Experience Strategy

Experience Strategy an Overview


What is an Experience Strategy?

•  An approach to defining and planning for a product’s user experience.

•  A recognized process that’s central to user centered design practice.

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What is an Experience Strategy?

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A clearly defined set of principles based on user needs and desires that guide design and development decisions.


What does an Experience Strategy do?

A good experience strategy: •  Deals well with rapid changes in technology and the

marketplace

•  Drives team and stakeholder consensus

•  Conveys clarity and fosters empathy for the user

•  Helps team to focus on the need, not the solution

•  Guides all subsequent design decisions

•  Answers: “Why?”

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Why would we need one?

Do we really need another document? We already have:

•  Business and Marketing objectives

•  Requirements

•  Market research

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None of these activities are wholly driven by user needs or desires.

Identify business needs and how to advance products and brand

Identify what features and functions to build

Identify opportunities in the marketplace


I wanta drain!

What about customer feedback? Sometimes…

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Yes! Drains are the future.


Why?

I want a window!

What about customer feedback? But more often…

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It sounds more like

you need a chair on the

porch.

I want to: •  Feel the sunshine

•  Smell fresh air

•  Talk to the neighbors

•  Watch the cars go by

•  Feed the birds

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But more often…

What about customer feedback?


What about customer feedback?

Customer feedback is critical to our work, of course.

But it only identifies problems - and not very well.

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An experience strategy provides a

means to solve those problems.



Because to customers,

the experience is the product.

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Interface

Business Organization

Programming/Data/

Hosting

The System How Users See It

Interface

MAGIC

Source: Adaptive Path, 2008


How about an example?

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•  Product Vision: The center of a Microsoft entertainment ecosystem

•  Market opportunity: a cheaper iPod •  Feature-rich •  Revenue streams •  Features with no basis in user needs

(subscriptions, music reorganization, sharing, TV connectors)

•  Experience Vision: Take your music with you anywhere

•  Created a new experience, not new features

•  Revolutionary

OK, Iʼm Sold.

What’s in an Experience Strategy?


The Experience Strategy produces:

1.  Experience Vision the experience promise once the product is developed; the “North Star”

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2.  Experience Goals the user’s desired specific results, which become the “experience principles”

3.  Strategies the things we’ll design or do to achieve the user’s experience goals

4.  Audience Groups general categories of our users; their needs, desires and culture


How does a UX team create the strategy?

1.  Gather requirements and conduct research – with users and project stakeholders (product/project managers, developers, business analysts, etc)

2.  Create a presentation and document that defines the product’s experience vision, and shows steps to meet that vision.

3.  Present to project stakeholders, get feedback and buyoff.

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The project has a workable roadmap:

instructions on how to proceed with design:

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•  Information design

•  Interaction and visual design

•  Conceptual Design

•  Technical design

So when the Experience Strategy is finished…


What’s not in it?

Because the strategy is a roadmap, it doesn’t include: •  Site maps, wireframes or visual designs

•  Content strategy

•  Personas

•  Requirements

•  Project plans or timelines

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…but it would call for these things.


Sample:

Advantage Experience Strategy (handout)

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Discussion/

Questions/

Thanks for your time.

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