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A thought-provoking blog post delving into the realities of User Experience (UX) Design. Uncover insights from UX professionals about limited user engagement in their workflow, with most spending only 10%-15% of their time with users. This post critiques the disparity between ideal UX practices and actual workflows driven by sales and C-level directives. Learn about integrating user feedback, leveraging AI for user-centric design, and adapting UX methods for more effective, user-informed design strategies. Join the discussion on redefining UX practices and explore Nextapp for innovative UX solutions. Key topics include UX research, user engagement, AI in UX, and user-centric design approaches.

Explore the innovative integration of AI in Product Discovery tools with our latest blog post. Delve into the evolution of user experience research, emphasizing the seismic shift towards AI-enhanced insights. Discover how next-generation Discovery tools, inspired by Amazon's intuitive UI, are revolutionizing data navigation and user insights. Uncover the pivotal role of predictive search, personalized recommendations, and user-centric design in transforming Product Discovery. Learn how these advanced tools democratize user insights across various roles, from Product Managers to Developers, fostering a collaborative and inclusive approach to product development. Join the discussion on the future of Product Discovery and its impact on creating user-centric products in the era of big data.

Explore the paradigm shift in UX research with AI integration, mirroring e-commerce's impact in retail as per Chris Anderson's 'The Long Tail'. Discover how AI transforms traditional UX research, expanding beyond user interviews to a vast repository of data from support tickets and customer success calls. Learn about the need for advanced AI-driven tools in UX research for navigating extensive data, akin to Amazon's UI. Understand the evolution from top user insights to niche nuggets, and how AI democratizes product development in UX, leading to more user-centric designs. Delve into the long tail of user interactions for comprehensive UX understanding.

Developers and UX collaboration, Scrum efficiencies, bridging the gap between UX research and software building, the importance of early developer involvement, benefits of shared insights, advocating for synergistic creation, moving from mere coding to crafting user experiences, call for combined innovation in digital development.

Explore the role of artificial intelligence in UX research with a focus on its challenges and strengths. Dive into AI's potential deceptive interpretations, the importance of human review, data-backed AI insights, and the depth video snippets bring over text transcripts. Understand the synergy of AI's computational power with human intuition for effective and responsible UX research.

"NEXT Acquires Reveall to Enhance Customer Insight Capabilities" We're excited to share that NEXT has acquired Reveall, the innovator in qualitative data analysis for product teams. Their impressive track record, supported by leading investors since 2021, aligns perfectly with our vision for AI-driven product development. This partnership promises to accelerate our mission to deliver better products more efficiently. A warm welcome to the Reveall team—here's to shaping the future of product discovery together.

Explore the shift in democratizing UX research from mastering methodologies to sharing research outcomes. Dive into the transformation of the UX researcher's role, the benefits of open-access research data, and the collaborative future of user-centric design. Understand how democratization leads to broader perspectives, deeper insights, and collective innovation in user experience.

In the era of AI, the realm of UX research undergoes significant transformation. Traditionally, UX research was about discerning value through a human lens, sifting through insights to find the most relevant information. However, AI is redefining this process. Instead of constraining insights to a single research question, AI allows data to be repurposed and reanalyzed for numerous queries. This shift means that what was once deemed "irrelevant" can suddenly become invaluable in a different context. As AI democratizes data, even non-researchers can access and benefit from past insights. Consequently, the role of researchers is evolving. They're no longer just data collectors but have become curators and facilitators, ensuring data is well-organized and guiding stakeholders. In this AI-driven age, every user insight has potential value, challenging traditional perceptions of "value". Embracing AI means seeing researchers as strategic data stewards, where every feedback, irrespective of its current significance, has the potential to be a pivotal insight in the future. The blend of AI and UX research opens up vast opportunities for a more user-centric world, urging enthusiasts to immerse themselves and shape this promising future.

Unlock the compelling power of authentic user voices in your UX research with video testimonials, exploring a fresh, impactful approach to communicating crucial user experiences directly to stakeholders. While traditional UX research reports are rich in data, they often fail to engage decision-makers in the way that stories do, sometimes leading to critical user feedback being overshadowed by anecdotal tales from internal team members. This post illuminates how integrating unscripted, emotion-rich video clips of user feedback into the product development process not only enhances the memorability and impact of user insights but also fortifies the user's presence and influence in organizational decision-making. By prioritizing and amplifying genuine user voices, businesses can ensure that pivotal product decisions are deeply rooted in real, unfiltered user experiences, safeguarding the brand’s reputation, loyalty, and market position in the long run. So, hit record and let your users narrate their truths, transforming their invaluable feedback into a potent catalyst for user-centered change.

In our latest blog post, we explore the limitations of traditional UX research methods like user interviews and highlight the untapped potential of alternative feedback sources, such as sales calls, support tickets, and customer success interactions. Discover how AI can transform the way we gather and analyze user insights, making it more efficient and insightful than ever before. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on the AI revolution in UX research. Don't miss this opportunity to reshape the UX research paradigm!

Unlocking Product Management Success: Prioritizing Quality Ideas Over Quantity of Developers In the world of product management, the perennial challenge of too many ideas and not enough developers often takes center stage. But is this truly the bottleneck? In this blog post, we debunk the myth and shed light on the importance of distinguishing between dreams and deliverables. We explore how an evidence-based approach to story selection can revolutionize your product backlog. By prioritizing ideas grounded in user-centric evidence, you can transform your team's efforts from chasing trends to making a real impact. Learn how enriching your stories with user video clips fosters empathy and clarity, leading to a more effective, user-centric approach. It's time to shift the narrative, prioritize quality over quantity, and create products that genuinely resonate with users. Say goodbye to the 'we need more developers' mantra, and embrace a clearer vision for product success.

Discover the transformative power of incorporating video evidence from UX discovery into your product backlog. In the world of product development, challenges persist beyond the initial stages, with technical complexities and integration issues often emerging as stories evolve. Summarized insights from intensive product discovery, while valuable, lack the immersive context of their origin. Video evidence emerges as a guiding light in times of uncertainty, offering a holistic understanding of user environments and reducing ambiguity. It fosters creative collaboration within your product team, fueling innovation and cost-effective solutions. By embracing this integrated strategy, you perpetuate a continuous loop of user feedback and insights, blurring the lines between discovery and implementation, and elevating "agile" from implementation-only to a holistic product development process. Don't let UX discovery end with handovers; embrace inclusive collaborations and shape products that resonate with genuine user needs.

In product management, prioritizing user evidence is key to an effective backlog. Label stories with direct user feedback as "User-Evidenced" or "Direct Feedback" to highlight their importance in tools like Jira or Github. These evidence-backed stories should take precedence in backlog grooming and sprint planning, aiming for at least 30% of each sprint to be user-evidenced. Continuously assess their impact to refine your product strategy, ensuring it aligns with user expectations, and driving more user-centric product development. This approach optimizes your product backlog management for superior results and enhanced user satisfaction.

Discover how incorporating user video testimonials into your Scrum grooming sessions can revolutionize your product management process. In this blog post, we delve into the powerful benefits of watching real users express their perspectives and needs. From time efficiency and authenticity to empathy amplification and collaborative problem-solving, these short clips bridge the gap between developers and end-users. Ensure consistent messaging, enhance stakeholder buy-in, and create products that truly resonate with your target audience. Elevate your grooming sessions with the invaluable insights gained from the user's voice.

At the heart of any digital product lies its users, and as product teams, our mission is to understand and cater to their needs. This is where UX researchers come in, diligently conducting interviews and crafting cohesive reports that shape our products. However, a barrier has arisen between product owners and the raw user sentiments. The current practice has researchers conducting interviews, retreating to analyze data, and then presenting their insights. While invaluable, this method limits us in crucial ways: it loses nuanced context, hinders inspiring technical solutions, and restrains genuine empathy. The solution lies in breaking this barrier and fostering collaboration between researchers, product owners, and developers, collectively tapping into raw user sentiments for more resonant and empathetic products.

Learn how to seamlessly integrate robust data privacy principles into your UX research workflow using NEXT, the AI-powered product discovery and customer insights platform. This blog post navigates you through key steps, from capturing participant consent and safeguarding sensitive information in transcripts to efficient data retrieval for GDPR compliance, categorizing recordings based on consent levels, regular data audits and sanitization, controlled data access, team training, and maintaining a culture of awareness. Elevate your research with NEXT AI while ensuring you respect the privacy of your research participants.

A guide through the labyrinth of data privacy in User Experience (UX) research. This comprehensive post will delve deeper into the legal and ethical intricacies UX researchers face when recording and storing user interviews.

Over the past years, the product function has seen unprecedented growth as digital product development has become one of the most actionable and vital components for any business’ success. With the importance and influence of product departments growing, the role of the director of product has grown too, becoming a crucial part of any company’s leadership team. From ideation to launch, the role of a product director is critical in creating innovative products that meet customer needs and drive business growth. But what is a director of product, and what makes a product director truly great? In this article, we'll explore the role of the director of product, the skills needed to be successful in the role, and how you can become a great director of product. We will also share unique tips and insights from successful product leaders that we had the privilege of speaking to.

As a product team, you're always trying to find ways to not just make better decisions, but to make faster decisions too. A helpful tool that product teams can draw on is a concept review. In this article, we'll define what a concept review is, discuss how to go about conducting one, and explore how it can help you make better product decisions when prioritizing potential solutions. We'll also provide an example of a concept review in action, so you can see for yourself how you might use it in your own use-case.

The key to any successful project is to have a clear action plan. The same goes for products – good product planning ensures your product meets the needs of users and aligns with the company's goals. In this article, we'll explore what product planning actually is, why it's important, and how it is still relevant in modern product management despite being a well-established process. We will also provide you with a practical guide to creating a successful product plan yourself.

As a product team, it's essential to know what you're building, why you're building it, and what impact it might have. But keeping everyone aligned and focused on the same objectives can be tricky. Even though most teams take time every month or quarter to define their strategic objectives, they still often find themselves drifting away from their original goals. It’s no surprise that one of the challenges many product managers complain about is lacking strategic direction. That's where impact mapping comes in. Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique that helps teams identify their objectives, the behaviors they want to encourage, and the impact they hope to have. In this article, we'll explain what impact mapping is, how it can help product teams become more outcome-driven and why it’s a great tool for creating and maintaining strategic direction.

Discover the secret to better products and reduced development costs: record your customer calls, analyze them with NEXT and share insights directly with your team. Embrace this strategy to fully engage in conversations, share invaluable learnings, enhance user experiences, inform product roadmaps, and democratize customer understanding. Tap into the full potential of customer insights and leave decisions based on gut feeling in the past.

Explore our top picks for UX research tools, including NEXT's AI-powered UX research platform, Figma, Maze, TheyDo, and Miro. These tools will help you make better product decisions and build products customers rave about. Leverage AI-powered solutions for UX and product discovery.

Discover how BASF, a global chemical company with a presence on Earth, the moon, and Mars, transformed its product development approach with NEXT. Adrian von Mühlenen, Product Owner at BASF, emphasizes the importance of a customer-centric, discovery-first approach. By leveraging NEXT, the team shifted from making decisions based on gut feeling to using customer evidence, resulting in a more refined product design. This approach not only applies to software development but also extends to hardware and materials development, potentially revolutionizing R&D processes. Join BASF in unpacking customer needs and delivering customer value with NEXT.

If you work in product, you're probably familiar with the terms "outputs" and "outcomes." But what is the difference between the two? While they may sound similar, outputs and outcomes are fundamentally different, and it's crucial for product teams to understand this difference in order to achieve success. In this article, we'll explain the difference between outputs and outcomes, why it's important to distinguish between them, and what product teams can do to become more outcome-driven.

Ever wondered why we use filler words like 'um,' 'ah,' and 'uh' during conversations? These seemingly meaningless sounds actually serve a purpose. This blog post delves into the world of filler words, explaining why we use them and how they impact communication. While excessive use of filler words can make you appear hesitant, there's more to them than meets the eye. Research suggests that filler words can signal authenticity, honesty, and important information. In the realm of product discovery and user research, understanding the significance of 'ums' and 'ahs' can lead to deeper and more meaningful insights. Instead of tuning them out, this post encourages you to embrace filler words as road signs to uncover valuable customer insights. Discover how these seemingly small nuances can make a big difference in building products that customers truly love.

“Services have come to dominate many national economies,” reads the World Trade Report 2019. “[And] they are playing a bigger role in the global economy as well.” This evolution of a product-based economy towards a service-dominated economy is due to several factors — consumption and investment, among them — but technology is the “game-changer”, the report reveals. “Services that were once difficult to trade, because they could only be delivered in person, are becoming far easier to trade, because they can be delivered digitally.” The rapid spread of digital infrastructure is further accelerating the importance of services in the portfolios of companies. These investments are a direct reaction to the fact that globally connected digital platforms tend to grant outsized rewards to a small number of star services, which are in turn able to be delivered at almost zero marginal cost. The result? A 21st-century version of the gold rush, but this time for new, innovative services that will capture billions of users. In this context — and unless they want to be in a commoditized business — companies must upgrade their offerings to the next stage of economic value by augmenting their products with new services or creating new standalone services. Needless to say, the service revolution has arrived — big time. But given the ongoing disruptions, how can organizations not only adapt, but continue to thrive?

In an era of economic uncertainty and tight budgets, the importance of thorough product discovery cannot be overstated. As Robert Pressman's research reveals, investing in discovery can save businesses 10 to 100 times the costs, time, and effort spent on addressing unforeseen customer needs. Many product teams operate on the 'build it, they will come' motto, but history has shown that products like Amazon Fire Phone and Google Glass failed due to a lack of understanding of customer needs. This blog emphasizes the significance of combining discovery and delivery to create products customers love. It discusses the Agile Manifesto's influence on the intertwining of discovery and delivery and the need for tools and rituals to facilitate effective product discovery. Discover how purpose-built product discovery platforms like NEXT can help you collect, analyze, and validate customer needs, leading to better products, faster time to market, and reduced development costs. In a world where discovery matters more than ever, embrace the power of evidence-backed discovery to drive customer happiness and market success.

Discover the journey of NEXT, a software company founded by Ronny and Moodi with a shared passion for curiosity and innovation. Starting as a side project, NEXT has evolved into a full-blown product discovery platform over the years. They've released new features, integrated with popular software tools, refreshed the platform's look, and launched the NEXT Community, all while staying true to their values. Whether you're looking to collect, analyze, and share customer needs and wants or seeking a marketplace of product discovery frameworks, NEXT has you covered. Join the community and start your journey with NEXT today, all for free.

Customer feedback is the lifeblood of an organization’s success. There is pretty much no way anyone can ensure a product’s sustained growth by intentionally excluding their audience from the decision-making process. Reveall, as a product, relies on feedback to define and prioritize roadmap items, as well as continuously improve existing features. We like to think of it as a surefire way of eliminating bias and assumptions from our decisions. In this article, we’d like to explore the importance of customer feedback and the insights that stem from it in building a well-rounded product that truly addresses people’s needs. We’d also like to share with you a story on how we used feedback to refine and improve our transcription feature.

Corporate culture is an often overlooked element of customer experience. It’s a vital component of an organization’s overall health that promotes long and short-term performance. The importance of culture has seen considerable change over the years. While the customer is still at the heart of an organization’s CX efforts, ensuring that your employees are aligned with corporate values has gradually become a new standard. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the importance of corporate culture, its role in your customer experience strategy and how employee satisfaction can build a loyal and long-lasting relationship with your customer base.

When asked about customer input in the development of the Ford Model T, Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Like many other famous soundbites, Ford's take on "faster horses" appears profound—it's slick and it sounds pretty convincing. However, like many other popular quotes, it suffers from a wide array of flaws—it lacks context, it's reductive in nature, and, most importantly, there's no proof that Ford ever said it. But regardless of whether Ford actually uttered those words or not, I still believe that they carry a lot of valuable insights. We just need to shift our perspective to extract them. The quote is often used to support the idea that customers are oblivious to their needs and that businesses should, therefore, not invest too much into customer feedback or research. And we get to hear it a lot, given that Reveall is a product that deals with turning user research into actionable insights. Ironically, Ford's eventual business problems are an excellent example of why organizations should seek to listen to their customers, which is not synonymous with making decisions based solely on their input.

In 2014, Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal entitled “Competition is for Losers.” There are only two categories of businesses, he writes: non-monopolies and monopolies. And those businesses that build monopolies will “create and capture lasting value.” From an early age, we’re taught that being competitive — and winning competitions — is a good thing. Whether you’re running in a schoolyard race, applying for a job, or starting a business — we’re always competing. It’s ingrained in our minds. But wanting to compete isn’t always the right thing to do. So what if we stop playing the game and start our own? Like Thiel, the 2004 book “Blue Ocean Strategy” also challenges the traditional view of competitive-based strategy. The blue ocean theory instead claims that, with the right approach, you can out-do other players by tapping into unaddressed demand (non-customers), thus creating and exploiting new markets — or “blue oceans.” Discovering a blue ocean is extremely valuable, if only because you will secure a spot as that market’s “default” product or service, with everything else seemingly a cheap or lesser imitation.

Can you draw a perfect circle? For centuries, children, artists, and mathematicians have strived to create a perfect circle by freehand. Making the world circular is just as hard as drawing a perfect circle. And successfully executing and deploying such projects in an organization is hard too. But the win can be big for those that get it right — as well as for everyone and everything around them. At its core, the circular economy promotes waste prevention, less pollution (and polluting processes), reuse of materials, and the regeneration of natural systems. Its principles can also be applied to products and services, business models, and economic systems. In fact, a 2015 study found that a circular economy model could boost Europe’s productivity by 3 percent by 2030, saving €600 billion a year. Companies like Philips have already embraced circular solutions, such as reclaiming all used customer goods to be carbon-neutral. Still, circular has struggled to go mainstream.

Do you work primarily with quantitative user research? Or are you more about the qualitative user research? Either way, how do you best combine the two? Both types of research require a different set of expertise and mindset and mastering or even just working with both can be a real challenge. Oftentimes, it's only by combining quantitative and qualitative user research that you can get the best results.

Empathy map. User journey. Storyboard. Just a few of the highly visual and collaborative business design tasks in NEXT. These tasks are often synonymous with high-energy in-person creative workshops during which walls are covered with stickies. Organizations are facing a once-in-every-few-centuries’ disruption. To respond, an increasing number of organizations are adopting business design as an everyday practice to transform their offerings, create new customer experiences, and innovate new disruptive or circular business models. But with hundreds of projects on the go, bringing teams together at every step of the process for workshop-style events isn’t always possible. Then there is the rise of remote working — 70% of people globally work remotely at least once a week, not to mention the proliferation of distributed teams that rarely meet face to face. You may be working with people in Lagos, New York City, or Shanghai, as well as teams across the road. “The way work gets done is changing rapidly”, said Moodi Mahmoudi, Cofounder of NEXT. “At NEXT, we wake up every morning to make sure the ‘new normal’ is a better normal.” That’s why we’re announcing a partnership with Miro, a leading online visual collaborative whiteboarding platform. NEXT’s partnership with Miro means you’ll spend less time traveling and coordinating and more time innovating, transforming, and designing offerings that delight your customers — all remotely.

When you work in a big organization, it’s only a matter of time before you need a UX research team. Sooner or later, people will realize that a proper dedicated team is necessary if you want to understand the needs and motivations of your users in the long run. As with building any team, the starting point is always stakeholder buy-in and budget. But how do you get that approval? Depending on how customer-centric the culture of your business is, this can be quite the challenge. People always tend to agree on the importance of customer research, but that doesn't automatically mean that you will get approval to spend more resources on it.

Spending a lot of time conducting and documenting research but not seeing it being used? It's a frustrating thing that most user-centric professionals experience. Teams work in silos, customer-centricity is preached but not practiced and insights either get lost or are ignored. Luckily, solving this problem boils down to finding the right way of working and using the right tools.