hip·po (hp)n. pl. hip·pos Def: Hippo is an acronym standing for HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion.  This term was coined by Avinash Kaushik, analytics genius. When you are in a meeting and trying to get some decisions made, look around.  Who is the person who gets to make the final call?  They are your Hippo.  It…

The other day, I was lamenting that I didn’t have visibility regarding the usage patterns in the application I work on.  I wanted to know who was “at risk” and who was an emerging power user.  (Being ‘At Risk’ means that you might not renew because you aren’t using the system much). We had subjective…

Many people I know develop personas for their applications and then pretend to be the user.  It’s like method acting for application development.  I think this is a bad idea.  The reason is simple:  Users are random and unpredictable.  They will click everywhere and do every possible wrong thing. An engineer once argued with me…

Imagine your users are normal smart people who are using your application during Halloween. They are happily using your great product when all of the sudden, “ding Dong!”.  Oh, it must be a cute little bunch of trick or treaters.  Let’s stand up and walk over to the door.  Oh, what a cute little princess!…

I use the concept of Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (love that name) to attempt to describe how you should position your product and your customers. In the picture, you can see the different positions one could be in.  A1 is when you are doing something easy and you have enough skill to do it.  Like riding…