Free calculator for improving your project estimates, based on the historical estimates and actual hours. Useful for one-off projects in digital bureaus.
Projects with fixed budget and time are not a frequent occurrence these days anymore, but they are still quite a thing in digital bureaus who sometimes do fixed scope projects. While this sheet could also be used for ongoing projects, in my opinion, this has the highest value for the fixed-scope projects. In this article I am sharing a DIY Google Sheet calculation inspired by Joel Spolky’s article on Evidence-based scheduling (yep, it’s an oldie :).
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.
Agile methodologies resolve the problem of running over the budget, but not every project can be and should be agile.
Running over budget is associated with huge…
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” is a management mantra that I often hear as a UX designer. But the “experience” seems to be one of those nebulous, immeasurable things. It doesn’t have to be that way.
When you hear “measuring UX”, many people immediately think of the Google HEART framework. With it, you work with the goals you want to achieve, signals that indicate that the goal has been achieved and metrics that indicate success. You measure Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task Success.
Even though Google HEART is a very solid framework, I think that…
Design Sprint is a fantastic tool in the innovation toolbox. But just as real tools, it works well for specific tasks and bad for others. What criteria should a good sprint question meet?
This post is a modification of the original post published on Frankwatching.nl (in Dutch).
Design thinking is simple, but it isn’t easy. A Design Sprint makes design thinking practical, tangible, manageable, and accessible. It gives you a clear step-by-step guide and an overview of how you can solve and test a product question in 5 days. It is clear what you are going to do, what you will get, what roles and what commitment is needed. ‘Instant innovation solution — just add water!’
When the Design Sprint is done right, that is, 5 days, and not ‘a couple’; with thorough…
“We want to get to know you better”, “What did you think about …?”, “Share your experience with us”, “We are curious about your opinion”… You see online surveys everywhere, and they are often top-of-mind if you want to learn something about your (potential) customers. When is it a good idea to use a survey for customer research?
An online survey quickly comes to mind if you want to find out which customer segments use your product the most or want to know how satisfied they are with it. It’s fast, cheap, and you get quantifiable results and statistics. Your decisions are therefore crystal-clear and evidence-based. Isn’t it fantastic?
A survey is very easy to set up. But it is even easier to set up a bad survey.
A survey is very easy to set up. But it is even easier to set up a bad survey. The fact that your customers answer a number of questions does…
Soft skills are indispensable for UX designers. Communication and “being human” are equally important as hard skills for a good UX designer. UX itself is communication: towards the users, but also to the people in your organisation.
A few months ago I pimped my CV. I started by updating and re-writing the descriptions of the different projects that I did. I wanted not only to explain the activities and skills involved, but also to show what my added value was to the project. …
A couple of weeks back I got to work on a rapid research project for one of our clients. It was one of those open-ended questions ‘Have a look at the journey and point out the improvement opportunities’. Not log before that I learned about Jobs to be done, and was well on my way to complete reading ‘When coffee and kale compete’ by Alan Klement. Reading this book felt like I was mostly nodding and saying ‘yes, exactly’ in my head. Everything fell into place.
I decided to experiment with a JTBD type interview and see how it would…
The presentation of Galaxy Note 10 last week got quite some media attention. What stood out to me is that the air gestures (which also go by touchless gestures, air motion, and gesture control) are now available with the stylus. This sounds fun, but it is quite useless, really.
Why (new) tech succeeds
Air gestures have been a thing for some time already, yet they never caught on. In my opinion, the reason for that is this:
To be adopted, new technology has to fit in the context it is used in, and make the existing task simpler, faster, or cheaper than the current…
How come is that airbnb is such a delight to use, but when it comes to paying your taxes it feels like you’re in the 16th century? Why is it that there are so many designers pushing the limits of usability and experience every day, but every time you try to find something on your company’s intranet, you mostly give up?
I am generally pessimistic about the prospects of government digitalisation, but my thinking was challenged last week during the delivering.digital conference.
Have you noticed how often you hear something like ‘all X are the same nowadays’. Specifically, the websites, like, all of them. An easy answer is to blame Bootstrap and Wordpress, which is part of the explanation. But I think there’s something bigger behind this.
We live in the world of endless opportunities and variety, but if you look deeper, most of the stuff around you is actually the same.
Various genres of music are getting simpler and simpler. It is hard to deny that the top 100 hit songs on the radio sound kind of the same. There is…
Recently I hear the words ‘design sprint’ uttered by non-dedigners more and more often. Our methods and approaches are more widely recognised, so… yay? I’m more inclined to a ‘nay’, and here’s why.
Design sprint is a process that you can use to answer certain types of questions. It is set up in a logical way to progress from actually defining the challenge to identifying the solutions and testing them. The beauty of it is that together with your team, you create and validate a solution within 5 days.
Design sprint is a great, comprehensible way to bring the nebulous…
