UX Intensive: Focus: How to Generate Real Business Value
[Notes from the first day of the UX Intensive]
To have successful design you need a clear strategy.
Utility > Usability > Profitability > Strategibility ;)
See: History of Target Clear RX
- Design impacts strategy
- Strategy is about fit
- Strategy is a system
Design can impact or even embody a strategy. Clear RX was a new way to position Target in the drug delivery marketplace.
Business is about two things: innovation and marketing Peter Drucker
Strategy is about planning what is appropriate for your firm and for your customer. Being the best is not a strategy. Doing everything is not a strategy. Target's ClearRX isn't the best for the penny-pincher. It is an expensive system to manufacture. This is why Target implemented it and not Walmart. Operational efficiency is not a strategy by itself. Best practices aren't a strategy either because everyone is already doing those things.
In the end, being the same as everyone else and doing the same thing as your competition should not the basis of your strategy.
Trade-offs are about choosing what to do and what not to do. Strategy is about saying "no."
Strategy is about planning and thing ahead. It is about common sense.
So back to the history.
Utility > Usability > Profitability > Strategy
That last piece is about integrating design with the organization's strategy.
What do you need for design?
- Scope
- Customer Value
- Definition
- Focus
So let's start with focus. The question here is what will generate real business value. How can interaction design, broadly defined, interact with the business value? How can it generate measurable ROI?
People who understand and express the "R" of Return on Investment get the "I."
AP did some primary research and developed two models.
The first is organizational. Groups evolve through four stages as they become more sophisticated user experience practitioners.
- Intuition
- User Behavior
- Project Value
- Business Value
- Market Strategy
An organization doesn't need to move up this ladder to work.
The second model is the UX value chain. This is circular.
- Identify business problems and opportunities
- Identify metrics and measures
- Choose projects
- Design and test
- Assess actual value
- Set budgets
- Repeat these steps
How do I know if my organization is doing this right?
Common problems:
- The panacea project: "this will fix everything"
- "We want to be the Google/iPod of..."
- Ambitions exceed resources
- Too many competing requirements
- Prior attempts failed
- Can't say "no"
- Focus on just one metric
So how do figure out what to do? How do we figure out what will provide the most value?
Stakeholder interviews are an important way to begin. This is a good way to generate a list of things the organization could possibly do.
See: Lulu example
The two factors to look at are importance and feasibility. Is technically feasible? Is it organizationally feasible? Plot out your ideas along this spectrum.
Not everything is automatically really really important and really really feasible. Strategy is about saying "no" to some things so you can do really well at other things.
Take all of the opportunities you have identified and rate them from 1 to 5 on importance and feasibility. Limit the number of points so the average is three. This forces scarcity and thus makes it possible to really decide between options.
[Pause for an exercise. The workshop format is a great addition to the talks.]
When setting priorities it is important to balance values. In the exercise, my group ended up nothing in the "Do Now" category because our rankings were balanced. It is almost as if ranking everything close to average is a way to avoid making a decision too. We also found that what we rated as priorities from the perspective of the business was also ranked as less feasible.
Another interesting issue is the way that priority and feasibility can influence each-other when they are side by side. If you have a group that really trusts each-other you could divide into separate groups to rate priority and feasibility before coming back to plot the initiatives on the chart.
It is very important to avoid skipping ahead to solutions. This is a big problem for me. As a designer I want to make the initiative concrete, to talk about in terms of actual designed things. This needs to be avoided so everyone can keep their minds open to all the options in front of them. It is similarly important to avoid measuring feasibility only in terms of the web team.
Focus really means saying "no." It means getting to an achievable mandate with explicit design guidance.
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