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 second interviewee is Ronnie Battista, practice lead for experience design at Slalom consulting and co-creator of experience design programme at Rutgers University.
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 first interview with Paul Bryan on our YouTube channel.
Interview notes
- Definition of UX strategy [1:08]
- First questions UX strategists should be asking companies [2:01]
- What is the UX strategy process [3:10]
- Conditions for creating a UX strategy that’s going to take [5:35]
- Challenges facing industries trying to implement UX strategy [6:03]
- How to create a customer centric organisation [8:56]
- Why UX design is changing business environments [13:18]
- The next big areas for skills development in UX strategists [16:29]
- Communitas and connecting with customers [21:34]
- The future of UX design [24:30]
Transcript excerpt:
Q. Could you describe what experience design strategy is and what you do?
A. My view of experience design and strategy is that first and foremost we need to be at that table — at the big table — in the beginning to make sure that what those business goals and values and KPIs are, are aligned to the customers, employees, the audience that they’re serving.
Q. Do you have an example of a client where you’ve had an impact around culture and working practices?
A. There’s a client that I work with that has made a very significant investment in a customer-centric organisation. The interesting piece is that there is still a little bit of a challenge in making that connection because this is an organisation that is being viewed by some as “the next flavour of three years of customer-centric thinking”. One of the small ways that I’m trying to help effect some change is helping make connections at a team level within the organisation, so there is some degree of understanding of their language, understanding of their challenges, understanding most notably of how they’re incented, and making sure that folks have those understandings across teams.
Q. How do you think about the future for experience design and actually where it’s going and its role in the world?
A. This is one that is both a very strong interest personally, obviously because it’s how I make my living, but also in that broader lens I feel like if we’re doing our job the way we should be doing our job, if we are making those impacts culturally within the organisation, if we are embracing a generation of folks that were born this way — that understand and communicate in different ways — I think that our field, if we’re doing it right, we shouldn’t exist. And that sounds a bit provocative, but the need to have a strong advocacy for customer centricity feels like it’s getting a cup of sand on a beach and going and selling somebody on the value of sand.
Useful links
- Connect with Tim on Twitter
- Connect with Ronnie on Twitter
- Theo Forbath article on interconnectivity
- Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal
- More useful articles for Developing a UX Strategy
- Find out about our Strategy & Planning practice
