The Balanced Scorecard is Really Useful. Here's Why

Reblogged from NAJ'S BLOG:

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The Balanced Scorecard. What is it? It's a performance management framework alright - what's a framework you ask? Arrghhhh! - Just listen up okay, you'll get it. Trust me.

Probably one of the most useful systems around to manage performance and has been commended by both business people and academics alike.

Now, I'm not going to bore you with too many details but the Balanced Scorecard is essentially a tool that gives companies a template on how to manage both…

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iOS 6 maps and photo apps as location-based search and photo-sharing killers.

On Apple® Special Event on September 12, 2012, Scott Forstall introduced the maps app and shared photostream feature.

I perceive the features incorporated as a strategic design approach aiming to dominate local search and private photo sharing.

About Apple’s maps app search feature:

apple-maps-local search

apple-maps-local search

By implementing its own maps app and including 100M POI’s, Apple is aiming to dominate local search. There is a clear opportunity to route local searches on maps app either organically or through siri. Apple’s efficient business models can attract professionals to register their shops in order to be available in fast one-the-way local searches and gain more customers. Ofcourse Google and even Facebook are aleady working on this with Google Now and Facebook Local Business but now Apple is trying to breakthrough on its own way.

 

About Apple’s shared photostreams  feature:

apple-photostream-sharing-commenting

apple photostream sharing & commenting

Apple is targeting a social attitude niche: private content sharing. People want to share photos with close friends and get feedback. Apple has made this a transparent option where is trying to tight users with their photo streams and apple photo galleries. After location tagging, photos now have additional metadata including likes and comments. I perceive these features as Apple’s weapon to dominate photo sharing in small groups (including business use) and disrupt Facebook and Flickr relative features.

 

The skeuomorphism of Passbook App – Apple® Special Event September 12, 2012

On WWDC 2012  Apple® presented the disruptive Passbook app, aiming to change just about all aspects of discounts, ticketing and payments. On Apple® Special Event on September 12, 2012 the presentation repeated and the skeuomorphism applied was emphasised once more.

In order to further trigger users to change the way they use tickets, apple emulated all interface objects to a challenging level.

apple-passbook-skeuomorphism-ux-marketing-image

apple-passbook-skeuomorphism-ux-marketing-image

In my eyes, the “delete” functionality is a remarkable example of the skeuomorphism on Apple® iOS UI and in computer interfaces in general.

Here is a break-down of the design decision:

  1. The User Story goes like this: “As a user, I want to delete an expired ticket from my library so that I can focus on future items only”
  2. The UI metaphor is a paper shredder that destroys the item in multiple lanes.
  3. The User Experience is that the ticket is gone for good in a fancy way that you will remember.
apple passbook skeuomorphism on delete function

Apple® passbook skeuomorphism on delete function

My view is that the skeuomorphism exaggerations was used in order to clearly trigger users transition from the physical elements. The design decision was valued as a strength in comparison with the competitive apps.

  • But what about users that have no experience with the original shredder?
  • What about  breaking of the operating system interface design standards?
  • What about waste on UI space?

With this app is more clear than ever that Apple will go long with skeuomorphism and will use this UI approach as a competitive advantage for its major competitors, Google and Microsoft.

You can learn more about Passbook in this Quora answer on the question: How will Apple’s new mobile wallet Passbook impact other mobile wallets?

You can learn more about Skeuomorphism on Wikipedia.

Let me know your view on this, in the poll below:

Communicating with client representatives, an experience.

Sometimes you may have to collaborate with client’s representatives (e.g. managers, advisors, marketeers) in order to gather requirements for a new project.

It is very possible that they have never been included in a website or mobile application design in the past so they can only accept deliverables from a particular level and up!

I conducted a series of meetings with a financial advisor, a tv product manager and my CEO.

The meetings stories are presented below:

  • Meeting 1. Discussion – Requirements – Conceptualization
  • Meeting 2. Present a balsamiq prototype that visualize requirements from meeting 1 and 5 Personas that whre created after research.

Image

Sample of the balsamiq mockup

Advisor perceived balsamiq sketch-looking wireframes as a sample of the final product. As much as I tried to explain the reason for sketching and that the final result will have nothing to do with those early wireframes, she couldn’t even look at them in order to provide feeback on the design decisions. She actually call them “cartoon-looking” and proposed to work on “something more final-looking”. Personas worked nice into communicating that I know what I am doing…

Image

Sample of a persona

  • Meeting 3. TV manager and my CEO had a better understanding of sketches, so we worked together with card sorting, wireframes and requirements prioritization. I shared a card sorting board as a google drive drawing and we worked remotelly on the main section labelling and the required user actions. I gathered feedback from her on this meeting and iterated my designs.
  • Meeting 4. I created a hi-fidelity comp of the home page in photoshop in order to convince advisor that the final product is not going to be like a balsamiq sketch. Advisor was impressed with the comp and so I gained trust in order to continue with lo-fidelity prototypes. Again I gather feedback and I iterated my designs. Additionally I asked from 2 available employees to navigate the prototype in order to cunduct a fast usability test. I found out 2-3 usefull stuff and I changed them on the next iteration.
  • Meeting 5. I created an Axure lo-fi wireframe with the basic pages. I gathered feedback and iterated again.

ImageSample of the lo-fi prototype

  • Meeting 6. I created the photoshop-illustrator graphic assets and relative content-scenarios and I imported them to the existing axure work in order to create the hi-fi prototype. Representatives where exited about the overall look-and-feel and solutions provided.

The prototype was ready to be presented to the client, along with a presentation of the value-proposition.

Conclusions:

  1. High-level managers can not provide feedback on early designs but only on hi-fi comps and prototypes.
  2. In general, clickable prototypes work better than photoshop comps, due to interactivity and familiarity with the browser.
  3. Marketeers and managers are familiar with card-sorting so it works in order to gather ideas.
  4. Personas are difficult to fit in a 2-3 hours meeting with stakeholders than are not designers.

A prioritization worksheet that..works

A have recently been called to facilitate a prioritization process for an upcoming MVP (Minimum Viable Product). A nice approach that presents formal results and works in real world is to use a prioritization worksheet as described in the book “A Project guide to UX design” by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler http://projectuxd.com/.

A created a more “automated” version of this worksheet in google drive.

Prioritization Worksheet (Google Drive Link)

where I used the following rules:

Worksheet rules

The worksheet was completed by 4 key members:

  1. Business importance: Product Manager
  2. User importance: UX Designer
  3. Technical feasibility: Software Architect
  4. Resource feasibility: Project Manager

Each member rated his field by the rating rules and then a custom formula applied:

(Business + User importance) – (Technical + Resource feasibility) = Feature score

Features are then prioritized by their score which is a 4 members opinion.

Implications:

Each member should have conducted the required research and rate based on validated knowledge.

  • business importance requires defined and clear business goals
  • user importance requires user research (at least)
  • technical feasibility requires technology knowledge and high-level architecture
  • resource feasibility requires knowledge of team performance and project planning.
Additionally the initial feature set has to be well defined. New feature ideas should then pass the same process.

The results are presented below:

Prioritization worksheet

We processed in implementing the features with score over 0.

Value: we decided in a formal level on what features we should focus for this MVP.

What’s next? Create a prototype and test it with real users.

Andreas Papaderos