All posts tagged
strategy

Taking your seat at the strategy table: Three must-have leadership skills

Strategy for UX. But where’s the UX vision?

“When you take your place at the strategy table as a UX leader, lean in and ground yourself in your deep understanding of customer behavior. Make it central to how you express your product strategy. This customer-focused approach will allow you to provide unique value to the master plan when you practice and evolve the three conventional business skills that I shared from my journey.”

(Sara Ortloff Khoury ~ User Experience Magazine)

So you want to write a digital strategy?

Moving up the ladder means more strategic thinking, for clients a well.

“A digital strategy is not as intimidating as it sounds. It is just a document outlining how your company or client should handle the different aspects of digital from the website and mobile to email, social media and digital marketing. It doesn’t need to cover everything in huge depth (it would be unreadable if it did), but instead should establish some general approaches to these different areas. This post will provide you with a crash course on where to start and what kinds of things to include. I hope it proves useful.”

(Paul Boag ~ Boagworld)

Strategy and online: How online is changing the game and the playing field for strategy development

A great piece on being successful online, every designer, manager and marketeer should read.

“Strategy is about trying to take control and trying to win. Strategy is about trying to predict the future or at least enough of that future that will give you a competitive advantage. Strategy is about being specific. It is about helping you get from A to C by doing B. It’s about putting your cards on the table, placing your bets.”

(Gerry McGovern ~ CustomerCareWords)

Are personas still relevant to UX strategy?

They will always be a great starting point for the unknowns of empathy and UCD.

“There have been some who have proclaimed the impending demise of personas as a UX design approach since shortly after their introduction. While the optimal approach to creating and employing personas is still evolving—thanks to more useful data becoming available to design teams and new project-management methods—their usefulness has not yet diminished. If anything, personas have become even more useful because they put a human face on aggregated data and foster a user-centered design approach even within the context of efficiency-driven development processes.”

(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)

Content Strategy Is A Process Not A Deliverable

Or to put it differently, it’s a verb, not a noun.

“Strategies involve objectives. They have to. Either a strategy supports the attainment of the objective or the longer term impact to outcomes after the objective has been reached. Either way, a strategy is something that uses tactics but is not exclusively about them. Strategies also have to support measurable objectives. That is, a strategy’s success can only be realized once an objective has been met and that objective has a set of metrics against which it is measured.”

(Kris Mausser a.k.a. @krismausser ~ The Discontented Company)

UX Strategy on the Job: An Interview with Three UX Strategists

From business, through digital to C/UX strategy. The plan to achieve the vision.

“The statement that they agreed to participate is significant. Some of the people I asked to participate in this interview said their companies wouldn’t allow it. A couple of the UX Strategists who did participate said that they would have to send their responses all the way up the command chain for editing and approval. Why the secrecy? Why can’t UX Strategists share their craft openly like other UX professionals do when they discuss things like Photoshop filters or research methods or JavaScript tips? It’s because a UX strategy is a valuable asset that companies want to protect: a battle plan for success in the digital realm.”

(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)

Lean Strategy for UX Design

The perfect mixology: strategy, lean, UX, and design.

“Lean strategy in UX design means getting to a simple, actionable statement about what problem we are going to solve for the user as soon as possible, so that the design process can proceed. In fact, lean strategy often happens in concert with design, enabling us to be more adaptive and to more easily apply our thinking to our designs. It’s about being less precious and profligate with our decks and deliverables, freeing us up to bring greater clarity and focus to our ideas. It’s strategy in motion, pressing us forward rather than holding us back until everything has been figured out and proven with mathematical certainty.”

(David Gillis a.k.a. @davegillis ~ UX Magazine)

UX Strategy: The Heart of User-Centered Design

Without a strategy, the HOW gets lost and the WHY remains static in the UX vision.

“Today, organizations interact with their customers through multiple digital channels such as call centers, mobile devices, applications, and Web sites. It is not enough to create a strategy for these channels from business, technology, and marketing perspectives. Rather, it is essential that an organization’s UX strategy be at the core of user-centered design. A UX strategy establishes goals for a cohesive user experience across all channels and touchpoints.”

(April McGee ~ UXmatters)

Is UX Strategy Fundamentally Incompatible with Agile or Lean UX?

As with all new things, it will take some time before UX Strategy establishes its position.

“UX strategy is about building a rationale that guides UX design efforts for the foreseeable future. UX strategy can be effective in an agile environment if you can complete the strategy before agile development begins. Following a lean UX process, you can develop a UX strategy that is sufficient when time and money are very tight, and you need to complete a working product at the earliest possible date. However, lean UX does not serve UX strategy well in large companies that can afford the time and resources to collect and analyze the data they need to formulate a strategic UX roadmap that produces a sustainable competitive advantage.”

(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)

Using Neuroscience to Inform Your UX Strategy and Design

The brain and strategy, an ideal combination.

“Finally, the corporate world is catching up with UX fanatics. Companies are hiring UX designers and UX strategists like crazy. As these UX professionals complete projects, many organizations are happy with the new software they’ve created, but they haven’t necessarily learned why and how they can continue to implement better user experiences in the future.”

(Lori Kirkland ~ UXmatters)

There Is No Such Thing as UX Strategy

Now UX Strategy is the subject for this DTDT format.

“In the minds of many UX professionals – at the levels of both members of UX teams and UX executives – there is no such thing as UX strategy. But based on the scenarios that I’ve described in this column – all of which I’ve taken from real-life situations – the felt absence of UX strategy indicates that it urgently needs to become a reality.”

(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)

Mobile Is Not a Channel – It’s an Attitude

Channel, platform, or touchpoint? I’m getting all confused with the new cross-lingo.

“Mobile is not a channel because I don’t believe that consumers are making a distinction between their mobile and their fixed Internet experiences – from a consumer perspective, it’s the same Internet accessed through different devices. (…) Let’s stop talking about mobile as a separate channel and start designing digital experiences that incorporate mobile the way it obviously needs to be done.”

(Laurel Erickson a.k.a. @erxn ~ Enlighten)

Why you need a user experience vision (and how to create and publicise it)

“Many design teams launch into development without a shared vision of the user experience. Without this shared vision, the team lacks direction, challenge and focus. This article describes how to use the ‘Design the Box’ activity to develop a user experience vision, and then describes three ways of publicising the vision: telling a short story; drawing a cartoon showing the experience; and creating a video to illustrate the future.” (David Travis ~ UserFocus)