This article from Harvard Business Review has so many good quotes that I couldn't resist posting it and commenting on it. The gist of the article is that design thinking is becoming increasingly important to large organizations (I couldn't agree more). Just a few choice comments: I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their

In everyday usage, a persona is a character played by an actor. When we bring this term into the UX world, the most common meaning is a fictional character who represents a customer. This fictional person is based on demographic and psychological characteristics which drive customers in the real world. For example, consider the following two personas: “Molly” is a 72 year old woman who is a frequent visitor of “Happy Crafter” Store. Her primary hobby is scrapbooking, but she

Text-to-speech is everywhere these days, for example, the iPhone’s Siri, or Amazon’s Echo. Yet, many IVR (interactive voice response) systems still rely on a human voice talent to actually sit down in a studio and read your prompts into a microphone. So, why haven’t more enterprises dumped the human and gone full-on Text-To-Speech in their call center implementations? For a couple of reasons. First, fidelity. Edward Tufte once said that the IVR phone interface is the lowest-