UX Strategy

Put the human at the centre

What is an experience vision?

Experience Visions are an essential ingredient for driving organisations to deliver better-designed products and services. By telling a human-centered story of how our improved user experience will improve the lives of customers and users, we can get the entire organisation bought into our mission.

SOLUTIONS

CORPORATE STRATEGY

Increase Revenue

Reduce Costs

Increase New Business

Increase Existing Business

Long Term Sustainability

Shared understanding

CURRENT EXPERIENCE

PROBLEMS

TO SOLVE

Problem value metrics - how much do these problems cost us?

Success metrics - Yes we have /

no we have not achieved that

EXPERIENCE

VISION /

Aspirational story

of outcome

CORPORATE VISION

"If we do a great job of our corporate vision, what does that look like for our customers?"

Progress metrics - How close does this get us to achieving success?

SOLUTIONS

UX OUTCOME

/ Improvement to someone's life

– Source: Experience Vision diagram ALStarr75

Our experience vision is where we want our organisation to end up. Yet our peers, stakeholders, and leadership will only understand its true value when they can see what today’s experience looks like. We need to surface the actual experience our current users face, so those in our organisation can see the difference our experience vision will make.

Tell the story of what great UX looks like

Stories are what make us human. They are what motivate us to push for change. At the core of a great experience, a vision is a compelling story about how a better user experience will improve people’s lives.

If you don’t get executive support for your experience vision, it will die on the vine. You’ll know you’ve succeeded when your organization’s leadership is proudly telling your experience story to everyone they meet, explaining how this is everyone’s top priority.

Translating the benefits of your improved user experience into the priorities that propel stakeholders into action and connecting the dots between great UX and key business objectives will have executives begging you to make your vision a reality.

Driving your product roadmap from your experience vision

We need to get the experience vision into the organization. Our experience vision needs to start telling the story of what great UX looks like. It’s time to put together your experience vision team, craft your story, create your envisionments, and gain the support of your senior leadership with a compelling experience vision.

Every item in the product roadmap will either help us get closer to making the experience vision a reality, or it won’t. Since the roadmap dictates the product and service priorities, it’s critical we make sure we’ve prioritized those items that get us closer to the vision.

Drive the product roadmap directly from the experience vision and reframe features into the problems your team needs to solve, which, in turn, will make the products and services more competitive.

UX metrics for your experience vision

What gets measured gets done. Once our experience vision is out there, we need to know how much progress the organisation has made toward making it a reality. What are the essential UX metrics to complement our experience vision efforts?

UPLOAD PHOTOS

SUCCESS

• Ability to accept customer supplied pictures

PROBLEM VALUE METRICS

Current photographer cost

Photographer availability

Customer claims backlog

Customer wait times

The team asked customers to send in photos of damage
and found they did not meet quality requirements to
process the claim.

Achievement

The team then created instructions on how to take photos
and again asked customers to send in photos. The photos
improved but still not good enough.

Achievement

The team then sent out example photos and said ‘If you
have damage to your car, take photos like this’ or ‘If
you have damage to your house, take photos like this’.
The quality of the photos improved enough to use for
the claim.

Achievement (MVP)

(Each step in this process can be communicated
as progress measures, steps towards success)

• Ability to auto open claims from supplied pictures

SUCCESS

EMERGENCY DISPATH

SUCCESS

• Ability to co-ordinate emergency dispatch to multiple
customers in an area (thousands of people hit by a storm)

• Construction contracts for emergency construction

• Rental contracts for emergency vehicle replacements

EMERGENCY DISPATH

SUCCESS

• Selecting vendors capability

• Autobody relationships

• Ability to supply the debit cards and the accounting that
goes with that

– Source: Example Progress Metrics ALStarr75

The mindset shifts your stakeholders need for successful experience visions

What got us here isn’t going to get us there. Change starts with how we (and our key stakeholders) view how we design products and services.

Mindset Shift 1: UX Strategy is a long-term game

• We’re influencing change across an entire organisation.

• This doesn’t happen quickly.

• This is why we pick a 5-year experience vision.

• It has the stability to keep us focused for a long time.

• We can approach it with one baby-step at a time.

• 5-year visions give us a clear definition of the direction we need to go.

• Having the long time frame gives us a chance to recover from setbacks.

Mindset Shift 2: Teams can succeed with their own vision

• For many teams, having everyone heading towards the same vision is
a new set of skills.

• It takes a while to adapt to a long-term approach to thinking about
design and delivery.

• Any vision puts the user’s experience into critical focus.

• Gives the teams a way to centre everything they do around their users.

• Letting them have their own vision reduces friction.

• It often just validates what they’ve been doing so far.

• Giving them a chance to refine their thinking.

• Use this as an opportunity to build up experiential research.

• Trust that experiential research will guide the team to a better vision.

• That vision will likely merge with what other teams are working on.

Mindset Shift 3: Aspirational Experience should drive critical decisions

• Decision makers (UX influencers) are used to using business criteria for
critical decisions.

• Getting buy-in on the UX outcome puts the improvement in a person’s
life as a new goal.

• We build the aspirational experience vision off of the UX outcome.

• Decision makers can now ask “Which options get us closer to improving
the person’s life?”

• When we keep the aspirational experience vision alive, decision
makers can make this a habit.

• We succeed when it becomes second nature.

Mindset Shift 4: Research is about building confidence

• We can prioritize roadmap options with Bruce McCarthy’s formula:

Priority = (Value ÷ Effort) x Confidence

• Projects that deliver the highest amount of value with the lowest
amount of effort get prioritized first.

• However, it all relies on our confidence that we understand both the
value and the effort.

• Research is the tool we use to build confidence.

• It’s not just validating we have designed something well.

• Jen Cardello’s breakdown - research lead - Fidelity:

• First, make sure you’ve identified ‘The Right Problem’ (80% of
research effort)

• Then, make sure you have settled on ‘The Right Solution’ (15% of
research effort)

• Lastly, you can ensure you’ve ‘Built It Right’ (5% of research effort)

Bonus Mindset Shift: ”Good Enough” isn’t good enough

• Standard development, research, and design practices help us separate
good ideas from poor ideas.

• Experience visions are a tool to help us ‘separate great ideas from
good ideas’.

• There are too many good ideas that just make the product worse.

• We need tools for pulling out the great ideas.

• Great ideas are those that get us closer to the aspirational
experience vision.

• Good enough results in costly UX debt.

Download my FREE Experience Vision poster to help you put the human at the centre of your strategy