Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how to define a User Experience strategy and what that should look like exactly. There are so many acronyms now in the UX world. We have IXD, CX, UX, HCI, HCD, . Just how many three letter words do we really need to describe something deceivingly simple? The practice of User Experience is quickly becoming arcane.
So I’d like to start here: I want to make products and experiences by designing them around people. I don’t want to condition people to a design. People don’t like that so much either.
If we start looking at all the acronyms, we can find a ton of great frameworks for design, development, and strategy. Lots of tremendously smart people have been down this path before. However, as a professor once told me years ago, one of the best ways to show you’ve learned something is to try and restate it in your own words… and have it be understood.
The Beginning: Ask Two Questions
Let’s assume we already have identified a customer’s need (doing this is another exercise). The two questions are simple. “What is the user’s primary goal?” and “What is the business’s current product/market strategy?”
These two questions can be answered in depth with two really great tools. The first is the User Journey. Map out how and why a user encounters this need. Highlight the first time they interact with externalities (like Google search results or going to a store). Then highlight the first time (if ever) they interact with the product.
Everything can be refined so we start rough and get the things we think we know slugged in – test everything, trust nothing.
The second is all about understanding where the business was and where it is heading. It’s essentially another type of user journey map but – instead – we can use the Business Model Canvas: a great modeling tool, even if you’re not bootstrapping a startup. The more detail and history that can be dragged into the daylight, the better.
If we do both of these things even somewhat correctly, we usually start to see a set of gaps. One gap will tend to be between what the business is designed around and what the customer needs. Another gap will tend to be between what the customer needs and the current product set designed to solve it. Yet another gap will be between the customer’s perceptions, and the marketing targeting them. Marketing has a tremendously challenging job when the gaps between product, user, and business model are large. The great news is that unlike a classical gap analysis, this method puts the user at the center of both the product design and business design process.
Solving Gaps: Closing, Bridging, Ignoring
If gaps are the symptoms, then understanding malleability is the fastest route to a fix. Malleability is all about looking at the three pillars of this strategy (Customer, Product, Business Model) and asking “have we been able to change this in the past?”, “How hard would it be to change this in the future?”, and “What are the tangible rewards of changing this thing?” This tells us whether we can close the gap (by fundamentally altering the design), bridge the gap (by using one of the other pillars to help us out), or ignoring. The worst is obviously to ignore the problem but sometimes one of the pillars has to be sacrificed so that we can focus on the others.
Tooling and Testing
Once we’ve made as many internally-focused, educated guesses that we can, we want to get out of our own way and start tooling and testing. Tooling is (obviously) planning out how we will measure change and metrics that are important to us. The Google Analytics IQ program has a great primer on planning for tooling – even if you don’t plan on using Google Analytics as your digital analytics platform. Testing is the second half of tooling – we simply put into practice our plan with the tools we’ve wired up. You can see some of my reviews of various tool platforms here: UX Toolkit Reviews.
Designing, Testing, Iterating
Now that we have an understanding of our gaps, how we can close them, what our user needs, and what our business is centered on – we can actually start to affect massive, powerful change. My favorite framework for developing new products is Lean Design, Google’s blend of Lean Startup and Human Centered Design. There is a mountain of content over at IDEO, all of which is very good. But one key piece that’s missing is integrating marketing and communications into the development process. Customers are much more forgiving of iteration than we often realize, especially if we are doing multi-variant work. A small subset of users is enough to detect product issues (five or less!) and likewise, a small set of customers is enough to detect passion for a campaign or concept (also five or less!). The goal is to quickly iterate our way to really compelling content that is built around genuinely useful products that can drive revenue and profit at the same time.