@rhjr
Experience Strategy
Company realizes they have a bad product or service. Where are our pain points? Or are we at a point of stagnation? “The dip”. What are current usage patterns?
Case: Entry: search engine, Landing: content page, Exit: high bounce rate.
Companies usually approach this in reverse order, but should instead start with step 1.
- Step 5. Measure — Acquisition, Conversion, Engagement (do you keep people around?), Satisfaction (do they like you/vocal?). You can iterate: watch the metrics and adjust, repeat. The things you measure to determine success. The things that mean success.
- Step 4. Implement — Produce! Start using the app yourself. Maintain partnership with the developers. Test.
- Step 3. Plan — Identify the problems, figure out constraints (shape your approach), prototype. Design from the end goal/ideal, then plan your way to that goal with available resources. Test.
- Step 2. Define — “The Big Think”.The target. The vision for the user experience that must be communicated well.. Expression of why this matters (in the context of business strategy). “@simonsinek Purpose is not derived from products. Products are developed as a result of the purpose. The clearer the purpose, the better the products.” “Having a higher purpose keeps the team focused on what matters.” Start with the stories from your audience (and your team) and your co-horts. Learn their problems, seek out the common beliefs and condense to a single paragraph or sentence.
- Step 1. Audit — Take inventory. What are things like there? Primary tasks? Secondary tasks? Competitive difference? Problems? Obstacles? Pain points?
“Production Mode: fix all your problems by writing more code without design concept re-work.” So many decisions get made at the code level, has a huge impact on initial design. This is why fast prototyping and design/developer partnerships are critical. Use your application yourself.
“If you implement changes without first designing, you will come back to rebuild and rethink eventually.”
The moment you realize that it is time to step back is the moment you have gotten to the really important part of the UX strategy process.
“Why does it matter? Why do you do what you do? Why do you care? Why this problem/purpose?” How does this design/project support that? Makes all the other decisions make sense and be much easier because everyone knows where they are going and why throughout the entire team. Without it, everything you are doing is a guess.
Step 2 Deliverable: Vision onesheet — fit onto two sides of a piece of paper. ALl the information about your strategy and user experience vision in one document. They’re short, bulleted, and get read all the time.
Books/Articles
- How to sell design and influence people, Hoekman
- World’s easiest way to critique a design — What is the one thing you want people to do?
- Designing the Obvious, Hoekman, Jr.
- User experience tools, tricks, and techniques, learnable.com
- Creating great design principles, Jared Spool
- Design Principles bookmarks
Great notes — I was thinking during the talk that steps 1 & 2 are reversed for new products. Thanks for the links, too.
That could work. Or you could just change the perspective of the audit. Instead of doing an inventory with your own products, you turn outward and do an inventory with the product space. But it seems the key is to know what the context and current artifacts are related to the problem you are trying to solve. The nature of where you look is just possibly different between new and current products.