Service Strategy – How do you become Instrumental?

2nd of December, 2016 / / No Comments

There is a well-known concept developed by Ronald Coase around organisational boundaries being determined by transaction costs.
This concept stated that organisations are faced with three decisions.
To make, buy or rent.
In some scenarios, it makes sense for organisations to own and operate assets, or conduct activities in-house, however, at other times you could seek alternatives from the open market.
When seeking alternatives from the open markets the key factor can be the transaction cost.… [Keep reading] “Service Strategy – How do you become Instrumental?”

Enterprise Cloud Take Up Accelerating Rapidly According to New Study By McKinsey

19th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

A pair of studies published a few days ago by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company entitled IT as a service: From build to consume show enterprise adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services accelerating increasingly rapidly over the next two years into 2018.
Of the two, one examined the on-going migrations of 50 global businesses. The other saw a large number of CIOs, from small businesses up to Fortune 100 companies, interviewed on the progress of their transitions and the results speak for themselves.… [Keep reading] “Enterprise Cloud Take Up Accelerating Rapidly According to New Study By McKinsey”

What is the difference between POC & MVP? and Which comes first?

15th of September, 2016 / / 1 Comment

In past couple of projects, several clients have asked me this question: What is the difference between POC & MVP? and Which comes first? Most businesses are familiar with these terms but don’t know the exact meaning that’s why they often experience mistakes while building a product. They jump into starting up a development team to build a product. Knowing what each term means is not good enough, you should know when to use them, is vitally important to the success of your next product launch.… [Keep reading] “What is the difference between POC & MVP? and Which comes first?”

Why user experience matters

15th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

User Experience is a means to drive product innovation and differentiation. When implemented successfully, UX contributes to a number of critical business key performance indicators including customer engagement, retention, and loyalty.

Over the last two decades, most of the fortune 500 companies have come to the realisation that UX is an integral part of their business success. In his 2016 Design In Tech report, John Maeda suggests:

A good User Experience matters a lot, because we experience digital products a lot

Furthermore, the report (illustration below) uncovers that:

  • 89% of companies believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition —Gartner
  • 81% of executives surveyed place the personalised experience in their top three priorities for their organisation — Accenture
  • 90% of executives surveyed agreed that customer experience and engagement are objectives of their corporation’s digital strategy — MIT Sloan/Deloitte
  • Customers are 6 times more likely to buy with a positive emotional experience, 12 times more likely to recommend the company, and 5 times more likely to forgive a mistake — Temkin Group
 tech-report

UX improves the overall customer experience

UX is a critical part of CX.

… [Keep reading] “Why user experience matters”

Customer Experience Vs. User Experience

13th of September, 2016 / / 3 Comments

I was in a design meet-up a couple of weeks ago where I heard someone saying this – CX is the same as UX. And to my surprise, there were about a dozen of people who nodded (in agreement) to this statement. Now, this is where I lose my fuse!

As design professionals, it’s imperative for us to learn the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience.

User Experience is everything that affects a user’s behaviour and interaction with a product or service.

… [Keep reading] “Customer Experience Vs. User Experience”

Driving innovation & user experience using Kano model

27th of June, 2016 / / No Comments

How often are you asked to jump straight into design without doing any research? Well, it happens to me quite often. Reason – lack of time or budget.

No matter how tight the budget or timeline is, I always recommend to do some research beforehand. And  if “how to do it in a cheap and efficient way?” your question, then here is how:

I stumbled upon Kano model in my MBA book – an incredible technique used by many businesses to discover, classify and integrate consumer needs into the products and services they offer.… [Keep reading] “Driving innovation & user experience using Kano model”

Designing for emotion

9th of April, 2016 / / No Comments

What is it that makes us advocates of the products we love? Why are we loyal to a few bunch of apps and websites? When I connected the dots, I realised that all the things I love in my life has one thing in common – emotional attachment.

What is emotional design?

Emotional design is a technique of infusing the elements of emotion into product design. It aims to evoke positive emotions and engagement with consumers.… [Keep reading] “Designing for emotion”

Introduction to User Experience Design

30th of March, 2016 / / No Comments

User Experience is everything that affects a user’s behaviour and interaction with a product or service. It’s about how a person feels, understands, and perceives a product.

Many people confuse User Experience with aesthetics of a product. User Experience Design – rather than focusing just on visual or technical aspects, largely deals with the psychology and behaviour of people.

Also, UX is an umbrella term which comprises of four major disciplines:ux

  1. Information architecture
  2. Interaction design
  3. Visual design
  4. User research

When someone refers to themselves as UX designers, it usually means they have a good understanding of all the four disciplines and are experts at probably a couple of them.

… [Keep reading] “Introduction to User Experience Design”

Any device, any platform, one Microsoft

29th of February, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Only a few years ago you’d have been hard pressed to have mentioned the following four words in a single blog post where you weren’t arguing for / against a way of doing things: Microsoft, iOS, Android and development.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will no doubt have seen Microsoft’s announcement on their intent to acquire Xamarin, a business very much about cross-platform application development.

For those of us working in this space this has really been a case of
“what took you so long?”… [Keep reading] “Any device, any platform, one Microsoft”

Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites

27th of November, 2014 / / 7 Comments

This blog post shows you how to install a wordpress website in a sub-folder on your Azure website. Now somebody would ask why would I need to do that, and that is a good question, so let me start with the reasons:

Why do it this way?

Assume that you have a website and you want to create a blog section. This is a very common practice and most companies nowadays have a blog section of the website (which replaces the old “news” page).… [Keep reading] “Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites”