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 third interviewee is with Jaime Levy, author of “UX Strategy”, College Professor, UX Strategy Consultant, and public speaker.
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 interview with Paul Bryan and our interview with Ronnie Battista on our YouTube channel.
Interview notes
- What a UX strategist does [3:38]
- The challenges with writing a book and how to overcome them [6:17]
- Why the “UX Strategy” book is written for business people, not UX strategists [10:54]
- Jaime’s UX strategy framework [15:22]
- The 4 tenets of UX strategy [18:30]
- Tenant #1: business strategy [20:09]
- Tenant #2: validate user research [21:05]
- Tenant #3: value innovation [22:54]
- Tenant #4: killer UX [24:55]
- Why Airbnb succeeded and their competitors failed [26:00]
- How prototyping early is essential to strategy [30:01]
- Why programs are more important than products [34:15]
- Why enterprises need to experiment [37:10]
Transcript excerpt:
Q. What does a UX strategist do?
A. It’s hard to answer that question directly, but ultimately, it’s trying to validate that the vision is going to solve a problem that people really need solved and then to see if there’s opportunity in the market for that product. Can they get funding, can they get enough of a user base to monetise it and then figure out everything from how to create rapid prototypes to what are the key features and then help them build a direct channel to the customers.
Q. One of the chapters in your book is called “creating prototypes for experiments” and I’ve started to talk about strategy, not just with my clients, but with my team, in that we need to get people away from this idea that strategy is an abstract concept and that you can contain it in a PowerPoint slide and everyone will understand, but rather that strategy ultimately needs to turn into a thing that people can touch and feel and experience. I’m interested to hear your thoughts around the idea of strategy producing things.
A. The point of having a strategy is a game plan with a caveat that I may have to pivot on my game plan as I learn along the way. At the very beginning we might throw out a bunch of guesses on what we think, what is this vision that we sought to create and instead of it being something that we have to spend all of our resources up front — whether it’s a million dollars or even a hundred thousand dollars — how can we figure out ways to test what is truly the value proposition, what I call in there the key experiences to make sure people want this thing, what Eric Ries called the minimum viable product. It’s the same idea as creating the rapid prototype.
Q. There are a lot of sort of practical techniques and tools that you’ve not just captured in the book but made available; how different is it between the world of start-ups as you move towards enterprises and bigger companies?
A. I saw Steve Blank and Alex Osterwalder recently talk about innovation and innovation horizons at a workshop and how a lot of enterprises have this thing called innovation theatre, where they have the shiny room and you can go in there and you can look at all these really cool things, or they do it like Google where they say “we’re going to let you have 2 hours of your day, or your week, that you can work on something innovative. Or they have an innovation culture, and it’s just thrown around as a buzz word and ultimately if you want to create innovate products it needs to be imbedded into the company culture in a genuine way.
Useful links
- Connect with Tim on Twitter
- Connect with Jaime on Twitter
- “UX Strategy” by Jaime Levy
- “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim
- “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries
- More useful articles for Developing a UX Strategy
- Find out about our Strategy & Planning practice
