In Berkun’s talk picked by the audience of Puget Sound SIGCHI, he ran through the biggest issues and advice. He goes into details on the mistakes in the post, so instead, here’s a table to see both the mistakes and the advice at the same time.

I thought it particularly interesting how he approached the talk:

Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as in prototyping and running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.

So what do you think? What other mistakes do UX designers make?

This is part 2 of a two-part post. Read part 1.
In the last installment, we talked about the distinction between Hands contractors and Brains consultants. Hands are brought in by the team as an extra resource to complete work the team already knows how to do. Brains are brought in by the team to provide expertise and insight on the best way to do something the team is struggling with.

Hands and Brains require completely different skills, have different approaches, and run into different challenges. Knowing which you want to be is important.

The role of Hands

The UX professionals who make great Hands are passionate about producing stuff. Whether it’s a pile of wireframes or a boatload of usability test sessions, they can crank through them. More importantly, they tackle every single piece of the project joyfully and proudly.

The thing to remember is someone who signs up to be Hands typically doesn’t get to say how the project is done. The team decides that up front, often before the project is started. It’s up to the Hands to match the work exactly, making it impossible to know which elements came from the Hands and which came from other team members.

When it comes to how the work is done, creativity and previous experience aren’t playing big roles. In fact, they are frowned upon. While the team focuses on getting everything done by the end project, they don’t want to step back and take the time to rethink what they are doing.

The Hands will get management’s attention if they have tricks and techniques for speeding up production, while keeping the results indistinguishable from what’s been done so far. An experienced Hands contractor brings speed and agility, while playing the chameleon to match the work of their temporary teammates.

Bring in the Brains

This is a complete opposite to the Brains—who aren’t about production at all, but instead about strategy. The Brains, when at the top of their game, are the sheriffs, coming in to clean up the town. When a team is stuck and not making progress, and it feels like they’ve tried everything without results, they call in the Brains.

Unlike the Hands, the Brains doesn’t make a good producer. Their value is squandered if they spend the bulk of their project time churning out similar items. Of course, if the team is struggling with what to produce and how, the Brains can get them started, showing them the technique and coaching them through the work. But, in this scenario, the Brains quickly backs away, as soon as it’s clear the team members can produce their own results. (Some Brains will bring Hands into the project at this point, working jointly.)

Instead, the Brains’ real value is in strategic understanding of the situation. The Brains looks at the entire scope of the project, studies the goals, and assesses the team’s capabilities and flaws.

Then the Brains suggests a new plan. They get the team started on the plan. They train the team on the tricks and techniques that will get them through that plan. Then they leave town, just like the sheriff, to go off and clean up the next team’s mess.

Why The Difference Matters

Great Hands know how to produce. Great Brains know how to analyze and persuade. They are completely different sets of skills. Hands and Brains require different personalities. It’s very rare to find one person who does both.

Great Hands know how to produce. Great Brains know how to analyze and persuade. They are completely different sets of skills. Hands and Brains require different personalities. It’s very rare to find one person who does both.

The Brains aren’t challenged by production work. Once they’ve done one screen or conducted one test session, they’re ready to move on to something completely different. The Brains love the variety of the tasks—coming in to something new. The Brains love seeing problems and solutions nobody else seems to see. The Brains are energized when those problems are particularly gnarly and the solutions are deviously elegant.

The Hands struggle with strategy. They always feel they’re the wrong people to ask—that someone else should’ve figured this all out by now. They thrive on having a set of constraints, a schedule, and a near impossible pile of similar things to do. They love to crank through the work, seeing the Done Pile grow while watching the To Do Pile shrink. They don’t mind their work blending with the rest of the team’s—their contribution becoming invisible to anyone outside the team. They are energized by completion.

In other words, Hands thrive on walking into a project that’s well defined while the Brains thrive on walking into a project that’s poorly understood. That’s why it’s difficult to be both. It’s a very rare person who thrives on both definition and chaos. For everyone else, they need to choose one or the other.

I’ve seen managers who have tried to have one individual contributor play both the Hands and the Brains. Often this is because of resource constraints or not realizing there’s a difference. Unfortunately, this inevitably ends in disaster, because of the opposing strengths and weaknesses of Hands and Brains. Don’t fall into this trap.

What do you thrive on? What energizes you? Where do you get frustrated? Understanding this will help you figure out if you are suited for the Hands or if you ought to be the Brains.

Jared Spool is the keynote speaker at UX Australia 2010,  being held in Melbourne from the 25-27 August 2010. The conference has sold out, but Jared’s workshop and others are still available, or you can go on the waiting list. See  the site for details.

A strategy is a set of coordinated, orchestrated, planned actions, or tactics, which will take you along a journey to reach a desired future state, over an established period of time. Design objectives are conditions or outcomes that a project must meet, often of tactical nature. User experience (UX) strategy shouldn’t therefore be confused with design objectives. This article is about how to plan and coordinate actions to organisationally achieve good UX.

The idea for this article was sparked by a cacophony of opinions on what constitutes UX strategy voiced recently in the twittersphere. Nothing currently posted in the blogosphere or in the UX community websites about UX strategy hit the right chord with me. I decided to add my two cents to the debate and try to bring a new perspective, based on my professional experience.

I think that the confusion stems partly from Jesse James Garrett’s famous, groundbreaking, commendable book, The Elements of the User Experience, where he employs the term UX strategy to name what was traditionally called a project’s design objectives or goals. Design objectives may consist of things like this:

• Reduce checkout drop-off rates to 30% from 70%
• Make it easy for new members to sign up for the web site
• Minimise the number of steps required to search, select and book a flight

A single project is always a tactical move; the use of the term “strategy”, in the context that Garrett uses it, sounds a bit off beat to me, and erroneous. It’s not my goal to flame JJG or anyone here – he’s an author who deserves my deep respect – but clear distinction between tactics and strategy is necessary.

So, what is UX strategy then?

User experience comprises everything a customer touches, hears, or sees from your organisation. From your products’ usefulness and functions, their form, performance, packaging, user guides, to the accompanying services like your ordering processes, customer support, billing, through social responsibility and environmental concerns, all of these aspects will form the customer’s appreciation of how they – consciously or not – experience your organisation (PDF).

UX strategy is therefore about the big picture. The ability to deliver a compelling, engaging and successful user experience is directly impacted by your organisation’s ability to orchestrate marketing, engineering, IT, product development, sales, and operational efforts. To that end, it must be approached from a higher vantage point – at the organisational level – not from a project level. In many politically charged, siloed organisations the orchestration required can represent an overwhelming endeavour and a daunting task. A well delineated strategy, however, will provide you the means to workaround those barriers. It will help you align all the ducks, break silos, build commitment and – why not? – gain consensus, and motivate the troops. The strategic plan will set the agenda for developments and actions to deliver on your strategic vision and objectives, usually in the 3 to 5 year timeframe.

UX strategy how-to

The process for defining your UX strategy is not very different to what you’d typically do to define your organisational overall strategy, corporate plan, or growth plan – whatever it’s called in your business. If your business doesn’t have a strategic plan yet, you should take care of that first. It generally comprises the following steps:

• Figure out where you are today
• Work out where you want to be in the future
• Choose and prioritise actions, while addressing any issues
• Map out the journey
• Get the job done

Strategic planning, like typical UX work, is a multi-disciplinary exercise. You’ll need a team of 5 to 8 people, usually representing a cross section of your organisation, i.e. people from marketing, IT, sales, product development, operations, financial, HR, etc. These must be people with power to make it happen, and willing to make a positive contribution to the planning process.

Where are you today?

This phase’s goal is to take a picture, a instant view of what’s happening now both internally and externally to your organisation. The reason is pretty straightforward: to go where you want to go, you need to know where you are first. Otherwise, which direction to take? Here’s what you need to look at:

The external landscape

If you haven’t done it yet, define your audiences. The most useful way to do this, in UX terms, is to develop a character set of personas representing your key audiences. Personas are excellent devices to communicate your audiences’ key characteristics, attributes, expectations and needs to your internal stakeholders and peers, and to build a common understanding of what needs to be put in practice to meet their requirements. Personas are also a very useful asset that can be reused for a myriad of other initiatives and, if you spend time tweaking and improving them over time, will have a long-lasting lifecycle.

You’ll also want to understand where you stand in the marketplace, review your positioning, benchmark your products and services, and compare them against the competition. The goal here is not to copy them, but to identify gaps in the offering and envision opportunities to better your own stuff. Pro tip: some people think that, because people out there are doing things in a certain way, this most certainly represents a best practice. Don’t fall in this trap! Focus on differentiation and innovation instead.

Lastly, analyse industry trends, paying careful attention to social change brought by new technologies, and don’t forget to look at your supply-chain and network of partners.

The internal landscape

Make an assessment of your organisation’s capabilities and competencies. You can do that through a Usability Maturity Model (UMM) assessment (I prefer User Experience Maturity Model instead, and will refer to it as UXMM heretofore). Don’t do that off the top of your head, though. Instead, employ solid assessment models and be rigorous and follow a protocol – as you do with usability testing, right? – because credible data and trustworthy, honest reporting will get you much needed stakeholder buy-in. The UXMM assessment is basically the crossing of UX skills, tools and processes on one hand, and a grading system, on the other hand. The resulting matrix will reveal where your organisation stands in the scale, and will highlight the gaps that need to be bridged. Regrettably, existing UXMM assessment frameworks can be difficult to use, and little literature or documentation is available on the subject. The Usability Professionals Association has a useful article (unfortunately for members only) comparing the different UXMM assement frameworks available today. Here’s an example of UX Maturity scale:

The User Experience Maturity Model

(Adapted from Bruce Temkin’s Experience-based differentiation maturity)

Map out your business processes and pay careful attention to handover points between channels, e.g. online to phone. If you work for the government, examine cross-agency baton-change points, e.g. commuters changing from buses to trains. Those are typically areas where organisational tectonic plates can meet, causing user experience havoc. Customer journey mapping (CJM) will help you address these kinds of issues.

You may also find it useful to develop a set of staff personas, and check the state of the systems and applications portfolio supporting staff work. Draw up a clear picture of your IT infrastructure and its organisation.

Le fric, c’est chic. Freak out!

UX is not about being nice to users; it’s about money. In effect, UX activities aim at enhancing productivity, improving conversion rates, and delivering higher ROI, to list a few, which ultimately translate into either reduced costs or higher income. Therefore, try to get a grasp on your UX-related expenditures, which may include marketing and IT budgets. The goal here is to identify opportunities for rationalisation, to align and synchronise investments where appropriate, to ensure equity across business units (thereby preventing asymmetric implementations between rich and poor units, for instance), and to deliver a higher ROI.

Finally, understand your stakeholder’s priorities, drivers, culture and values. Don’t forget to look at any regulations framing your activities.

All of the above may sound like a lot of work, but if you have already got a business strategic plan, you can piggyback on most of the information in there and concentrate on UX stuff like UMM, persona development, customer journey mapping, etc. Don’t bloat your head with detailed information and avoid at all costs a too lengthy data gathering processes. You’ll get stuck otherwise.

Where do you want to go?

Now, it’s time to make projections in the future. It’s not about wishful thinking or where you think you might be; it’s where you want to be.

Once the data gathered in the previous step is analysed, some obvious gaps will surface. It’s then time to find creative, innovative ways to bridge those gaps, and make informed choices.

Choosing and prioritising actions

One straightforward goal could be to gain, say, one full step of the UXMM ladder, or move up to the next step. Depending on where you are in the scale, moving up to the next step may require some years of carefully planned and timed actions.

Samsung cultural makeover, for example, took ten years of hard work and hefty investments – which included the establishment of an in-house design academy – to change from a status of me-too designer of cheap electronic products to winning awards in international design contests.

The outcomes of this phase are:

• the strategic vision
• mission statement
• key UX principles
• key objectives and areas of improvement

Developing UX principles is very important; they are the guiding stars to all of the great things that you are going to create for your customers. An example of UX principle could be “Involve users in every phase of the design process”.

Spelling out the above is crucial for the successful communication of the strategy, and to generate commitment, motivation and engagement within the troops. Make sure you address any issues and zap any roadblocks that may lie in your way.

Planning your journey

Start by collecting any low hanging fruit, now. How the plan is laid out may vary depending on your organisation’s needs, but it typically charts who does what when, and what needs to be in place when. You’ll also want to know when do you’ve reached your targets. Metrics are your friend here.

Getting the job done

Roll up your sleeves and charge ahead. Constantly monitor changing conditions along the way to make any necessary adjustments of course and don’t forget to celebrate when you hit your targets.

Final thoughts

The higher an organisation is up the UXMM ladder, the more the UX strategy becomes fully embedded in the overall strategic plan (as opposed to being a separate, standalone thing). Indeed, when UX is part of an organisation’s fabric – not treated separately – its strategic nature is core to the business, like it is the case at Amazon, Apple, IKEA and BMW.

UX practitioners and designers alike will benefit form talking the talk and walking the walk of their businesses and/or clients. You may find useful some readings on strategic planning, and I’d recommend the following:

• Simplified Strategic Planning, by Robert Bradford and J. Peter Duncan with Brian Tracy
• High Impact Tools and Activities for Strategic Planning, by Rod Napier, Clint Sidle and Patrick Sanaghan

When looking at a product have you ever heard yourself saying “why would anyone buy this?” or “why would people use this?” – I have. Unfortunately, there have been many times when I look at products and experience the “I don’t get it moment”. I mean, I understand the functions being demonstrated but I don’t understand what problem the product team is trying to solve. So we put our doubts aside and start working on the product anyway as you know at some point you can help simplify, redesign and make usability improvements. But something still niggles at you. What is missing?

Understanding value

The problem is we don’t spend enough time up front on projects discussing, assessing, defining and refining the value of what we make. We jump too quickly into design and build before applying rigor to what we make. Its easy to get lost in the product detail: a screen, code and forget what the product’s value is and who you are building it for. Everything we do should be to help move the product a little closer to success. Every question we ask, every piece of research we do, every design or sketch we make, every product walk through we have with stakeholders, should all help iterate towards understanding the product value – the copy, a widget, a function, a screen, the product framework, the product, the product line and where that product line lives in and around other products in the company and the marketplace should say something about its value.

we don’t spend enough time up front on projects discussing, assessing, defining and refining the value of what we make.

Stop and assess

We must dedicate more time up front, at the start of any project or before we jump into developing a new feature, feature set or redesign effort to better assess the value of stuff we make. What makes people want something in the first place, use it, continue to use it, buy more of the same, treasure it and keep it? The following list is by no means exhaustive, rather it attempts to get to the heart of why something is valuable:

We should…

• do our homework and investigate how product decisions are made;
• show how we can help the team make better product decisions;
• provide research methods to test assumptions along the way;
• ask: what does this product do? (what makes this product tick?);
• ask: what do you love about the product? (why would you buy it?);
• ask: what does the product team love about the product? (are they passionate about what they are working on?);
• ask: what does sales love about the product? (are we helping them sell more?);
• ask: could you sell the product? (if you were tasked to sell the product could you? Would you want to face customers with the product you have today?);
• ask: what features would you sell? (any stand out features? any useless features? any features you would lead with when selling?);
• ask: what are customers saying about the product? (does it really help them?);
• ask: at what point would you want to throw the product away? (at what point does the product lose its value?);
• ask: at what point would you want to upgrade? (what would you base your decision on?);
• ask: how do you want the product to shine in the market place? (what would make it stand out?).

By asking questions about the product and its value you are by doing this in fact demonstrating value. Your role is to test assumptions and ensure that you provide clear value for users and determine what deeper research is needed. That is the sweet spot – providing ways for us to manage, facilitate, guide and educate product teams to take the necessary time up front and at every stage to deliver value as we drive towards product success. We don’t do this enough and the product team often does not have a shared set of design principles, philosophies or design tenets to hold onto as the product develops.

Dont Ask Permission

Ask yourself, is there general agreement on the team about the product’s value? Is this ever defined? Don’t ask for permission. You are all in the right position now to question the value of what you work on and to help improve stuff. Questioning, improving upon and nailing down the value of something helps set our strategy in the right direction, helps us focus on building the right stuff and helps avoid storms ahead. So get clarity around:

1. Understanding the value of what we do
2. Understanding the value of the stuff we work on
3. Showing the value of what we do to others
4. Appreciating the value of the people who end up using the products we make
5. Appreciating and leveraging on the value of the product team skills available to help make better stuff
6. Assessing and finding value up front before we start making stuff

So what stuff do you value in your life and why?

I look forward to an ongoing discussion with you and to learn from your successes and failures.

We often discuss the need for us to be designing for an experience. And we talk about the importance of experience design – and design generally – playing a strategic role in business decisions. But we’re less forthcoming when it comes to discussing what is an experience strategy?

The question of what, exactly, do I mean when I talk about experience strategy has been coming up a bit recently. In part, that’s because a good chunk of the work I do revolves around experiences; and in part it’s topical here in Sydney since UX Book Club has been reading Subject to change by the folks at Adaptive Path as our title for June.

As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of discussing experiences, and strategy, and what an experience strategy actually is. So here is my definition of experience strategy in one statement:

An experience strategy is that collection of activities that an organization chooses to undertake to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions which, when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way; that is unique, distinct & distinguishable from that available from a competitor.

Let’s deconstruct that a bit and see what I’m trying to say.

An experience strategy is that collection of activities…

Delivering products or services, or hybrid systems of both, is a complex undertaking that involves many people executing many tasks and activities. Some of these activities are really obvious: the sales staff in your retail store; the product engineer; the call-centre staff. And some are not so obvious: like the person responsible for driving the forklift in the warehouse to move spare parts to where they’re needed; or the person responsible for the servicing of the forklift. Some activities have a much more direct impact on the end customer, but all contribute to that customer’s perception of us and our products. And if a change to an activity is required in order to deliver on your new experience, then that should be mentioned in your strategy.

That collection of activities is often summarized in the experience vision. Subject to Change includes a very nice example of an experience vision from Eastman Kodak over 100 years ago: “You press the button, we do the rest”. Or Apple’s experience vision for the iPod: “All your music, any time, any where”[1]. Drawing on a literary heritage Cindy Chastain puts forward the idea of an experience theme as the coherent, binding articulation of our intent. Both work for me; the theme/vision helps us not only choose the activities needed in execution, they also help to galvanise and coordinate the way these activities are carried out.

…that an organization chooses to undertake…

Strategy is about two things: compromise and intent. When we devise a strategy we are necessarily indicating an intent or aim. If there is no goal then you don’t have a strategy: you have a to-do list.
We choose certain activities over others for a number of reasons:

• We can’t do everything;
• We don’t need to do everything in order to reach our intended goal;
• There are some activities that will actually take us further from our goal.

A core component of an experience strategy is also an articulation of the what. That is, the collection of activities described above. The choice of activities is also a way of putting into action a specific design solution – the how.

…to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions…

There are actually two points in here worth identifying and discussing. The first is that the experience we deliver is the sum of a series of separate interactions. I like the way Eric Reiss articulated this concept in his article explaining how he thinks of user experience. Our experience at a restaurant is more than the food; more than the service; more than the wine list or the decor. It’s each of those things, and all of those things, and it’s the way in which each is choreographed with respect to the others.

But there’s a second facet here that is important: not every interaction has to be exceptional or even good. It’s OK for some components to be average, satisfactory or mundane. This is one of the choices that we make in selecting our activities: not only which ones to carry out, but at which we’re going to excel. A memorable experience isn’t necessarily made up entirely of memorable interactions. Making every interaction memorable might make the entire experience too expensive for anyone to afford; or too time-consuming; or impractical. And so we’re back to compromise: what are the critical components of the experience that…

…when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, [hard-to-replicate] way…

We’ll go out of business quickly if our offering is inferior. That’s pretty simple. When all of those activities are brought together we need to have something that sings, and – more importantly – sings in the hearts and minds of our customers. Our offering needs to be meaningful for our customers – and there are ways that we can try to achieve that, through our design process – but our aim should be clear.

…offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way…

Businesses that wish to be profitable design experiences that are meaningful for their customers. Businesses that wish to remain profitable in the long term offer something that is not only meaningful but also hard to copy. In business parlance that’s call a sustainable competitive advantage and it’s the shining difference between companies like Apple or Toyota and the also-rans in the market-place.

Think of it this way: if your offering is easy to copy; easy to replicate – you won’t be the only one offering it for long. And that just means your profits will very quickly be eroded as you shift from a value proposition built on the strength of the experience, to a price war driven by operational and scale efficiency.

…that is unique, distinct & distinguishable from that available from a competitor.

Your offering – as good as it is; as compelling as it is; as hard to reproduce – needs to be uniquely identified with your organization for you to really reap the benefits. There’s a great photo of Lance Armstrong – 7 time Tour de France winner – shown in Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences in which Lance is shown on a stationary exercise bike warming up for an event (he’s not sweating so I assume he’s not cooling down). From his ears are two white cords that converge and disappear into his pocket. He’s quite clearly listening to an iPod even though the product is nowhere to be seen.

There’s a restaurant in Sydney named Tetsuya’s – one of the finest restaurant’s you’ll find, anywhere – that dishes up what can only be described as an eating experience. 13 courses complemented by a 7-course degustation wine list that delights, and tantalises, hints and astounds your taste senses over several hours. The experience is unique, and distinctive.

And one of my favourite distinctive experiences: driving a Mini Cooper S (original or modern).

These are experiences that are exceptional (as a whole), memorable, and worth telling to others. They sell themselves through the passionate response of the people who have already experienced them, and they are uniquely connected to the name and the brand behind them. There is no mistaking the experience of driving a Mini Cooper with any other car. Other consumer electronics manufacturers don’t design and make products like Apple. In fact, if they did, it would so clearly be inspired by Apple that the other company would be doing Apple’s advertising for them.

Finis

Delivering on an experience requires the coordinated effort of many parts of an organization. Whilst the experience vision or theme provides the guiding light for those efforts, the experience strategy takes that vision and articulates the specific areas of focus around which the organization will strive to differentiate itself in the market by crafting that experience in a particular way.

The strategy holds and speaks to both the destination and the journey and in so doing bridges the gap between concept and action.

I’d like to send out a big thank you to Cindy Chastain, Joe Lamantia, Donna Spencer & Ruth Ellison for reading through the draft of this article. Their time and insights were much appreciated.

[1]: In Subject to Change the authors refer to these as experience strategies.

In my opinion they’re not. A strategy encompasses both a goal and the path. These statements are vision statements. At best they describe the experience – such as the example experience on page 28 of the book – but without the activities needed to deliver on that vision I don’t class these as strategies.