Dear Reader,
Creating a UX strategy is complex. Strategy isn't just about analysis, market research, and road maps.
It's about not stepping on the toes of other product and business areas and aligning upward. It's about facilitating decisions.
A good strategy is about making big moves. But that requires buy-in, alignment, participation, and collaboration with many different internal stakeholders that are busy and have their own agendas.
Anytime you bring a group of people together to work on strategy, it will be hard.
How do you overcome that?
Let's look at a collaborative process that brings stakeholders together to reach our goal.
Here it comes to save the day!
But does it?
There is no perfect strategy sprint you can copy and paste from someone else, and there is no perfect strategy workshop, canvas, or framework that will work perfectly for your company.
It has to be unique.
That uniqueness is one of the reasons why strategy is so hard. It is unique to your industry, your company, your team, and your users.
But don't worry, that doesn't mean you're alone.
A strategy is a long-term action framework, but it still has to be tended after "delivery." A strategy is at heart a hypothesis, and it has to be checked. That's why a good strategy should be emergent, which means it’s a living thing that you should guide.
A successful UX Strategy plan is a sequence of gatherings between the UX team and stakeholders. The plan should:
But that doesn't mean we ALL need to meet and work together ALL the time. What happens between the group activities needs to utilize individual expertise and work.
These strategy maps are inspired by Sam Kaner's work with participatory decision-making and multi-stakeholder collaborations. I've adapted them to reflect a UX strategy plan.
But this is just a taste of the full process. There's much more involved.
Do you want to learn more about the full process of designing a unique UX strategy for your company?
Join the webinar on June 8th→
Until next week!
Hannah Baker
Educator & Co-Founder
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
5 Signals That Hint at the Future of AI Interactions by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, The AI landscape is changing fast, and the way we interact with AI is changing even faster. Who knows what the UX of AI will be in 2035? Right now, most of us talk to AI through clunky, chat-based interfaces. But new hardware hints at something more human and ambient. Today, I want to share 5 signals: surprising examples from today that suggest where the future might end up, and a method used by future foresight...
When Your Strategy Slides Hit Silence By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, I’ve shared strategy before, and watched it stall. Not because it was wrong. But because the room didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t looking for feedback. I wasn’t asking for approval. I was hoping they’d pick it up and run with it. Instead? Confusion. Silence. They didn’t see what I saw. Not because they didn’t care. But because I’d built the strategy, not the on-ramp they needed to step into it. It’s something I’ve...
Let's Talk about Liquid Glass by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Goodbye, paper-like design. Hello, moving blobs of liquid glass! Play button blunder from Apple Apple's new paradigm in aesthetics is both cool and potentially awful at the same time. "Rather than trying to simply re-create a material from the physical world, Liquid Glass is a new digital meta-material that dynamically bends and shapes light." -Apple Just when you thought skeuomorphism was dead, it rears its realistic head again. I...