Overview of Experience Strategy, a method of planning for a good user experience.

1. Experience Strategy
an Overview

2. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What is an Experience Strategy?
• An approach to defining and planning for a
product’s user experience.
• A recognized process that’s central to user
centered design practice.
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3. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What is an Experience Strategy?
A clearly defined set of principles based
on user needs and desires that guide
design and development decisions.
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4. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What does an Experience Strategy do?
A good experience strategy:
• Deals well with rapid changes in technology and the
marketplace
• Drives team and stakeholder consensus
• Conveys clarity and fosters empathy for the user
• Helps team to focus on the need, not the solution
• Guides all subsequent design decisions
• Answers: “Why?”
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5. Experience Strategy
an Overview
Why would we need one?
Do we really need another document? We already have:
• Business and Marketing objectives
Identify business needs and how to advance products and brand
• Requirements
Identify what features and functions to build
• Market research
Identify opportunities in the marketplace
None of these activities are wholly driven by
user needs or desires.
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6. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What about customer feedback?
Sometimes…
Yes!
Drains
are the
I want future.
a drain!
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7. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What about customer feedback?
But more often…
Why?
I want a
window!
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8. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What about customer feedback?
But more often… It sounds
more like
I want to:
you need a
• Feel the sunshine chair on the
• Smell fresh air porch.
• Talk to the neighbors
• Watch the cars go by
• Feed the birds
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9. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What about customer feedback?
Customer feedback is critical to our work, of course.
But it only identifies problems - and not very well.
An experience strategy provides a
means to solve those problems.
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10. Experience Strategy
an Overview
Why would we need one?
Because to customers,
the experience is the product.
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11. Experience Strategy
an Overview
Why would we need one?
The System How Users See It
Interface Interface
Business
Organization
Programming/
Data/
Hosting
MAGIC
Source: Adaptive Path, 2008
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12. Experience Strategy
an Overview
How about an example?
• Product Vision:
The center of a Microsoft entertainment
ecosystem
• Market opportunity: a cheaper iPod • Experience Vision:
• Feature-rich Take your music with you anywhere
• Revenue streams • Created a new experience,
• Features with no basis in user needs not new features
(subscriptions, music reorganization, sharing, • Revolutionary
TV connectors)
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13. OK, Iʼm Sold.
What’s in an Experience Strategy?

14. Experience Strategy
an Overview
The Experience Strategy produces:
1. Experience Vision
the experience promise once the product is developed; the “North Star”
2. Experience Goals
the user’s desired specific results, which become the “experience principles”
3. Strategies
the things we’ll design or do to achieve the user’s experience goals
4. Audience Groups
general categories of our users; their needs, desires and culture
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15. Experience Strategy
an Overview
How does a UX team create the strategy?
1. Gather requirements and conduct research – with
users and project stakeholders (product/project
managers, developers, business analysts, etc)
2. Create a presentation and document that defines
the product’s experience vision, and shows steps
to meet that vision.
3. Present to project stakeholders, get feedback and
buyoff.
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16. Experience Strategy
an Overview
So when the Experience Strategy is finished…
The project has a workable roadmap:
instructions on how to proceed with design:
• Information design
• Interaction and visual design
• Conceptual Design
• Technical design
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17. Experience Strategy
an Overview
What’s not in it?
Because the strategy is a roadmap, it doesn’t include:
• Site maps, wireframes or visual designs
• Content strategy
• Personas
• Requirements
• Project plans or timelines
…but it would call for these things.
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18. Experience Strategy
an Overview
Sample:
Advantage Experience Strategy (handout)
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19. Experience Strategy
an Overview
Discussion/
Questions/
Thanks for your time.
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