RE: How to accomodate your company's user experience strategy with vended products

<it occurred to because I happen to be in a company that communicates
strategy internally very poorly and one of my other jobs is to change
that and champion the UX practice.>
 
The company's positioning statement - its brand essence if you will -
should drive the UX strategy. If the company's essence hasn't been
clearly articulated, attempting to determine an UX strategy could result
in either hit or miss. The company's strategy should drive communication
in all channels with UX being just one component.
 
An example: The corporate brand philosophy is to communicate speed and
efficiency. The philosophy should be used when determining user needs.
Does the site's organization offer the most direct approach (speed and
efficiency) to satisfy the user's needs?
 
<it allows you to identify the stakeholders, their different
expectations/interpretations of what that strategy is, and help improve
or at least eliminate the big flaws in that strategy (or create one when
one doesn't exist).>
 
Stakeholders include more segments (influencers, media, press, etc.)
than just those (neophyte, intermediate, expert) who will be affected by
a UX strategy. While your stakeholders will be interested in the success
of the company, the actors are more interested in whether or not your UX
strategy meets their expectations, their needs and wants.
 
<guidelines then, should be easy to derive from the strategy. For
example, if the overall UX strategy is for example "to be the company
customers look to for X kind of products", then you can outline what
aspects of "X kind products" need to be consistent throughout. As you
mentioned, brand alignment, consistent behavior, visual design, etc, are
probably going to be some of them.>
 
The example given is a desired position for a company-at-large, not for
a specific product the company is going to create or procure. Brand
alignment and visual design should be driven from the corporate brand
identity. If the company pushes products, the product's brand becomes a
satellite brand in the case of Microsoft or a lead brand in the case of
Procter & Gamble but there has to be an inherent overarching strategy
that supports all brand platforms. Addressing consistent behavior--from
a UX perspective--is digital channel specific only and does not address
how the company's strategy should be executed in other channels (i.e.,
print, radio, TV, billboards, etc.) A UX strategy can't begin to
articulate those user expectations nor should it have to.

________________________________

From: Livia Labate [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 5:51 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AIGAExperienceDesign] How to accomodate your company's
user experience strategy with vended products


I'm dealing with a similar problem; instead of an external product
coming
into the company, it's for several and upcoming new products we're going
to create in-house. I've started on this job recently and identified
that
the UX strategy is non-existent, much less documented.

To your point, if there is no documentation on what that strategy is,
have
it documented as soon as possible. The process of documenting is more
valuable than the resulting documentation - it allows you to identify
the
stakeholders, their different expectations/interpretations of what that
strategy is, and help improve or at least eliminate the big flaws in
that
strategy (or create one when one doesn't exist).

Your guidelines then, should be easy to derive from the strategy. For
example, if the overall UX strategy is for example "to be the company
customers look to for X kind of products", then you can outline what
aspects of "X kind products" need to be consistent throughout. As you
mentioned, brand alignment, consistent behavior, visual design, etc, are
probably going to be some of them.

I have seen lots of recomendations about creating guidelines but the
majority is focused on deriving them from one specific project, you will
probably need something more overarching, like deriving it from that
strategy.

This is a model I am currently experimenting with and it occured to
because I happen to be in a company that communicates strategy
internally
very poorly and one of my other jobs is to change that and champion the
UX
practice.

Let me know if you're interested, I can try to share more about the
process.


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PURPOSE OF THE LIST:  The objective of AIGA Experience Design is to build an interdisciplinary community of professionals who design for a world in which experiences are increasingly digital and connected. This list has been established as a forum for the exchange of information among community members.

TO VIEW ARCHIVED MESSAGES: visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AIGAExperienceDesign

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