Strategy: Design Strategy

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses how to prevent a project whose goal is defining UX strategy from devolving into a tactical exercise. First, our panelists considers how important it is that a project team have a shared understanding of what strategy is, but also acknowledge that, even among UX professionals, not everyone defines UX strategy in the same way. Our panelists define the terms strategy, tactics, business strategy, product strategy, UX strategy, and design strategy.

Our expert panel agrees, only once a business and a product team have aligned on their strategic goals can UX professionals understand how best to support all of those goals. Our panelists also recognize the importance of understanding where UX strategy work fits within a company’s projects and roles. Finally, the panel looks at how to create UX strategy artifacts that support business goals and propel their company toward achieving them. Read More

One characteristic of good UX design is that it’s unnoticeable to users because it reflects the way they work. As many companies scale up—especially growing startups—they struggle to add value without adding complexity. This is one reason we’re seeing a trend toward adding secondary navigation at the left of many applications. Often, one horizontal navigation bar across the top of an application is just not scalable.

Your focus should be on simplicity. The main question you need to ask yourself when considering your user-interface design is how you can help your application scale. How can a company grow their offering while keeping the spirit of an intuitive product alive? Read More

Maybe you’re excitedly reviewing research questions for your upcoming study on internal communication and messaging, and your manager asks how your work will impact the product team’s larger communication strategy. While you’d thought about the larger communication strategy at the beginning of the project, its importance has slowly waned as you focused on creating your interview guide. Or worse, you’re presenting your research findings on improving the usability of a tool in wide use, and your main stakeholder asks how this will improve awareness and adoption of the tool overall. Somehow, that initial goal faded during the research planning discussions.

These sorts of things can happen all too easily. Sometimes we throw ourselves into planning and executing our user research, getting caught up in the details, until someone barges in and asks a simple question: Why? Why are we doing this? What is the overall goal of the research? Read More