Why I hate the Internet sometimes

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 Watch my site get slow. Watch me download the logs to make sure nothing happened. Thanks for wasting my time script kiddies.

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How to start a product redesign - a playbook

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A few months back I was working on a large, ground-up redesign for a product I own. I had a little trouble getting started. I realized I needed a playbook to remind me of the basics. I am sharing my playbook for those who are having trouble and procrastinating getting started. Enjoy. Before you start At the highest level, in one paragraph, what is a representative user's goal and the problem you are solving for them?  If you can't answer this succinctly you have many, many features or you don't know your users well enough to continue.  Slow down, answer #1 for each feature set before you go to #2. What's working for them now? What's not? What you need to design for them Verify you are building all the tools they need. Show the process they will use to reach goal - give them a map or trail to follow. Indication of progress toward the user's goal - "You are here" Make sure you build in escape hatches because they find a better way....
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Applying user centric design to your business plan

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Image by Lars Plougmann I got asked by an investor recently how we at Digital H2O do design. I liked the conciseness of my response and thought it was a good example of how to tie user centric design into a business plan. Here goes: Our design philosophy is best described as user centric design. Our goal is to only design and build features our current, or potential customers, find valuable and that substantially help our business continue to grow. We spend significant time listening to our customers’ needs throughout the sales process. We then form hypothesis what customers’ needs are and what they can accomplish in the application. While designing features we show mock-ups and prototypes to customers in order to get feedback and incrementally improve the design. After the product is built and released we continue to test our hypotheses about how customers will use features we have built. We utilize automated event tracking in the app to monitor u...
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Goodbye

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When I started this blog, Agile was not yet the lingua franca of product development. I was passionate about teaching the Chicago community about Agile. I helped start the Chicago Agile Project Managers Meet Up. I presented at the international Agile conference. I was coaching organizations to use Agile practices and how to integrate user centered design into product development. Good times. Based on this blog’s old google analytics data I can see that I was able to help a lot of people.  Today I find myself spending very little time on blogs - reading or creating. My go to places to find content to learn and grow professionally didn’t exist when I started Planning for Improvisation. This blog isn’t needed anymore. As I have moved on, this blog can too. -Kal
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