User Research

This is a story about My Underwear. Not my underwear —  but “My Underwear” — the mobile game for children from my old game studio. More importantly, it’s about the hard work of building accessible products, about finding and fuelling previously unreachable audiences (niche markets on the internet), and ultimately about creating joy for people using our products Read more »

The one spontaneous ovation at this year’s London MTPCon was when Drift CEO David Cancel muttered “I hate agile” as an aside while he was on stage. Agile, a revolutionary idea 10 years ago, has clearly lost its shine for many people. However, almost all the product teams I know use some agile methods, and they Read more »

Jeremy Toeman is VP of Product at CNET, the world’s largest and most trusted online source of consumer technology news and reviews. Toeman is responsible for building CNET’s multi-channel products, including web, mobile, OTT and apps. Toeman also runs CNET’s audience development, engagement and social media teams. He has 20 years of experience in the consumer electronics Read more »

In this talk I gave at ProductTank London, I reflected on how mobile has become a massive traffic channel for M&S in just a couple years and the attitudinal transformation that I helped lead there. Specifically, looking back on my journey of inheriting legacy app builds and a rapidly evolving customer, whilst working within an organisation with a Read more »

When you launch a product, you rarely ever run just a single customer test of the capabilities and features – it tends to be a series of tests that follow each other (much like Stage-Gate for the development of new products). This “gated” approach allows you to balance the risks of widening your audience against Read more »

Could you deliver great software without user personas? Possibly. Especially if you are the user of your own system. Having easy access to users or customers is not the luxury of many of us however. In most cases, these people are remote and distributed across large areas or even time zones. Not knowing who the Read more »

Worlds collide in this detailed discussion between product management, UX, and Engineering heads at Schibsted Media, showing us how their teams coordinate and prioritise development. Jaqueline Dozier (PM), Atelach Alemu Argaw (Dev), and Axel Haugan (UX) guide us through these familiar but troubled waters. Scope Ideas into Manageable Pieces We’ve seen products move from a Read more »

Michele Ide-Smith is a UX designer with over 17 years’ experience designing digital products and services. She loves solving complex problems: from re-designing government and educational services, to creating productivity tools for software teams, and she is currently a UX designer and researcher at The European Bioinformatics Institute. In this in-depth case study, Michele will share Read more »

Iwan Roberts (Business analyst, BBC) is part of a relatively small agile team building location services at the BBC, continuously iterating for over a year now. In this ProductTank talk – “Driven By Data” – Iwan gives a whistle-stop tour of how his team has iteratively built a set of operational dashboards to help them Read more »

In this ProductTank talk, Andrew Harder talked about common problems that product teams face in finding and choosing opportunities to pursue. He illustrated ways that user research can provide a deep understanding of user needs and help keep product discovery on track by knowing what questions you can and can’t ask of users, as well Read more »