[Sigia-l] [IxDA Discuss] User Experience Strategy

[prady]

This is an interesting thread, but there are few problems nested in
this debabte.

All the point of views are very limited and biased from their core
descipline -- IA, UX, Aesthetics. I am not saying it is necessarily
wrong, but that can only take you so far to build strategy. These
desciplene may feed into User Experience Strategy, but the question
remains how do you arrive at this strategy? If we focus on debating
Form & Function, we will never get to that.

The other problem is in implying UX strategy is always directly linked
for innovation for future prospects. This notion assumes that UX
drives the business strategy. IMHO, it may be a case for Google, Apple
and few others, but largely UX Strategy is a micro strategy for
business/marketing/IT strategy.

>From that POV, it is important to understand what is business strategy
and when and how it seeks innovation from UX. This is important
because strategy is derived from business needs, not from
make-belief-notions of "experience".

It is important to know why is your firm in the business. If my guess
is right it is for maximizing profit (not maximizing UX; that's
secondary), while minimizing resource deployment. What is important to
business should be the starting point when we make a case from UX.
Experiences are important, but they are mostly trade-off for something
else, and that's why understanding big-picture strategy is key. In
most of the cases (with exceptions to Google/Apple, et al.), it is
worth while to plug-in UX Strategy with business or marketing
strategy.

There are many places where you can go to plug your UX strategy -- one
place is Marketing. (This is just an example and I am not implying
that you should always anchore with Marketing). Most of the marketing
units inside established firms are looking at customer segments,
loyality, voice of customers, demographic trends, competition to
establish their marketing focus. It will be more effective to talk
about UX Strategy with relations to these efforts. Otherwise, UX
remains pure art.

I felt that the debate so far was very bottom-up: desciple>IA>UX strategy>??
I am trying to flip it with top-down approach: Customer/Market needs>
Business Strategy> Marketing Strategy> UX strategy> IA etc...

Thouhgt?

Prady


> I've given a presentation on the topic, but haven't compiled it into
> a stand-alone format yet. But there are others like James Cascio and
> the Institute for the Future who are doing similar things. Some notes
> and references of mine are here:
> http://noisebetweenstations.com/personal/weblogs/?cat=131
>
> Best,
> Victor
>
> On Jul 30, 2007, at 5:20 PM, Peter Morville wrote:
> >
> > ...what about the relationship between user experience, design,
> > innovation, and
> > futures techniques?
> > ...
> > Are folks doing anything along these lines today? Thanks!
>
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