April 2018 Summaries

The author, who previously lacked first-hand experience with UX research, learned that it's a team effort that involves everyone gaining empathy and understanding why design decisions are made. To facilitate this, teams can create templates and resources to participate in UX research efforts, such as joining a Design Feedback Group to try new features before anyone else. When starting a research project, teams identify unknowns and assumptions by discussing knowledge gaps and anecdotal beliefs, and then build an interview script with observation goals that guide the prototype design. The script is used to observe customer behavior remotely, often using video calls and prototypes, and participants are recruited through screener surveys. After observing and revising based on feedback, teams synthesize notes into clusters and theme names, which informs report findings and design adjustments. This approach makes research a more collaborative and parallel process, rather than a waterfall of separate stages.

Gmail has rolled out its biggest revamp for years, introducing a new side panel to display emails, events, notes, and tasks in one place, allowing users to quickly manage their day-to-day tasks and calendar events alongside their emails. The update also includes features like snooze emails until later, self-destructing emails, and confidential email mode with expiration dates and authentication requirements. Additionally, Gmail now offers a preview of attachments without opening the email message, improved compose button design, and an integrated Google Tasks app for mobile devices. Users can access these new features by clicking on the "Try the new Gmail" option in their settings or by updating to the new version of Gmail.

We are the hero of our own story, and to build a successful business, one needs a lead - someone interested in your product or service who could be your next customer. A lead is not just anyone on the street; they're people who take action, show interest, and need your product to complete their story. The marketing funnel concept helps move potential customers from awareness to sale by starting with a wide group of people, then narrowing down to those who are highly likely to become customers. The journey from lead to customer involves capturing, nurturing, qualifying, and converting leads into sales. Customer retention and churn reduction strategies also play a crucial role in keeping existing customers around and encouraging them to make repeat purchases. By understanding the importance of leads and the marketing funnel, businesses can create effective sales strategies that help turn potential customers into loyal customers who complete their own story with your product or service.

Microsoft Office add-ins are tools that can be installed within the Office applications to enhance their functionality, providing new features and capabilities without requiring a switch between programs. These add-ins can be used with both free Office Online apps and newer versions of Office for Mac and Windows. The selection process involved over 100 highly-rated apps across four main products (Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), narrowing down to the top 22 add-ins that meet specific criteria such as being free, having broad audience appeal, and offering useful use cases. Some popular add-ins include Boomerang for Outlook, Woodpecker for Word, XLTools.net Data Cleaning for Excel, Pickit for PowerPoint, and Zapier for automating Office apps with other tools. These add-ins can greatly enhance productivity and efficiency in various tasks such as email management, document creation, data analysis, presentation design, and more.

Sunny Paris, CEO of noCRM.io, highlights the evolution and importance of automation in modern software, noting the shift from traditional, manually initiated scripts to more sophisticated integrations enabled by APIs and automation tools like Zapier. Although automation is typically seen as automatic, there are scenarios where manual triggers are beneficial, allowing users to initiate actions at their convenience. This approach, as utilized by noCRM.io, enhances application functionality by enabling users to manually trigger events, such as sending a predefined email, directly from within an app using automation tools. By leveraging REST webhooks, developers can seamlessly integrate manual triggers into their applications, allowing for enhanced flexibility and user control. This method not only simplifies the process for users but also enables developers to enrich their applications with features from other apps without extensive development, offering a cost-effective way to expand app capabilities.