Welcome to our interview series on Experience Design Strategy.
In this series Tim Loo, Executive Director of Strategy at Foolproof, will be talking to global leaders and experts on the thinking and doing of experience design strategy.
Tim’s fifth interviewee is Jim Kalbach, who is head of customer success at Mural, and author of ‘Mapping Experience’.
If you’d prefer to listen on the move you can also listen to the interview as a Podcast on iTunes. Alternatively you can download the interview as a PDF to read later.
You can watch our interviews with Paul Bryan, Ronnie Battista, Jaime Levy and Pam Pavliscak on our Youtube channel.
Interview Notes
- Defining UX Strategy [1:12]
- UX Strategy as a cascading strategy [4:34]
- ‘Jobs to be done’ — and the role it plays in emerging UX Strategy [7:36]
- Resources for UX Strategists [10:38]
- Businesses need to adopt a designer’s mindset [13:17]
- Injecting creativity into strategy planning [16:38]
- What is ‘shared value’ [19:23]
- How should we approach ‘shared value’ and how is it formed? [22:40]
- How apps compete in terms of experience [26:36]
- Digitally designed workspace as a recruitment advantage [29:21]
- The future of experience design strategy [31:46]
Transcript excerpt:
Q. If you had to describe experience design strategy, or UX strategy, to someone how would you do that?
A. It’s a tough question and defining it is always a can of worms because people have different definitions. Part of that is the squishiness of the terms themselves, ‘strategy’ and ‘UX’. You can ask what is strategy and what is UX and when you put those two together you don’t necessarily get more clarity. For me, UX Strategy is a component that rolls up — if you think about strategy as cascading down — it’s a component that rolls up and supports a larger superordinate strategy. Strategy has two components one is looking at the UX capability, looking at the team, the processes, the capabilities and how that then delivers a user experience all in a way that is congruent with what the business, or business unit, is trying to do. As well as another superordinate strategy, there might be a brand strategy, or a product strategy that you’re trying to support. In that sense UX strategy is a supporting strategy that rolls up.
Q. We have to make things for people to actually understand what the strategy is — does that chime with you in anyway?
A. Totally, I think that’s where strategy gets a bad name. That a few people in a company — go on a strategic offsite (which is kind of a joke) and they decide the direction of the company for the next year, two years, five years, whatever. And then they come back to the company and in a PowerPoint deck, with bullet points and they say here’s our strategy now go execute. Then you never see that PowerPoint again, they don’t talk about it, you don’t know if anybody has buy in, and then in six months everybody is wondering why the implementation of that strategy is off track.
I think strategy — this notion of a closed box strategy — is broken. I don’t think strategy is broken, I think the practice of strategy is broken. Strategy needs to be inclusive and creative. That’s why you see frameworks like the business model canvas and a lot of the work that Dave Gray’s company Xplane do about activating strategy, about getting buy in around strategy, and even to some degree the little strategy blueprint canvas I created is a step in that direction.
Q. Have you seen businesses improving the experience of staff become more important?
A. Absolutely, for lots of different reasons. The first which came to my mind was the consumarisation of IT — this notion that user experience and B2B application doesn’t matter, they signed the million-dollar deal and none of the users’ can change the product anyway, it doesn’t matter, the buyer and the user are completely separate entities. You’ve kind of had this B2B ugliness which we’ve put up with. The problem is if you just look down on your iPhone or Android phone that B2B app is right next door to a consumer app. Again, this is the human centricity that I think we bring to the table.
Even though you’re not in the same market, even though you’re not competing with that consumer app because you’re B2B — you’re not even in the same industry or the same field — but in terms of the experience you are competing with those consumer apps. I think the notion of B2B changes in that respect. The effect is the buying decision on what experience am I giving to my employees — not just what deal can I get from this B2B provider as the buyer of B2B services, but rather, what’s going to be the net effect of that.
There are lots of things around efficiency, I mean that’s the typical ROI of B2B, ‘saving time, saving travel costs’ things like that. But, I think what we’re starting to see is another layer — is this a tool that people are going to spend time in on a day to day basis? And, if their choice is I have a consumer app, or a B2B app, then that experience is part of the decision-making process now at the B2B level because people want their employees to have a good experience too.
Useful Links
- Connect with Tim on Twitter
- Connect with Jim on Twitter
- ‘Mapping experience’ by Jim Kalbach
- ‘Mural’ Jim’s digital workspace collaboration tool
- ‘Experiencing information’ a website curated by Jim Kalbach
- More useful articles for Developing a UX Strategy
- Find out about our Strategy & Planning practice
