[Sigia-l] Strategists (What do they do that IA's don't?)

[Whitney Quesenbery]

>As a strategist, I work closely with designers so that I can not only
>suggest solutions to design problems

As usual, "your mileage will vary" depending in part on the kind of company 
and what they do for a living.

In my experience, I most often see strategists in situations where there 
are several loosely related projects that need to be coordinated, whether 
they are different parts of a suite of tools or different marketing/product 
design initiatives.

When they are good, their role in helping manage "direction" is invaluable. 
They often have communication, mediation or facilitation skills that go 
beyond the individual project visions and implementation skills.

 From some of the other comments, I think that we need to think a little 
bit about separating ROLES, no matter how they are aligned in JOBS. Perhaps 
the titles will settle out in time, but we are still inventing the future, 
but for now, we are likely to see overlaps in job descriptions and 
variations in how companies put their teams together.

Perhaps the simple answer is to be flexible about titles, clear about roles 
and aware of overlaps in our individual skills with others on a team.

Here's an example:

Most of the time, I function in a design role, and do usability or ia as 
part of what needs to be done to get the design job done. Recently, I have 
been working on one aspect of a project, but do not control the overall 
site design and content. I was asked to conduct a usability test of the 
site. During the post-test brainstorming session, I had to think carefully 
about how to communicate what I had actually seen participants do and what 
I thought the underlying problem was...without leaping to dictate design 
solutions. I did make design suggestions, but always with my "design hat" 
on rather than my "usability specialists hat" on.

This may seem tortured, but as we talked about ways to improve the site, it 
was important to separate the problem from the proposed solution.

There is a difference between (something like):

"Even when the content they were looking for was just one click away, 
participants rarely clicked on the "XXXX" top level menu item, but when 
they were guided into that section of the site, they indicated that these 
pages were a good grouping. Do we all feel confident that this is a 
terminology problem? Let's look at some of the words they used to describe 
this content and see if there is a better label to use."

and

"The label on "XXXX" is not understood and should be changed to "YYYY"


In the first example, we collected several ideas from the group, and then 
the site designer took some time to make a choice that "worked" for him 
within the overall design. Buy-in all around.

In the second, example -- one I see all too often --- the group has not 
even agreed on the nature of the problem, and ends up arguing about the 
solution, or even about who gets to propose the solution.



Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at WQusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

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