point of view
Want to be “customer-centred?” Instead of designing from a birds-eye view, the simplest change to make is to use journey maps and design each step as the customer would experience it.
UX innovation in Africa: Culture and relevance
It’s rare to find black women working in technology. So, last week, I was delighted to find myself the only “pale male” on the panel at the Interact2013 UX in Africa discussion. The other three panelists were women from Kenya engaged in different aspects of UX design. Left to right… Susan Dray (Panel chair). Shikoh …
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Work around your own irrationality and be better designer
We’re irrational. People like Dan Ariely and Daniel Gilbert have convinced us of that. Irrationality affects us in our roles as entrepreneurs, product managers, designers and developers. And it affects our colleagues too It can lead us to make make poor business decisions and deliver failed user experiences. I did this talk for a meeting …
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Flow project: 25% increase in registrations for MXit
Flow helped MXit create MXit 6: a stylish and easy-to-use new version of their mobile phone software across three types of handset. The project delivered a 25% increase in daily registrations in the first month, to over 60 000 registrations per day. Delivering a great user experience across the widest range of handsets is key …
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Handing over control of your social profile?
Registering for a site using Facebook connect, or connecting an app to your Twitter account, asks such scary questions that you could be forgiven for backing out of the process. Zynga wants complete control of your Twitter account. Does that feel safe to you? Gowalla wants to access your private Facebook data while you sleep. …
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Launch and learn – don’t crash and burn
“Launch and learn” is a great way to tune innovative, digital products to customer needs. But at worst, I’ve seen “launch and learn” used as an excuse for lazy, dysfunctional teams to launch ill-thought-out products that don’t provide customer value. And then listen in all the wrong ways. Digital teams can behave in strange ways. …
How to lose customers and alienate people
Originally published on Memeburn.com South African websites repeatedly make basic usability mistakes. The results: frustrated customers, negative brand impact, reduced online sales, and poor return on investment for the whole web project. The best advice for making an impact online is to Zig when others Zag. Stand out. Be amazing. Give a shit. But if …
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4 ways to combat usability testing avoidance
Working with users during the design process will untie project knots and boost team productivity and focus. But there always seems to be an excuse for not testing. Here are 4 ways to counter the excuses and make usability testing happen. Excuse 1: “It’ll slow us down” Finding users, building prototypes and working through hours …
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