Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

User Experience Strategy

suggested by Alok Jain on 2006/08/17

There is a lot of discussion on ‘experience’ design and the term ‘strategy’ gets thrown in every so often. We all probably understand what this means at a subconscious level (and some at conscious level too). This article captures my thoughts on what User Experience strategy is:

What is Strategy

Before we define User Experience Strategy, lets define Strategy. Answers.com says
“Management plan or method for completing objectives; plan of procedures to be implemented, to do something.”

That’s a bit vague, so lets try to get some handle here. Strategy is the path between Vision and executing vision or in other words a vehicle to realize vision. hmm so it’s not just a tool but has great importance. It’s a 3 step dance:

Vision > Execution Strategy > Execution

Many organizations tend to go directly from vision to execution, missing this important step in between, perhaps most important one as it is allows for energies and resources to be canalized in the right direction.

Vision

For this article I’ll equate Vision to goals even though that’s not entirely correct. But you’ll see why I am doing this.
Goals that an organization has are more or less a variation of:

• Increase Revenues


• Reduce Costs


• Increase Profits


• Increase customer base


• Improve brand image

You need to figure out what variation of which goal do you want focus on in the solution you are building.

Strategy

So now that some context is set for what strategy is and role it plays, Lets dig deeper into it. Strategy can apply to anything with a vision from building a house to marketing a product to anything. So there can be :

• Marketing Strategy


• Brand Strategy


• Pricing Strategy


• Product Strategy


• Experience Strategy


• Innovation Strategy


• Coding Strategy


• Combat Strategy

... this list can go on and on..

Important thing here is to understand that more than one kind of strategy can be applied to reach the goals.

Lets take an example – Microsoft v/s Apple – both would have had similar goals, but applied different kind of strategies, Needless to say but Microsoft focused a greater effort on marketing strategy and less on experience strategy, Apple was opposite.

Lets take another example – Google v/s Microsoft (can’t resist this one). If you look at it Google is NOT a search company, it’s brand stands for innovation , that’s the reason we just absorb “any” product they launch.. everyone has to have an account with new products from Google.

A non-tech example would be airlines – Jet blue had experience strategy, they had well developed systems (in non-technical sense) to ‘institutionalize’ ability to provide superior experience

So User Experience Strategy is one of the many that an organization can choose from. Each strategy has a cost and value that it delivers. Also strategy does is relative not absolute. It depends on time, market, and competition.

How to decide on the strategy? Here are some tips, (but this is a subject that deserves a separate article):

1. Vision: This of course is the starting point, strategy must align with vision.
2. 
   Industry Direction: Take an example of Hotel industry, the base direction it is taking is experience strategy, which is good, but question to be asked is if you can differentiate yourself on same strategy or something else is needed. Consider Yahoo – it has opened yahoo products like a development platform, because even though industry is moving towards Innovation Strategy, they cannot generate enough innovation in house.
3. 
   Socio-Economic Situation: Back in 1940-50s airline prices were regulated by government, given this airlines could only differentiate based on service and experience they provide. Once that regulation was removed, price wars started and strategy changed.
4. 
   
5. Competitive Landscape: This is very much of like Industry, however in case you have specific competitors you are going after, looking at Industry direction alone would not be enough, you competitor might be doing something that changes Industry direction
   
6. Your offerings: Last but not the least your capabilities. Sony is putting a great deal of resources on Blue Ray disc (one of the two HD DVD Formats being released). This has resulted in them selling new Playstation boxes at a loss because Blue Ray drives are being shipped in new PS and have added significantly to costs. But with competition from X-Box they cannot increase prices. So look at where is the strength in our offering and adopt the right kind of strategy.

User Experience

Okay, let me take a parallel road and look at User Experience at very high level, and then we’ll converge it with Strategy discussion.

So what is User Experience? Answers.com does not even tries to answer this, so lets take it from Wikipedia:

“User experience is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system.” We should change ‘system’ to service.

In more materialistic terms I would say User Experience is essentially something that resides in User’s long-term memory and has a bearing on decision to transact with the company in future. This could be positive or negative.

You need to ask following questions, and these will map you to User’s experience life-cycle:

a. How do users come to know of their need?
b. How do they find the right product/service?
c. How do they make a decision on that product/service?
d. How do they order it?
e. How does it get delivered?
f. How does it get installed?
g. How are problems with product and service resolved?
h. How is it disposed?

Am sure some questions here are new and do not form a part of current experience design discussions, but all are important opportunities.

Now map your user’s path across these stages and rate your and competition’s performance at each stage. I like to follow a 5-point scale as it brings enough granularity, and at the same time has limited subjectivity. I do not recommend using 1 to 5 scale, instead use (-) 2 to (+) 2, i.e. –2, -1, 0, +1, +2

-2 Significant problems with experience
-1 Mild problems with experience
0 As expected
+1 Mild improvements to expected experience
+2 Significant improvements to expected experience

Here is an excel based template to measure the same – http://alok.ajain1.googlepages.com/ExperienceAssessment.x… ( Would appreciate if you can leave my name in the same when using)

So now you have some assessment of User Experience at high level

Bringing the two together

So now you know which places the experience fails. Next Step is to “Identify Critical moments”. These are moments where users decide to move to next step or not. For e.g. lets say you are doing this for Parking Garage and experience of finding the garage was significantly negative, but once they find the garage they might go ahead if other parameters are fine. But if at this stage attendant’s approach is not right and if customer place high value on attendant’s attitude making it “critical” for customer, she might decide to look further.

So identify such critical moments and those are where you start to focus on. With this you have now narrowed on 2-3 such critical points and start to go deeper.

How do you find what’s critical and what’s not – User Observations are the most reliable method. Go in the field see what goes on and you’ll know what’s important what’s not. In addition talk to people. Do this for your product/service as well as competition product/service.