Efecte Blog

When you first bump into a new website or piece of software, the first thing you see before you dare to click anything is the visuals; colors, shapes, images, fonts, contrast. Jesse James Garrett calls this the surface. In other source, this is referred as aesthetic appeal. In my previous post I promised to write about different aspects of user experience and I thought of starting from the most visible part.

Tip of the Iceberg

One of the best things about visuals is that everybody has an opinion about them. This means that it is very easy to get feedback – I can ask from a colleague in the cubicle next to mine and get instant feedback. Because the nature of visuals is static, I can also show the visual proposals through website or via mail to get feedback from very large amount of people. Unfortunately, the opinions people have differ greatly from each other and asking from very large amount of people is probably not the way to go. Mainly, because more people you ask more varied opinion-base you will get. Take colors for example: if you ask enough for many people and narrow down the possible colors to use in your software, you probably end up in a situation where there are no colors to choose from. Or perhaps you will have two colors. Who hates black or white -  most probably someone? To overcome this problem, there needs to a be a despot in the organization who decides about the visuals. This despot can be a predefined document that people follow, usually called Look and Feel (LAF) document or a style guide, or the despot can be an individual in the company. I’m not saying that this despot should not ask for feedback on visuals, but this despot’s main responsibility should be to keep the visuals consistent, and according to company brand.

Overall visual consistency, brand identity and visibility are the two most important aspects of software visuals. Overall visual consistency is one of the important aspects in creating consistent user experience. Consistency in this refers to  usage of visual cues and elements in similar manner in similar contexts and reusing these same patters where applicable. Company brand visibility in the visuals is important from overall user experience perspective to ensure that the experience created outside the usage of the software, like with customer visit, website visits and other marketing efforts are also linked to the software. Consistent and uniformly presented brand identity helps in leveraging this impact through the use of the software.

Of course it does not hurt to make the visuals also beautiful, but when it comes to building user experience, if company brand is not built on beauty, the software created does not need to be built on it either. And as with opinions on visuals, beauty is also in the eye of the beholder.

If, however, the visuals are the only thing in a place in a piece of software, the software diminishes to a painting. If your goal was to use the software to solve some problem, the mere painting will not probably solve your problem. And of course, if your goal was to enjoy nice painting or two, there are probably more pleasant environments to do this, like Louvre or Eremitage . To make sure you are not just looking at a nice looking painting, ask for a live demo or try the piece of software yourself. You will know in minutes if you are looking at a real software or just a nice painting.

So what lies beneath the surface that really makes the difference when it comes to a truly great user experience? I’ll share some of my insights in the next post -  so stay tuned!

Self-service has become the word of the day, and everybody seems to be talking about it nowadays. But does your organization walk the walk? Here’s my very direct take on getting self-service done. 

Excuses for postponing self-service implementations:

• No budget
• No resources to implement this
• It’s so complicated
• We need to describe all of our services and processes first

No budget

Web Self-Service

Self-service cuts down internal costs, shortens end-to-end service delivery processes, and improves end user satisfaction tremendously. If you consider how much more efficient online services are when serving customers, my question is this: how do you plan to get these benefits, if you don’t implement self-service? If your IT doesn’t have the budget now, why don’t you bring this to management?

No resources to implement this

The thing is: self-service releases time from fire-fighting. When every single service request contains the necessary information, suddenly your organization becomes much more efficient. Requests are easy to handle; they are automatically forwarded to correct delivery channels etc. We’ve had one customer case that has been postponing for 9 months now due to customer’s lack of resources. In a year, they could have saved over million euros due to improvements in the ordering processes, and they would have solved the problem. Instead, they are still fire-fighting. What a waste. A direct quote from one of our customers who implemented a self-service channel: ”After implementing this it seems so stupid that we haven’t done this before”. Self-service is a cure for not having enough resources. It just needs to prioritized high enough.

It’s so complicated

No it’s not. In our experience, it’s really not complicated at all. It may feel complicated because you haven’t done it before. But when your self-service tool has a good baseline for services that you just adjust to your organization, it’s actually very straight-forward, and if the self-service channel is implemented well, it’s also easy to maintain and develop further. We typically ship in one month, and during that month the services are defined. One of our customers was able to implement not only the self-service channel but also the backend processes in 2 months, and they immediately dropped the number of calls by over 10% and were able to move many employees to new roles due to productivity improvements.

We need to describe all of our services and processes first

Good luck. You may succeed in a year or two. In my experience, this typically leads to time spent in the internal stuff and end users don’t witness any benefits for a long time. In contrast, describing standard services for end users can be easily done during the self-service implementation. And for processes, improving them is much easier when the whole process starts right, and you have hard facts on how you perform in regard to different services. I’m not against describing processes and services. It’s just that it’s easier after self-service implementation, and you get concrete benefits faster. Again I can compare some real-life cases: implementation of self-service in one month and immediate benefits vs. over a year of defining processes and services that haven’t yet contributed to real life savings.

Just get it done

In our experience, self-service helps the organization from day one after it’s launched. The business reasons for implementing it come from cost reductions, improved service delivery, and higher customer satisfaction. Every employee wants this, and everybody talks about this. Enough talk, let’s start walking!

Experience matters – that’s the key idea for our employee self-service product. The big question is: how much does experience actually matter? Think a bit of all the experience and knowledge that you have gathered during the years…… Mind boggling isn’t it? All the experience that I have: as a concept it is something that is truly out of my grasp. The sheer amount of tangible, intangible, conscious and unconscious experience that affects all the decisions that we make is just too great to comprehend.

The expression “Experience matters” tries to refer to something new experienced using a particular software. Still, the old experiences have great effect on the new experience caused by the software. So how to limit the effects of this old experience to the new one? There is, of course, no proven way to do this limitation, but certain experiences can be neglected as having only minor effect on the experience. On the other hand, certain experiences have much stronger effect. If you consider for instance time, usually if the experience has not been very traumatizing, more recent experiences have typically more weight when considering how the new experience really feels like. Also, context of the experience has more weight the closer the experience is in context related to the new experience. For instance, usage of computers and different software has usually greater weight to the new experience felt when using an another software, when compared to the weight of for example a skiing trip to the Alps.

Use of software can sometimes draw users’ full attention – like when teenagers play some fairly addictive game. It may seem that nothing can distract them and their full attention is drawn by the game. In this situation, the game can actually fairly well control the current experience spiced up of course with the previous experiences of the teenager. Typically there are, however, plenty of distractions present when using software. If I consider myself in the office, the list of distractions is fairly long: people come to chat fairly often, emails keep popping up, Skype and Communicator chat sing all the time, phone rings from time to time. And that’s only the internal distractions. In addition, in an open office environment there is at least the same amount of external distractions. All these distractions have an effect on the overall experience.

Different User Roles

The issues described above are something that we as a software company have no control over. But there are, however, many things that we can control. The self-service product that we are developing is meant to solve certain problems. All people do not have these problems. This starts to limit the amount of different kind of users able to use the channel. We can go further and defined user roles to categorize potential users. And in fact now that I have babbled all along about experience there is already an existing “field” and buzz-word called User experience or UX that has plenty of tools to tackle the issues related to experience of users’ using software products.

Jesse James Garrett has fairly well described the different elements related to User experience in his book. These elements from concrete to abstract include:

•   Surface (Visual appeal)
•   Skeleton (UI design)
•   Structure (Information architecture)
•   Scope (Product backlog)
•   Strategy

In the future blog entries I try to tackle each of these elements in more detail. Tell more how we face these elements? And what are biggest problems, fallacies and pitfalls related to these elements?

So stay tuned!

We all probably had our favorite bedtime stories as a child. One of my favorites was a story about Pablo the penguin. It’s about a penguin who is always feeling cold and tries to come up with different means to keep warm. To spoil the whole story, in the end Pablo surfs with his bathtub through the oceans towards warmth using the ocean water coming from the sink. Physicist buddies of mine would state that it is impossible and against the laws of physics.

Times have changed and now part of my profession is about writing stories. You all probably heard about user stories. And if you have been involved with agile software development, you know that user stories are the building blocks of an agile software development backlog. Stories are sentences in the business language of the end user that captures what the user wants to achieve. In addition to this, user stories should also fulfill the INVEST criteria, i.e. stories should be Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable. Simple right? Well, not necessarily. To create stories that fulfill these criteria, product owners need to grasp the market needs, user needs and iterate over and over again with the development team. This is the bread and butter of product owners in agile projects. The only problem in these criteria is that they have been created to support the agile software development, but agile software development itself does not support creation of easy-to-use software.

So how to create stories that also support easy-to-use software?

1. As a  <Role>, … when writing the stories make sure the user role from which the story is written, has a persona defined
2. Independent: although the stories need to be independent from each other, they also need to map to at least one user workflow to create connection points to existing users’ stories that have been created. Or then, the story itself needs to create a workflow of it’s own.
3. Negotiable: to ensure also the negotiability on the ease-of-use there needs to be sketches the users and product managers can comment and negotiate. Same kind of negotiability needs to be achieved through usability testing of the prototypes and ready-made software.
4. Valuable: stories need to be valuable for the market, and for the buyer, but the most important part in creating easy-to-use software is to make sure the stories are valuable to the real users of the software. The users needs to have a real problem that the software solves – and solves it well thus creating value.

Just as with children’s books the ones that are on the top of the pile are the one read most often – in product backlog the stories with most value are also on the top of the pile. And actually the same applies for the UI design for stories: the stories used the most in the software should be on top of the pile, that is, visible in the first view of the software. Biggest problems in creating the pile arise from the fact that just as most of us had a different favorite story as a child, so do users have different problems that they need to solve.

By creation simple stories that at the same time fulfill all the criteria define above, we are one step closer in creating also simple and easy-to-use software. Impossible could my physicist buddies say. But I assure that we will do this and ride the bathtub side-by-side with Pablo towards the warmth of the south!

Site-note: Actually Pablo is probably riding north, because he is from the south-pole, but I prefer south especially at the moment.

itSMF-vuosikonferenssissa  järjestämässämme workshopissamme Sampo Pasanen esitteli loppukäyttäjille suunnattua palvelukatalogia ja Efecten ajatuksia itsepalvelusta. Tilaisuudessa nousi esiin paljon kysymyksiä, joista inspiroituneena Sampo päätti kirjoittaa blogisarjan, josta alla neljäs ja viimeinen osa. Kommentoi ja jaa mielipiteesi!

Katalogin ylläpito ja kehitys

Laitemallit ja versiot muuttuvat jatkuvasti. Miten katalogi suhtautuu tähän?

Loppukäyttäjää harvoin kiinnostaa laitteeseen liittyvät yksityiskohdat. Katalogi kannattaa rakentaa standardoitujen laitekategorioiden ympärille. Sen sijaan että katalogissa on valittavana teknisiä laitemalleja, kuten Dell Latitude E6410, siellä tulee olla ”Kannettava”, ”Kevytkannettava”, ”Tehokannettava” jne. Itse kuvaukseen voidaan haluttaessa lisätä esim. linkki laitemallin kuvaukseen. Näin toimittaessa katalogin rakenne ei muutu ja käyttäjien on helppo löytää haluamansa palvelut.

Puhelimet koetaan henkilökohtaisemmin, ja niiden merkistä ja mallista ollaan kiinnostuneempia. Puhelinten tapauksessa usein on päädytty mallikohtaiseen katalogiin kategorioinnin sijaan:

Esimerkki palvelukatalogin puhelinvaihtoehdoista

”Nokia E9”, ”Apple iPhone”, ”Samsung Galaxy S (Android)”.

Ohjelmistoissa joidenkin ohjelmien versioinnilla on myös merkitystä. Siinä missä Skypen versio ei ole käyttäjän kannalta kiinnostava, Adobe Photoshopin tai Windowsin versio voi olla hyvinkin merkityksellinen. Peukalosääntönä kannattaa välttää versioiden korostamista ja ainoastaan niiden sovellusten osalta joissa sillä todella on merkitystä, se kannattaa ottaa huomioon. Joistakin ohjelmistoista täytyy tarjota useampia vaihtoehtoisia versioita samaan aikaan.

Mitä katalogiin kannattaa sisällyttää pitkällä aikavälillä?

IT:stä tulee itsepalvelua. Itsepalvelu on ylivoimainen tapa tuottaa korkeatasoista peruspalvelua kustannustehokkaasti. Mitä enemmän katalogiin voidaan viedä asioita, joita käyttäjät tarvitsevat, sen parempi. Kaikki mahdollinen kannattaa tuoda katalogiin ainakin saataville. Se, että tapahtuuko varsinainen tilaaminen kaikissa tapauksissa kyseisestä järjestelmästä, on toinen kysymys.

Tuodaanko katalogiin kaikki palvelut kaikilta yksiköiltä ja toimittajilta?

Tähän kysymykseen ei ole yksiselitteistä vastausta. Oleellisia kysymyksiä jokaisen eri tilauskanavan kohdalla ovat:

• Käytetäänkö kanavaa oikeasti, vai menevätkö tilaukset service deskin tai jonkin muun tahon kautta?
• Kuinka tyytyväisiä käyttäjät ovat kyseiseen tilauskanavaan?
• Kuinka paljon aikaa organisaatio käyttää tilaamiseen kanavan kautta?
• Voidaanko kanava korvata helposti katalogin toiminnallisuuksilla?

Katalogin kautta tulee päästä käsiksi palveluihin mahdollisimman laajalti, mutta itse tilaamista ei tarvitse kaikissa tapauksissa tehdä katalogista, jos perusteet muiden kanavien käyttöön ovat olemassa.

Kuka vastaa päivittämisestä?

Tässä on kaksi vaihtoehtoista mallia: yksi keskitetty henkilö/funktio hoitaa kaikki muutokset, tai palveluista vastaavat hoitavat itse myös katalogia. Molemmat mallit voivat toimia, mutta aluksi suosittelen käyttämään keskitettyä henkilöä / tiimiä, jotta kuvauksista tulee yhdenmukaisia ja hyvät käytännöt palveluiden kuvaamiseksi saadaan luotua.

itSMF-vuosikonferenssissa  järjestämässämme workshopissamme Sampo Pasanen esitteli loppukäyttäjille suunnattua palvelukatalogia ja Efecten ajatuksia itsepalvelusta. Tilaisuudessa nousi esiin paljon kysymyksiä, joista inspiroituneena Sampo päätti kirjoittaa blogisarjan, josta alla kolmas osa. Kommentteja otamme ilolla vastaan!

Katalogin luonti ja käyttöönotto

Mitä katalogiin kannattaa sisällyttää ensimmäisessä vaiheessa?

Kaksi tärkeintä näkökulmaa tähän ovat:

1. Käyttäjien tarpeet. Ensimmäisessä vaiheessa pitää olla riittävästi palveluita, joita käyttäjät tilaavat ja kokevat tärkeiksi. Organisaatiokohtaista vaihtelua on jonkin verran,

tässä tyypillisimpiä IT-palveluita:

Type of Service Catalog

• Ongelmien raportointi
• Ohjelmistojen tilaukset
• Käyttöoikeuksien tilaukset
• Lisälaitteiden ja -tarvikkeiden tilaukset
• Puhelin- ja liittymätilaukset
• Työasematilaukset
• Etäyhteyksien tilaukset
• Uuden työntekijän aloitus
• Työntekijän poistuminen

2. Mitä saadaan nopeasti ulos. Pitkät projektit näivettävät porukan, ja katalogin kulmia on ylipäätään turha hinkata loputtomiin. Arvoa pitää kuitenkin olla tarpeeksi, joten käytännössä esimerkiksi yllämainitun listan ensimmäiset viisi palvelua voi riittää lanseeraukseen. Tällöin käyttäjät saavat katalogista nopeasti arvoa, ja palveluorganisaatio oppii palautteen perusteella.

Mitä kaikkea tulisi integroida?

Ensimmäisessä vaiheessa mahdollisimman vähän, ja pidemmän päälle mahdollisimman paljon. Alussa tärkeintä on ratkaista käyttäjien ongelma ja päästä nopeasti tuotantoon. Kun käyttäjillä on helppo kanava palveluiden tilaamiseen, seuraavassa vaiheessa voidaan integraatioilla automatisoida toimitusprosesseja, ja nostaa tuottavuutta vielä lisää. Se, että käyttäjiltä tulee jatkuvasti määrämuotoisia palvelupyyntöjä tehostaa toimintaa jo valtavasti. Tämän jälkeen myös raportoinnin avulla ymmärretään paremmin, mitä todella kannattaa automatisoida. Tyypillisiä kohteita ovat mm. palveluntarjoajien Service Desk -järjestelmät.

Käyttöönotto

Jos palvelua ei kukaan käytä, se lienee aika hyödytön? Julkaise siis kunnolla. Parhaat tulokset on saatu seuraavin toimenpitein:

1. Teaser koko organisaatioon pari viikkoa ennen julkaisua
2. Käydään tehotilaajien (sihteerit, IT-vastaavat, palvelupäälliköt yms.) kanssa palvelu läpi
3. Käyttöönottopäivänä tiedote ja kilpailu, johon voi osallistua tilaamalla erityisen ”kilpailutuotteen”. Tämä kannustaa kokeilemaan, jolloin palvelu jää paremmin mieleen.
4. Ensimmäisten päivien aikana aktiivinen seuranta ja tuki

Kun katalogin käyttöönotto onnistuu hyvin, ylläpidosta ja jatkokehityksestä tulee huomattavasti helpompaa. Jatkoa käsittelemme Q&A -sarjan seuraavassa osassa.

itSMF-vuosikonferenssissa 7.10. järjestämässämme workshopissamme Sampo Pasanen esitteli loppukäyttäjille suunnattua palvelukatalogia ja Efecten ajatuksia itsepalvelusta. Tilaisuudessa nousi esiin paljon kysymyksiä, joista inspiroituneena Sampo päätti kirjoittaa blogisarjan, josta ensimmäinen osa on valmis.

Mikä on loppukäyttäjän IT-palvelukatalogi?

ICT WebShop

IT-palvelukatalogia kannattaa ajatella yrityksen sisäisenä IT:n verkkokauppana, IT:n itsepalvelukanavana. Kyseessä ei ole lista asioista tai kuvauksia palveluista yleisesti, vaan konkreettisia tilattavia palveluita ja tuotteita, joita työntekijät IT:ltä tarvitsevat. Näitä ovat laitetilaukset (puhelimet, tietokoneet, lisälaitteet, tulostimet jne), käyttöoikeustilaukset, ongelmien raportointi oikeisiin kanaviin, uuden työntekijän aloitus jne. Helppo, konkreettinen palveluiden tilauskanava.

Voiko katalogia laajentaa IT:n ulkopuolelle?

Voi. Tyypillisiä laajennuksia ovat muut tilattavat asiat kuten käyntikortit, avaimet, ID-tunnukset sekä mm. työntekijän aloitusprosessissa hoidettavat IT:hen liittymättömät tilaukset. Kaikkia palvelutilauksia ei yleensä ole mahdollista tai mielekästä siirtää palvelukatalogiin. Tällöin tärkeintä on huolehtia palveluiden löydettävyydestä. Hyvä käytännön tapa on sisällyttää palvelut katalogiin, ja ohjata käyttäjä sieltä varsinaiseen tilausjärjestelmään. Näin kannattaa toimia mm. tapauksissa, joissa toinen tilausjärjestelmä on jo saanut vahvan roolin, ja automaatioita on rakennettu järjestelmän ympärille. Tällainen järjestelmä voi olla esim. pitkälle viety käyttöoikeuksien tilaamiseen tarkoitettu järjestelmä.

Kuka omistaa katalogin?

Parhaiten vaikuttaisi toimivan malli, jossa koko katalogin omistaa henkilö (palvelupäällikkö), jolla on näkemys katalogista kokonaisuutena, ja jonka tavoitteena on huolehtia, että loppukäyttäjien näkökulmasta palvelut ovat ymmärrettäviä ja hyvin rakennettuja. Tämä henkilö työskentelee muiden palvelupäälliköiden kanssa ja auttaa heittä tuotteistamaan palvelunsa helposti tilattavaan muotoon. ITIL-terminologiassa puhutaan Service Catalog Managerista. Pienissä ja keskisuurissa organisaatioissa rooli ei ole kokopäiväinen, mutta käynnistysvaiheessa tälle pitää varata aikaa.

Ketkä saavat päivittää katalogia?

Tämä vaihtelee organisaatioittain. Sekä keskitetty että hajautettu malli voi toimia. Keskitetyssä mallissa yksi henkilö ylläpitää katalogia, huolehtii katalogin yhdenmukaisuudesta ja tekee kaikki muutokset katalogiin. Hajautetussa mallissa palvelupäälliköt saavat tehdä muutoksia omiin palveluihinsa suoraan. Tällöin muutosten teko on helppoa ja vastuu on siellä missä palvelun omistajuus on, mutta yhdenmukaisuus kärsii.

It was a dark and stormy morning… itSMF 2011 in Dipoli was about to begin. The topic of this year’s conference was delicious. It was evident that also the guest speakers had been inspired by the Holy Cow –theme. There were entertaining sessions about the psyche and traits of successful CIOs, heated debate about ITIL’s contribution to IT, and breath-taking views of the future. The most exciting part of the program were the real-life stories from different IT organizations: Tieto-Tapiola, Wärtsilä, Sanoma-Data, and Enfo to name a few. One IT leader was heard exclaiming, how refreshing it was to come out of one’s own cave to hear from others in similar situations, and find out they were not alone with their challenges.

Riitta Raesmaa and Timo Hyvönen

Efecte’s own stand was busier than perhaps ever. And we didn’t even offer champagne this time! It must have been the large screen TV with ICT WebShop ’s colorful icons and the charm of our people at the stand. More seriously though, it seems that IT is truly interested in making the end users happy and allowing them to take control in the form of self-service. It’s a win-win situation for both sides.

Efecte’s Sampo Pasanen had an opportunity to hold a workshop on end user IT service catalogs and self-service to a room packed to the rafters with IT professionals. What set this workshop apart was the lively discussion, which had nothing to do with technology. The questions posed during the discussion inspired Sampo to write a blog series with the answers. The first blog post in the series will be published next week, so remember to check our blog then again.

It was heartwarming to hear Efecte referenced in so many places. We, of course, had our own session, but we were also mentioned by the ITSM guru Aale Roos, by the very successful Tieto-Tapiola in their case presentations, and as a cherry on top ex-Efectian Riitta Raesmaa received the itSMF 2011 award. This year you couldn’t get away from Efecte, even if you tried.

To finish an already great conference, Alf Rehn blew us away with his Dangerous Ideas. At least all the cob webs around my brain and thinking were blown away for sure – if just for too short a moment.

Simplify

There’s a clear message from management to all IT leaders: simplify. 

We’ve met a number of top officers from both G2000 companies and mid-sized organizations during the last few months. Management is totally fed up with the growing number and complexity of IT systems, and (not surprisingly) the costs that follow. Here are some direct quotes: 

“No more IT stuff !!!” – management board member in a G2000 company.

“I’ve given tens of millions to IT. It’s not about resources, it’s about getting the job done.” – management board member in a company of 5000 employees.

“Enlighted CIOs bring light to the organizations through simplification.” – Kati Hagros, CIO, Kone (blog post in Finnish). 

And the list goes on. 

This often results from the following

• No real vision exists for IT development and IT is developed from inside out, not from outside in
• No knowhow in generating user friendly solutions –> unnecessary complexity in the actual implementations and processes
• IT is full of management and leadership is missing –> big changes that would be needed to make a real impact aren’t implemented

This leads to IT being developed in silos and big picture is missed. Who suffers? Users, and eventually business. Luckily, first signs for customer centric outside-in development have started to form. Now it just takes will, effort and stamina to build a simpler IT. The change won’t happen overnight: start from quick wins but don’t forget the long-term development.

Efecte’s role is to simplify the interaction between employees and IT with self-service solutions. What are you going to simplify next?

Sketches to choose from

There is no choice, if you only have one option. Or well in that case you still probably have two options, as Rolling Stones had back in 1981: Take It or Leave It. If you should, however, decide a new business application to solve certain problems that you are having in your organization, the option to leave it is really not part of your vocabulary. You have to choose something. To make a better choice there should always be plenty of options to choose from.

The same amount of options applies in user interface design. Stakeholders like product managers, potential customer, and user should have plenty of design sketches to choose from in every step of the product development. From design perspective this requires a lot of fresh and different ideas to solve the problem at hand. Luckily, we designers live and breath from the ideation process.

Bill Buxton says in his book about sketching that:

 ”You are always in the ideation process – it’s just the granularity that changes.”

Meaning that early on in the software development process, when there are only some initial market needs identified and not a single line of code written, the possible solution sketches can and should look fairly different from each other – clearly different ideas of the solution. As the software development continues, the sketches will become more precise and focus on narrower area of the upcoming solution.  The amount of different solution sketches or even simple prototypes should still be big enough to give stakeholders room to comment and options to choose from.

The initial sketches act as a good visual channel to communicate the possible solutions and verify that the market need is understood correctly in both sides of the fence. Later on, when the sketches become prototypes and prototypes become production-ready software, the means to gather feedback changes. Now there are not that many options anymore and feedback is received through different usability testing methods. What remains, is the need to give enough options and receive invaluable feedback to support the continuous improvement on the design at hand.

In the end, there is only a set of production-ready business application to choose from, it is time to make the final choice: Take one and leave the rest behind.