Strategy: Design Strategy

Design matters for all businesses. In fact, eight in ten people are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. But, in many organizations, designers don’t have a seat in the C-Suite or any say in making larger business decisions. Often, designers and their business stakeholders don’t even speak the same language.

Time and time again, I see designers underselling their work internally because they don’t know how to show its connection to business strategy. As a consequence, companies fail to fund design work that could be very effective in helping them to tackle competitive threats. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses how objectives and key results (OKRs) can inform UX design. The panel explores how the use of OKRs differs from traditional requirements gathering. Our panelists then discuss the relationship between OKRs and product strategy and common pitfalls of using OKRs.

We also recommend a couple of books that could help you apply OKRs in your work. Finally, I discuss the importance of keeping business needs in mind. Read More

In the first part of my series on applied UX strategy, I outlined a UX maturity framework. Parts 2–4 of this series provided in-depth coverage of some operational and tactical aspects of implementing UX strategy, including requirements for product designers, employing platform thinking to ship quality products, setting up a design team, and creating a design culture. Now, I’ll begin my discussion of how to solve business problems through design.

In Part 5.1, I’ll discuss the use of a shared language between business and design, then solving business problems through design. Finally, I’ll consider the transformation of the product designer’s role in depth, which progresses through three stages:

1. Helping product teams identify and solve user problems, which I’ll cover here in Part 5.1
2. Evaluating maximal outcomes for problem solutions, which I’ll cover in Part 5.2
3. Moving from problem solving to innovation, which I’ll also cover in Part 5.2 Read More