Mobile app users are less forgiving than desktop users.

The sooner you realize this, the quicker you can find creative solutions for these users.

Having made hundreds of user profiles and done numerous analyses on smartphone users over the years, I have learnt that mobile app users are driving markets for good.

In 2016 a Technology trend significantly affecting Design was moving away from graphic user interface and moving towards conversational user interface. Some examples of such technology are Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Messengers’ and Chatbots. With technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), chatbots, a form of conversational User Experience, appears all set to be more prominently affecting our lives starting this year.

One of the most common questions we get during our client discussions: “What kind of Insights will you be giving us?”, “What is an Insight for you?”, etc. There is ample awareness over the overuse of the buzzwords like ‘360-degree’ in the Marketing / Design agency world and ‘Disruptive’ in the Startup world. ‘Insight’ has also gone through the linguistic grinder in the User Experience Research world.

Stories are known to be persuasive. Good Salespersons tell stories, which have a profound effect on our brains and our response. As kids, our most basic request to our guardians was to tell a story. The neurological connection of human brains to stories is rather straight — our response to nice stories releases Oxytocin (the Trust hormone), thus encouraging to our brain for empathy to the characters in the story. This sounds like a perfect recipe for a product that offers a great User Experience.

During concept and discovery phases, products can be envisaged in a form of several little interwoven stories that describe the User perspective of product usage. With so many stories in a product, it is likely that the project team missed the big picture i.e. the overall product. Story mapping is about keeping those little important stories together during the entire lifecycle of product development and active maintenance.