Miskeeto

Developing a user experience strategy

A miskeeto byte from Robert Hoekman, Jr. Posted on April 15th, 2009

The term “user experience strategy” gets thrown around an awful lot in design circles, but few people have offered an explanation as to what it means or how to achieve it. In fact, when Mario Borque asked the members of the Interaction Design Association how to design or write one, the replies were surprisingly thin. And although many business execs these days have heard the term, and may even understand how a UX strategy can affect their business, I’m not sure many people understand how to develop such a strategy, so I’d like to shed some light on the Miskeeto approach.

First, a UX strategy is exactly that — a strategy. It means that beneath all the day-to-day tactics a business works through, there’s an underlying plan that speaks to the goals the company hopes to achieve. Arriving at this plan can mean, among other things, defining how a product or service should affect peoples’ lives, what it should mean to them, and how it should feel to use it. But how exactly do you go about defining these things? And how do you turn that understanding into a company vision that can be communicated and used as a driver for decision-making?

Here’s a breakdown of how we go about developing a holistic user experience strategy.

Evaluate

To gauge a company’s current user experience, we:

• talk to stakeholders to understand the company’s goals
• evaluate the company’s current site and product or service offerings, whether live or drawn on napkins, via heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs, as well as quantitative and qualitative (but rapid) usability studies
• evaluate the company’s competition, whether it’s another site, an offline process or need, or something not yet defined
• talk to customers to find out how they feel about the brand, product, and/or competition and what they expect from it

Determine metrics

Putting all this information to good use, we establish a set of metrics for the project, whether it’s to improve usability, increase conversions, raise brand awareness, help the company connect to its community, or something else entirely. These metrics become the measurement points by which we gauge our success later on — so that we know when we’re done and when we need to rethink or revise a concept.

Finalize the vision and identify user experience principles

Based on our evaluation, project metrics, and the goals of the organization, we identify and/or finalize the experience vision. This is a simple description of how the product or service should affect users’ lives and how the organization hopes to be perceived. An organization’s vision is its most valuable asset. It should be clear and concise, and should be communicated throughout the organization so that everyone has the same ultimate goal.

Based on the experience vision, we identify a set of user experience principles the organization should focus on to fulfill the vision. This means we write a list of guiding tenets for the organization to use as the basis for design decisions. For example, an organization that aims to be seen as pragmatic might include “Waste not time nor pixels” as one of its user experience principles. (Of course, these principles are explained in more detail in our deliverables.)

Devise the strategy

From here, we create the strategy. Simply put, we set milestones and establish a list of actions to take to achieve the experience vision. These actions are directly based on the design criteria / experience principles, and serve as the guideline for a long-term plan, not just for the current project, but for the complete product. This plan is how we meet the success metrics for the project and how the organization meets its longer-term metrics after our involvement has ended.

Tell the story

To bring the research, UX concept, and initial design ideas together, we create a digital story to communicate the overall ideas and themes. This can be done through a slide deck, diagrams, sketches, storyboards, or even comic strips. The point is to create a cohesive story that we can communicate throughout the organization, and that the organization’s leaders can then communicate to its staff so that everyone understands the vision and can stay focused on it.

Design

Once we know what the site or application needs to do and why, we can flesh out ideas for how to achieve it via wireframes, comps, and prototypes. (These are created either by our team or by our client’s own in-house team.) These can come in the form of sketches, static wireframes, low-resolution click-through prototypes, interactive slide decks, Flash simulations, or any number of other possibilities. Regardless, we establish design criteria for every part of the design, both at the application-level to drive feature set decisions and at the feature level to drive task flow decisions.

This gives the designers — whether ours or yours — a clear sense of a user’s motivations for each part of a design so that the solutions match what users need and, ultimately, help the company achieve its goals.

Design criteria are an incredibly powerful tool, and are the major force behind all of our design decisions.

With these design documents in hand, we can go back to customers and evaluate the new designs to validate ideas, spot potential trouble spots, or simply explore a concept.

Deliver

Eventually, we wrap this all up in a nice, big red bow and drop it on the client’s doorstep to be built out and deployed. Our deliverables include research findings, usability study results, the vision statement, experience principles, details of the UX strategy, sketches, wireframes, prototypes,  and so on.

We try to keep this as simple as possible, however — we like our deliverables to be as usable as the designs.

And just for good measure, we can even go to a client’s offices to deliver workshops on design principles, social media, UX strategy, usability evaluations, and more, so that our clients can continue to do great work on their own.

Measure

After the strategy and its resulting designs are rolled out, we like to come back around for a return visit to evaluate the results of the effort — to see if we met the goals we laid out in the “Establish metrics” step. At this point, we can also iterate through some design revisions, and clear up any questions that may have come up along the way.

So there you have it — Miskeeto’s approach to user experience strategy, from the ground up.

Do you do things differently? Tell us about it!