Demystifying UX strategy: translating business decisions into better experiences for users
Co-authored by Henry Tapia & Adam Furness
Far from some shamanistic practice, experience strategy is “a configuration of resources and actions that yields an advantage in a challenging situation.”¹ For designers, that means translating business decisions into human terms; and better experiences for those who use our products.
This article will attempt to demystify and break down this process into a straightforward, repeatable framework; not unlike how designers work every day.
Have you ever been handed a business strategy document and found yourself thinking: how does this impact our user experience? Like many design leaders, we struggled with how to make that leap from business goals to meaningful user value.
We need a way to connect those business decisions to experience decisions, that would ultimately impact the lives of people using our products.
Enter an experience strategy.
Here‘s how we’re thinking about experience strategy and the framework we’re using; based on our work at Atlassian and a little help from an up-and-coming (fictional) tech company.
Strategy FOMO
End-of-year celebrations are a distant memory. The keyboard is dusty and cold. But what’s that — business folk are meeting and product people are spinning up documents. It’s that time of year again: the business strategy is coming…
As designers, we know the feeling too well.
Anxiously waiting. Not quite sure if design should get involved or when design should get involved. Do we:
- Wait until we have a clear direction, but less influence in that direction, and less time to execute?
- Move too early and risk going off on less-relevant tangents and waste work and time?
So rather than stew in our own FOMO, we decided to join the discussion and just get started. It made sense to take the ‘forming’ business strategy and begin to understand the problems and opportunities, from an experience perspective.
Are we creating an experience strategy? Why yes, yes we are. But wait…
What even is an experience strategy, and why do we need one?
We won’t spend much time on academic discourse on the nature of strategy.
For us, the role of experience strategy is to translate business decisions into experience decisions. And to ensure those experiences solve real and meaningful problems for our users.
We used Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy framework to guide our process. It enabled us to dive deep into the problems, and articulate strategically-sound actions that we could scale across our teams.
Rumelt’s process is fairly universal, so we filled in some design-specific gaps as we progressed; such as how to interpret high-level decisions to envisioned experiences.
Quick side-note: Working on your team’s overall strategy (not the design strategy), and want to apply design thinking to it? Check out Designing Strategy from IDEOU.
How we did it
Our experience strategy spanned three phases: the diagnosis evaluated the current state, guiding policy articulated a broad response to that state, and our coherent actions outlined specific things the team would do to solve the problems in our diagnosis.
Phase 1: Diagnosis
With our company vision and an emerging business strategy, we had enough of a steer to understand (in general terms) what we should pay attention to. We mobilised our design team to begin thinking about big problems and trying to understand the current state of things.
We looked at what our customers were telling us, what our competitors were doing, we evaluated our current experiences, and reviewed workforce and experience trends across our industry.
What our customers are telling us. We gathered qualitative data to create a picture of how we were meeting users’ needs and where we could do better. Existing research gave us a wealth of information, so there was no need to conduct a program of primary research. Across our top use cases, we gained a shared understanding of customer problems and unmet needs.
What our competitors are doing. Across our core markets, we evaluated our direct, indirect, and potential competitors. We paid special attention to the experience tactics our competitors were using to win, how they were attempting to delight their customers, and the quality of their execution. This highlighted levers we could target to address any experience threats.
What our experience shortfalls were. Next up, we collated our existing experiences across our key journeys and then graded them across both sentiment (from the empathy map) and usability, using the PURE Method. This provided qual and quant data that we could then use to diagnose where our experiences fell short, and where we should aim our design effort.
Diagnosis Outcome
The final step in this phase was to pull together the most salient insights for where we were heuristically, in the eyes of our customers, and against our competition. We took the most important lessons from the Diagnosis work and summarised them so our teams could immediately understand where our biggest experience weaknesses were.
We can’t reveal proprietary insights, so alongside sharing our process, we’ll share what our fictional friends at Acme Co did instead. Acme produces a line of smart home products, and an app for customers to manage those products.
💡 Acme’s Diagnosis
The product and marketing folks at Acme were putting the final touches on their company business strategy. They’d been busy making some high-level decisions to act as guardrails for their teams to work within; among those, was the call to invest in better integration between products to maximize cross-sell opportunities.
The Acme CX team needed to translate these guardrails into a concrete set of decisions for their customer experience. They mobilized their team to first understand where they were at now, and what the current state of their product and experience offering was.
Through this diagnosis, Acme learned that:
- Getting started was difficult, and competitors had the edge here.
- Their design was dated; premium hardware design is now table-stakes.
- Lack of product integration meant products didn’t work together, as users had come to expect.
Phase 2: Guiding Policy
If the diagnosis looks back at the current state, the Guiding Policy is where we begin to look ahead.
Here we take the diagnosis and develop recommendations to address the weaknesses we observed, and reframe them as winning opportunities. Crafting the Guiding Policy was a little bit of art to go with the science of the Diagnosis; a lot like workshopping design principles.
Each policy pillar outlines an overarching approach, to address the challenges and opportunities within the diagnosis; without going too deep into solutions. Some obvious actions stood out, like where customers were crying out for something, or where a competitor had a superior experience.
💡 Acme’s Guiding Policy
The squad leading the experience strategy work felt confident with their diagnosis, and their leadership agreed that these were critical areas to focus on; as they aligned well with the business strategy. The squad put their heads together and set out their guiding policy for addressing the problems they identified.
After a few sessions they landed on these recommendations:
- Reduce the time it takes users to experience the value of Acme’s products. Provide a clear path to the value of Acme’s products, and craft an app onboarding experience that provides just enough education to guide users to that value.
- Raise the quality bar of our hardware design so that they’re as desirable for their physical design as much as their functionality. Empower and invest more into our industrial design teams, and create a culture around design excellence across product teams for our products compete on desirability.
- Ensure our products work equally well as part of an integrated ecosystem as well as standalone. Prioritize functionality and use-cases that provide cross-product value, without diminishing the standalone value of our products.
Phase 3: Coherent Actions
Armed with a broad direction forward, it was time to turn the abstract into concrete steps; and ultimately, new and improved user experiences. It was also time to reflect once again on the business strategy and how our direction could complement it, based on what we now knew.
Envisioning Prompts
Throughout this process, we partnered closely with our friends in product, who were instrumental in landing on the parameters of the envisioning that followed. The key outcome of this collaboration was our Envisioning Prompts.
These prompts brought together the business and experience strategies into a statement the teams could creatively respond to. The envisioning that followed articulated the experience decisions that became the last part of our strategy; the coherent actions.
Guiding policy + business strategy = envisioning prompt
Having this statement provided direction to ensure the envisioning was focused, and strategically coherent, whilst broad enough to encourage creative exploration.
In our case, seven cross-functional teams spanning multiple timezones set about responding to these envisioning prompts, which encapsulated a unified strategic direction. They were tasked with thinking broad, then reigning it in to near-term solutions.
Importantly, they also used the prompts and experience strategy to help them evaluate, prioritise and decide which directions to explore and which to park. The envisioning is an article in itself, so we won’t go into more detail here.
💡 Acme’s Coherent Actions
The team decided to envision three separate future experiences to tackle each of the guiding policies, so they crafted three envisioning prompts. Here’s what one of the prompts looked like:
They then ran a series of remote workshops over a week, inviting key stakeholders and subject matter experts to contribute to brainstorming and aligning on a north star experience in response to the envisioning prompts.
The actions Acme would take were reflected in these envisioned experiences.The work was broken down into milestones to build confidence in, and deliver towards their north star.
Principles and Practices
Much of what we’ve discussed has been about the framework we used to craft our experience strategy. Equally important, was how we worked with our team, and the principles and practices we adopted throughout.
In our case, this work was done alongside delivery of existing projects in a distributed, fully remote team. We found the following useful:
- Mobilising the whole team. We had a clear driver of this work, but we shared the execution across our team. This meant we could get a lot done, and quickly, as well as capture everyone’s unique perspectives and creativity. We also partnered strongly with product, to ensure alignment throughout.
- Working at scale. Complex work, large, distributed teams, and the need to communicate externally with clarity meant we had to work in a consistent way that scaled easily. This translated into using Mural, Figma, and Confluence templates to create consistent outcomes that could be easily shared with leadership and partners.
- Frequent communication, often async. With multiple envisioning workshops happening at the same time, in different parts of the world, async video was the obvious way to create a shared understanding and engage our broader team. Most of these videos were short, scrappy throwaways, that shared the core outcomes of daily sessions.
In summary
- An experience strategy helps us translate business decisions into better experiences for users.
- A helpful framework to articulate your strategy is Diagnosis, Guiding Policy, and Coherent Actions.
- Diagnosis defines the current state, Guiding Policy outlines a broad response to that state, and the Coherent Actions are the specific experience decisions made in light of those challenges and opportunities.
- Having statements that encapsulate your strategy (like envisioning prompts), is a practical way to ensure your team envisions experiences that are creative, and strategically coherent.
Over to You
What are your thoughts on this process? Have you embarked on something similar? What would you have done differently?
References and Thanks
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Amazon), by Richard Rumelt.
- Designing Strategy certificate course, IDEOU.
- Practical Usability Rating by Experts (PURE) method: MeasuringU, Nielsen Norman Group.
- Acme Co. for so openly sharing their experience with us.
[1] Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (Amazon), by Richard Rumelt.
