Experience Strategy an Overview
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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Experience Strategy an Overview
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.
Experience Strategy an Overview
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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Experience Strategy an Overview
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
Experience Strategy an Overview
I wanta drain!
What about customer feedback? Sometimes…
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Yes! Drains are the future.
Experience Strategy an Overview
Why?
I want a window!
What about customer feedback? But more often…
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Experience Strategy an Overview
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?
Experience Strategy an Overview
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.
Experience Strategy an Overview
Why would we need one?
Because to customers,
the experience is the product.
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Experience Strategy an Overview
Why would we need one?
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Interface
Business Organization
Programming/Data/
Hosting
The System How Users See It
Interface
MAGIC
Source: Adaptive Path, 2008
Experience Strategy an Overview
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?
Experience Strategy an Overview
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
Experience Strategy an Overview
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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Experience Strategy an Overview
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…
Experience Strategy an Overview
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.
Experience Strategy an Overview
Sample:
Advantage Experience Strategy (handout)
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Experience Strategy an Overview
Discussion/
Questions/
Thanks for your time.
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