J.D. Meier's Blog

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Four Stages of Market Maturity: You can tell the maturity of a market by the consumer patterns. If you know the life cycle stages of a market you can better anticipate what level of "needs" your product needs to match to be successful. (I always think of needs in stages like Maslow's Read More...
Posted 31 December 07 11:28 by J.D. Meier | 3 Comments
Filed under Software Engineering, Social Software, Design, Business
Human Shepherds and the Law of Relevancy: Yesterday, Ed helped me word a "law" that I use for important decisions and that I see show up quite a bit in a number of places. It's the law of human relevancy. The Law of Relevancy No matter how relevant the information is, it's more relevant with Read More...
Posted 10 November 07 08:14 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments
Filed under Innovation, Software Engineering, Design
Scenarios in Practice: Scenarios are a practical way to organize and focus your product design, development and release. (We use scenario-driven engineering in patterns & practices) Key Benefits Business value . You can use scenarios to evaluate business value. What pain Read More...
Posted 15 October 07 03:21 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments
Filed under Security, Performance, Innovation, Guidance Engineering, Project Management, Software Engineering, Effectiveness, Design
Roles and Goals: The next time I need to get a set of requirements, I'm simply going to start with roles with goals. I made the mistake of asking for a set of scenarios. What I ended up with is a list of user tasks. Tasks aren't the same as goals. Flying a kite is not Read More...
Posted 13 March 07 03:44 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments
Filed under Software Engineering, Design
Requirements Perspectives: Here's a simple set of perspectives I use for rationalizing requirements: User Business Expert / Technical Industry/Standards Believe it or not, simply identifying these perspective helps a lot. You'd be surprised how many debates happen simply because Read More...
Posted 09 March 07 11:00 by J.D. Meier | 3 Comments
Filed under Security, Performance, Software Engineering, Design
Task-Analysis Grid for Communicating Product Design: How do you communicate design decisions? … Srinath sent me a helpful link on the Task-Analysis Grid . A Task Analysis Grid is effectively columns of scenarios along with sub-tasks to complete the task. Here's the key points: The columns are organized Read More...
Posted 09 February 07 08:16 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments
Filed under Innovation, Software Engineering, Design
Actors, Personas, and Roles: In user modeling, I usually come across actors, personas, and roles (user roles). I thought it would be helpful to distinguish these so that I can use the right tool for the job, or at least understand their relationships, strengths and weaknesses. Summary Read More...
Posted 04 February 07 09:39 by J.D. Meier | 4 Comments
Filed under Software Engineering, Design
Personas at patterns and practices: At patterns & practices , we introduced personas a few years back to help design user experience for our deliverables. Personas helped with a few things: Understanding demographics. Building empathy by putting a face behind the user role. Building Read More...
Posted 04 February 07 08:42 by J.D. Meier | 4 Comments
Filed under patterns and practices, Software Engineering, Design
Avoiding Do Overs - Testing Your Key Engineering Decisions: I noticed Rico has a Performance Problems Survey . From what I've seen, the most important problem is failure to test and explore key engineering decisions. By key engineering decisions, I mean the decisions that have cascading engineering impact. By Read More...
Posted 04 February 07 01:41 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments
Filed under Security, Performance, Software Engineering, Design
What's a Scenario: In general, "scenario" usually means a possible sequence of events. In the software industry, "scenario" usually means one of the following: 1. Same as a use case 2. Path through a use case 3. Instance of a use case #3 is generally preferred because it Read More...
Posted 09 December 06 02:40 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments
Filed under Software Engineering, Design
Scenario and Feature Matrixes: One of the most effective approaches I've found for chunking up a project for incremental value is using a Scenario and Feature Matrix . A Scenario and Feature Mat rix organizes scenarios and features into a simple view. The scenarios are your rows. The Read More...
Posted 09 December 06 12:00 by J.D. Meier | 3 Comments
Filed under Project Management, Software Engineering, Design
User Experience, Tech Feasibility and Business Value: I found a way to explore more and churn less on incubation (i.e. R&D) projects. It helps to think of your project experiments and key risks in terms of these three categories and in this order: 1. user experience 2. technical feasibility 3. business Read More...
Posted 06 December 06 12:44 by J.D. Meier | 2 Comments
Filed under Innovation, Software Engineering, Design
Scenario Evaluations for Product Design and Feedback: When I need to quickly analyze a product and give actionable feeback, I use scenario evaluations. Scenario evaluations are basically an organized set of scenarios and criteria I use to test and evaluate against. It's a pretty generic approach so you can Read More...
Posted 03 December 06 02:56 by J.D. Meier | 1 Comments
Filed under Software Engineering, Design
Be the Software: When you're working on an R&D project, how do you shorten the cycles around testing your user experience models? ... Be the Software That's the advise John Socha-Leialoha , father of Norton Commander , gave me and it worked like a champ. We faced Read More...
Posted 01 December 06 08:01 by J.D. Meier | 0 Comments
Filed under Innovation, Software Engineering, Design

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