UX Strategy

UX Strategy

by Jaime Levy
Released May 2015
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781449372866

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Book description

User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team craft innovative multi-device products that people want to use.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, UX/UI designer, product manager, or part of an intrapreneurial team, this book teaches simple-to-advanced strategies that you can use in your work right away. Along with business cases, historical context, and real-world examples throughout, you’ll also gain different perspectives on the subject through interviews with top strategists.

  • Define and validate your target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques
  • Conduct competitive research and analysis to explore a crowded marketplace or an opportunity to create unique value
  • Focus your team on the primary utility and business model of your product by running structured experiments using prototypes
  • Devise UX funnels that increase customer engagement by mapping desired user actions to meaningful metrics

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Table of contents

  1. Foreword
  2. Preface
    1. Who Should Read This Book?
    2. Why I Wrote This Book
    3. How This Book Is Organized
    4. What Is the UX Strategy Toolkit?
    5. Comments and Questions
    6. Safari® Books Online
    7. Acknowledgements
  3. 1. What Is UX Strategy?
    1. Misinterpretations About UX Strategy
      1. Misinterpretation 1: UX strategy is about identifying a “North Star”
      2. Misinterpretation 2: UX strategy is a “strategic way” to perform UX design
      3. Misinterpretation 3: UX strategy is just product strategy
      4. Misinterpretation 4: UX strategy is closely tied to brand strategy
    2. So What the Hell Is UX Strategy?
    3. Why a UX Strategy Is Crucial
  4. 2. The Four Tenets of UX Strategy
    1. How I Discovered My UX Strategy Framework
    2. Tenet 1: Business Strategy
    3. Tenet 2: Value Innovation
    4. Tenet 3: Validated User Research
    5. Tenet 4: Killer UX Design
    6. Recap
  5. 3. Validating the Value Proposition
    1. The Blockbuster Value Proposition
    2. What Is a Value Proposition?
      1. If you don’t want to live on Fantasy Island...
        1. Step 1: Define your primary customer segment
        2. Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s (biggest) problem
        3. Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions
        4. Provisional persona layout and breakdown
        5. Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition
        6. Customer discovery
        7. The problem interview
        8. Phase 1: The screener questions
        9. Phase 2: The interview
        10. Two-sided markets
        11. Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned! (And continue to iterate until you have product/market fit.)
    3. Recap
  6. 4. Conducting Competitive Research
    1. Learning Lessons, the Hard Way
    2. Using the Competitive Analysis Matrix Tool
    3. Understanding the Meaning of Competition
      1. Types of Competitors
      2. How to Find Your Competitors and Compile Your Competition List
        1. Searching for competitors
      3. Filling Out the matrix with data
        1. URL of website or app store location
        2. Usernames and password access
        3. Purpose of site
        4. Year founded
        5. Funding rounds
        6. Revenue streams
        7. Monthly traffic
        8. # of SKUs/listings
        9. Primary categories
        10. Social networks
        11. Content types
        12. Personalization features
        13. Community/UGC features
        14. Competitive advantage
        15. Heuristic evaluation
        16. Customer reviews
        17. General/miscellaneous notes
        18. Questions/notes to team or self
        19. Analysis
    4. Recap
  7. 5. Conducting Competitive Analysis
    1. The Blockbuster Value Proposition, Part 2
    2. What Is an Analysis?
      1. The Four Steps to a Competitive Analysis and Market Opportunities
        1. Step 1: Scan, skim, and color-code each column for highs and lows
          1. Scanning and skimming the data
          2. Measuring raw data points
          3. Fun with color-coding
        2. Step 2: Creating logical groupings for comparison
        3. Step 3: Analyze each competitor by benchmarking product attributes and best practices
        4. The analysis column of each competitor
        5. Step 4: Writing the Competitive Analysis Findings Brief
      2. Findings Brief, Section 1: Introduction/Goals
      3. Findings Brief, Section 2: Direct Competitors
      4. Findings Brief, Section 3: Indirect Competitors
      5. Findings Brief, Section 4: Cool Features from Influencers
      6. Findings Brief, Section 5: Taking a stand/Your Recommendations
    3. Recap
  8. 6. Storyboarding Value Innovation
    1. Timing Really Is Everything
    2. Techniques for Value Innovation Discovery
      1. Identify the Key Experiences
      2. Take Advantage of UX Influencers
      3. Do Feature Comparisons
      4. Storyboard the Value Innovation
        1. Three steps to storyboarding value innovation
        2. Step 1: Create your list of panels.
        3. Step 2: Decide on your visual format (digital montages versus sketching on paper).
        4. Step 3: Lay out your storyboard on a canvas, add captions below each panel.
    3. Business Models and Value Innovation
    4. Recap
  9. 7. Creating Prototypes for Experiments
    1. Giving It Your Best Shot
    2. How I Became an Experiment Addict
    3. Testing Product/Market Fit by Using Prototypes
      1. Three Steps to Design Hacking the Solution Prototype
        1. Step 1
        2. Step 2
        3. Step 3
      2. Solution Prototype Reality Check: Why User Experiences and Business Models Must Go Hand in Hand
    4. Recap
  10. 8. Conducting Guerrilla User Research
    1. Guerrilla User Research: Operation Silver Lake Café
    2. User Research versus Guerrilla User Research
      1. The Three Main Phases of Guerrilla User Research
        1. Planning phase (one to two weeks depending on team size and number of participants)
        2. Interview phase (one day)
        3. Analysis phase (two to four hours)
      2. Planning Phase (One to Two Weeks)
        1. Step 1: Determine the objectives
        2. Step 2: Preparing the interview questions
        3. Set up, recap/verify screener input (three minutes)
        4. Problem interview (10 minutes)
        5. Solution demonstration plus interview (15 minutes)
        6. Final thoughts (two minutes)
        7. Step 3: Finding the venue(s) and mapping out team logistics
        8. Step 4: Advertising for participants
        9. Step 5: Screening participants and scheduling time slots
      3. Interview Phase (One Day)
        1. Prepping the venue
        2. Participant compensation, café etiquette, and tipping
        3. Conducting the interviews
        4. Extracting succinct notes
      4. Analysis Phase (Two to Four Hours)
    3. Recap
  11. 9. Designing for Conversion
    1. Seeding Growth Hackers
    2. Using the Funnel Matrix Tool
      1. Why a Matrix and Not a Map?
      2. Rocking the Funnel Matrix
      3. The Vertical Axis
        1. Suspect stage
        2. Lead stage
        3. Prospect stage
        4. Customer stage
        5. Repeat User stage
        6. Reference User stage
      4. The Horizontal Axis
        1. User’s Process
        2. Desired Action
        3. Business Task
        4. Metrics
        5. Required Functionality
        6. Validated Learnings
    3. Conducting Suspect Stage Experiments with Landing Pages
      1. Case Study 1: When a Value Proposition Needs to Pivot
      2. Case Study 2: When a Value Proposition Needs to Acquire Leads
        1. How to concoct a Landing Page experiment
    4. Recap
  12. 10. Strategists in the Wild
    1. Holly North
      1. 1. How did you become a strategist and/or get into doing strategy as part of your work?
      2. 2. What does UX strategy mean to you? Is it a bogus job title?
      3. 3. How did you learn about business strategy?
      4. 4. Do you think it’s helpful for UX designers who are aspiring strategists to get an MBA or have a business degree?
      5. 5. What types of products have you done the strategy for that were the most exciting or fun to work on?
      6. 6. What are some of the challenges of conducting strategy in different work environments (for example, startups versus agencies versus enterprises)?
      7. 7. Have you ever conducted any form of experiments on your product or UX strategy, whether it be trying to get market validation on a value proposition or testing prototypes on target customers? How do you get closer to the truth while you are conducting strategy?
      8. 8. What is your secret weapon or go-to technique for devising strategies or building consensus on a shared vision?
      9. 9. What is a business case or anecdotal story that you can share that walk us through the steps you have to go through when conducting strategy specifically for an innovative product?
      10. 10. What are important skills or mindsets for a strategist to have? Or what makes you good at your job?
    2. Peter Merholz
      1. 1. How did you become a strategist and/or get into doing strategy as part of your work?
      2. 2. What does UX strategy mean to you? Is it a bogus job title?
      3. 3. How did you learn about business strategy?
      4. 4. Do you think it’s helpful for UX designers who are aspiring strategists to get an MBA or have a business degree?
      5. 5. What types of products have you done the strategy for that were most exciting or fun to work on?
      6. 6. What are some challenges of conducting strategy in different work environments (for example, startups versus agencies versus enterprises)?
      7. 7. Have you ever conducted any form of experiments on your product or UX strategy, whether it be trying to get market validation on a value proposition or testing prototypes on target customers? How do you get closer to the truth while you are conducting strategy?
      8. 8. What is your secret weapon or go-to technique for devising strategies or building consensus on a shared vision?
      9. 9. What is a business case or anecdotal story that you can share that walk us through the steps you have to go through when conducting strategy specifically for an innovative product?
      10. 10. What are important skills or mindsets for a strategist to have? Or what makes you good at your job?
    3. Milana Sobol
      1. 1. How did you become a strategist and/or get into doing strategy as part of your work?
      2. 2. What does UX strategy mean to you? Is it a bogus job title?
      3. 3. How did you learn about business strategy?
      4. 4. Do you think it’s helpful for UX designers who are aspiring strategists to get an MBA or have a business degree?
      5. 5. What types of products have you done the strategy for that were the most exciting or fun to work on?
      6. 6. What are the some challenges of conducting strategy in different work environments (for example, startups versus agencies versus enterprises)?
      7. 7. Have you ever conducted any form of experiments on your product or UX strategy, whether it be trying to get market validation on a value proposition or testing prototypes on target customers? How do you get closer to the truth while you are conducting strategy?
      8. 8. What is your secret weapon or go-to technique for devising strategies or building consensus on a shared vision?
      9. 9. What is a business case or anecdotal story that you can share that walk us through the steps you have to go through when conducting strategy specifically for an innovative product?
      10. 10. What are important skills or mindsets for a strategist to have? Or what makes you good at your job?
    4. Geoff Katz
      1. 1. How did you become a strategist and/or get into doing strategy as part of your work?
      2. 2. What does UX strategy mean to you? Is it a bogus job title?
      3. 3. How did you learn about business strategy?
      4. 4. Do you think it’s helpful for UX designers who are aspiring strategists to get an MBA or have a business degree?
      5. 5. What types of products have you done the strategy for that were the most exciting or fun to work on?
      6. 6. What are the some challenges of conducting strategy in different work environments (for example, startups versus agencies versus enterprises)?
      7. 7. Have you ever conducted any form of experiments on your product or UX strategy, whether it be trying to get market validation on a value proposition or testing prototypes on target customers? How do you get closer to the truth while you are conducting strategy?
      8. 8. What is your secret weapon or go-to technique for devising strategies or building consensus on a shared vision?
      9. 9. What is a business case or anecdotal story that you can share that walks us through the steps you have to go through when conducting strategy specifically for an innovative product?
      10. 10. What are important skills or mindsets for a strategist to have? Or what makes you good at your job?
  13. 11. Dénouement
  14. A. About the Author
  15. Index
  16. About the Author
  17. Colophon
  18. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: UX Strategy
  • Author(s): Jaime Levy
  • Release date: May 2015
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449372866