How I approach strategic UX design
Great Strategic UX fosters positive change throughout an organisation, aligning stakeholder priorities with exceptional customer outcomes to create a unified UX vision.
When stakeholders and designers are on the same page about which efforts will enhance products and services, there's a natural buy-in for UX initiatives.
Meaningful conversations influence product ideas, uncovering common ground where teams and squads can collaborate effectively. In this environment, UX is seen as a powerful, positive force that drives success.
Strategic UX planning matches stakeholder priorities with customer outcomes. Generally, we need to answer the question: If we do a really good job at (x), how will it improve our customer's lives?
Backcasting workshops
We start by envisioning the future we want to create and then work backwards to determine what we should focus on now to build towards that future. This technique, known as backcasting, helps to clarify a shared vision and understand the next iterative steps needed to move forward. It's important to acknowledge that the path to that future is unlikely to be a straight line. Backcasting is particularly useful for aligning key stakeholders during sprint planning, project planning, setting OKRs, and strategy planning.
UX project planning workshops
In this hands-on collaborative series of workshops, we explore how to design the right things and how to design them right, ultimately saving time and delivering meaningful customer experience improvements.
Here's what we cover:
Aligning on Business Priorities: Understanding what matters most to your key stakeholders.
Defining Your Customer: Identifying who you're designing this for. Do we know?
Understanding Customer Needs: Diving deep into what your customers truly want and need.
Do we know enough about the customer? Evaluating what you know about your customers and identifying any gaps.
Planning Customer Research: Determining what research we can and should do, to help you learn more about your customers.
Defining Customer Outcomes: If we do a great job on <stakeholder priorities>, how will we improve someone's life?
Defining a Vision: Painting a picture of how things will be better, both for the business and the customers.
Definition of 'Done': Establishing clear criteria for sprint/project completion.
Creating User Stories: Translating customer needs into actionable narratives.
Prioritizing User Stories: Deciding which stories to tackle first.
Prioritizing Features: Determining which features are most important.
Measuring Success: Establishing key metrics to track progress.
Understanding the Cost of Inaction: Recognizing the consequences of not designing the right thing.
This workshop is ideal for sprint planning, project planning, and major feature design or redesign.
Mapping out a UX vision
Crafting a compelling UX Vision is a crucial part of engaging key stakeholders. It contrasts what the experience is today with what we want the experience to be tomorrow.
The goal of the vision story is to show what a human-centered version of the future looks like. We’re showing that every decision turns into a UX decision. Visions are story versions of customer/ux outcomes, they are a story about what the change described in the customer outcome will look like. We use visions to support the principle of Show, Don't Tell.
It can be useful in some cases to translate the written vision into a high level journey map, to visually show how things will change.