Are Design Sprints the Next Silver Bullet?

The Design Sprint is a trending method to speed up product design and development while reducing risk. Formalized at Google Ventures where they could quickly run a product idea through the sprint process and have a solid direction in a week vs. months. Kudos to Google Ventures, Jake Knapp and Jonathan Courtney for refining and formalizing the process and then packaging it for wider use.

As I studied the Design Sprint process and tried it with various clients, I quickly realized it was not much different than the week-long “Rapid Design” sessions we had been doing since the mid 90’s. The difference was they had formalized the process derived from Ideo and other design firms and implemented some key techniques to help reduce discussion time, solidify decisions and foster more independent thinking.

I reflected on a week-long design session in 2005 I held with NASA USA Spaceops, the folks who create the mission control systems for the Space Shuttle. They had a complex problem to solve and needed a viable solution to reduce risk with future launches. The problem was around how the launch team could certify the gimbal thrusters were working properly in the final 10 seconds of the countdown. If wrong and there was a failure, bad things could happen. On the other hand, a ton of time and money would be wasted if they flagged false-positives and scrubbed the launch.

We had a competent team of engineers and product […]

By |2020-10-29T04:16:36-07:00September 13th, 2018|Categories: Blog, Digital Strategy|1 Comment

FINDING THE BALANCE BETWEEN USABILITY AND DATA SECURITY

A key strategy for today’s digital leader is how to provide engaging, usable interactions with customers on a variety of technology platforms while protecting the organization from data breaches and other security risks. Balancing these needs is key to a successful digital and data management strategy.

As we all know, the utmost priority in today’s security posture should be to insure maintenance of the confidentiality, integrity and availability of sensitive information in a digital environment.

Such maintenance priorities must not only occur at the highest levels of the organization, but must simultaneously be balanced against cost factors, user experience and the overall impact on the organization. Traditionally, the focus of most companies is to build expensive and elaborate firewalls around a digital property similar to a medieval castle, in order to protect sensitive information and keep unauthorized persons out. This approach, however, immediately becomes challenging and costly when one begins to secure the data at rest, in transit, and in use throughout the complex business processes that traverse many independent technologies, infrastructure layers, and geographic locations. The reality is we live in a world where key business stakeholders need increased user engagement while simultaneously demanding increase data privacy and security.

The number of data entry forms across corporate websites and intranets is growing significantly, however each form has the potential for a data intrusion attack via sql injection or other potential security threat. How do you monitor and protect each form without cluttering them up with  Captcha’s and other measures that often negatively impact user task completion rates?  Current solutions often result in slow response times, captcha popups other friction points that negatively impact task performance and the overall user experience. This often leads to low user adoption or even abandonment of the […]

By |2020-10-29T04:16:36-07:00April 9th, 2018|Categories: Blog, Digital Strategy|Tags: , |0 Comments
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