UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want by Jaime Levy [Book summary]
This book summary (with additional discussion notes) is compiled with the help of 高木文堂 and Rui Wu
Chapter 1: What is a UX Strategy?
Let’s start with “What is a Strategy?”
“ The purpose of any strategy is to create a game plan that looks at your current position and then helps you get to where you actually want to be.”
- UX strategy is the process that should be started first, before the design or development of a digital product begins.
- It’s the vision of a solution that needs to be “validated” with real potential customers to prove that it’s desired in the marketplace.
- It is the high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainty.
“Goal of UX Strategy is that Alice falls down the rabbit hole, and into a Wonderland”
UX Design v/s UX Strategy
Although UX design encompasses numerous details such as visual design, content messaging, and how easy it is for a user to accomplish a task, UX strategy is the “Big Picture.”
Chapter 2: Four tenets of UX strategy ?
“UX Strategy = Business Strategy + Value Innovation + Validated User Research + Killer UX Design”
Tenet 1: Business Strategy
- The business strategy identifies the company’s guiding principles for how it will position itself and still achieve its objectives.
- For this to happen, the business must continually identify and utilize a “competitive advantage”.
two most common ways to achieve a competitive advantage:
cost-leadershipanddifferentiation
Tenet 2: Value Innovation
Value Innovation is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost” - Inspired by Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue ocean v/s Red oceanA blue ocean is full of customers with unmet needs. A red ocean is a market full of sharks fighting for the fish.
Tenet 3: Validated User Research
- Stakeholders are dreamers in that they assume what is valuable to their customers instead of verifying it.
- Validation is the process of confirming that a specific customer segment finds value in your product.
Tenet 4: Killer UX Design
- UX: User Experience, how users are feeling while interacting with your product/service.
- It encompasses all touch-points, physical and digital.
Chapter 3: Validating the Value Proposition
Five Steps to reach Product/Solution Fit:
Step 1: Define your primary customer segment
- The customer is a group of segment of people with a common need or pain.
Describe in 10 words or fewer a set of people whom you can zero-in.
Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s biggest problem
- Make assumptions about your users, their needs, and how to solve them.
And acknowledge that you are working on assumptions.
- Write out the customer and problem hypothesis.
- Don’t build your product’s UX around a value proposition unless you have tangible evidence that people will want the product.
- find
job-to-be-done
Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions
A provisional personal will be helpful communication tool to depict your hypothesized customer and align your team.
- Name and snapshot/sketch
- Description
The description should be a composite archetype of the customer that is relevant to the product idea. - Behaviors
How is the customer trying to solve the problem? How does the persona’s personality affect his behavior? - Needs and goals
What motivates the customer and causes her to act a certain way. What is missing from the current solution? What specific needs or goals aren’t being satisfied by the customer’s current behavior?
Step 4: Conduct customer delivery to validate or invalidate your solution’s initial value proposition
- Customer discovery is a process used to discover, test, and validate whether a specific product solves a known problem for an identifiable group of users.
- You must get out of the building and get customer validation, which is foundational to the Lean Startup business approach.
The Problem Interview
It is made up of two parts:
- Phase 1: The screener questions
Questions to weed out the wrong people. - Phase 2: The interview
Context questions set up the context for your solution.
Two separate Problem and Solution interviews could be conducted to validate both assumptions: target customers have pain, your solution removes that pain.
Refer: Running Lean by Ash Maurya
Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned
And continue to iterate until you have product/market fit
Money-shot questionsvalidate or invalidate your hypothetical value proposition.
Chapter 4 : Conducting Competitive Research
Objective
Devise a solution that creates a competitive advantage
Who are the competitors
- Direct Competitors
Companies that offer the same or very similar value proposition to your current or future customers. - Indirect Competitors
Companies that offer a similar value proposition to a different customer segment, or your target customers are using a part of product/service offered by this competitor to solve their problems.
People often use products or combinations of products in ways that the product makers do not expect
What to Research (Quantitive & Qualitative)
- Purpose of product/service
- Year founded
- Funding rounds
- Revenue streams
- Monthly traffic
- Number of SKUs /Videos/Articles/listings
- Primary categories
What are the most active/popular/selling categories - Personalization Features
- Social Networks
- Community/UGC features
- Competitive advantage
- Customer reviews
- Heuristic evaluation
How does this product work for you as a user, Easy to use? Consistent style of design? etc.
Use a competitive-market research spreadsheet (CRS) to document the research. Sample given in the book:
Chapter 5: Conducting Competitive Analysis
Step 1: Scan, skim, and color-code each column for highs and lows
- Reacquaint with all rows (competitors) and columns (attributes) of competitive-research spreadsheet (CRS) before analyzing them
- The color code should be used sparingly to highlight things that are crucial to remember, like green: strong attribute, yellow: weak attribute etc.
Sample given in the book:
Step 2: Creating logical groupings for comparison
- Goal is to make it easier to identify which factors give other products their competitive advantage by analyzing them in logical subgroups
- One subgroup which is a must: direct and indirect competitors
- Other subgroups example:
- Highest traffic or most downloads (popular competitors at the top)
- Newest to oldest in the market
- Numerous features to minimal features
- Largest to smallest in terms of SKUs, articles, or listings
Step 3: Analyze each competitor by benchmarking product attributes and best practices
- Benchmarking is to identify and examine key facets of competitors identity so that comparisons can be made.
- For direct competitors:
- look for a baseline that defines the bottom-line criteria that future customers will expect when your team delivers on the value proposition.
- any interesting feature that can be emulated - For indirect competitors:
analyze how these digital products offer alternative ways to solve a problem.
At this point, we should see nuances among competitors. We have benchmarked attributes. We can gauge which competitors are a success or failure. We can say which competitor is number one, number two, and who’s doing something impressive even if they’re farther behind in the marketplace race than others. We have a sense of the diversity of business models in play.
Analysis column of CRS (last column of CSR)
Here these should be answered:
- How is it competing against your value proposition?
- If it’s a direct competitor, what is it doing great or particularly badly?
- If it’s an indirect competitor, is it competing with a similar solution or is it going after a similar customer segment? - What are the big takeaways the stakeholder should know if she only reads this cell?
Step 4: Writing the Competitive Analysis Findings Brief
First, you should be able to answer the following questions about the marketplace:
- Which competitors are closest to delivering a similar value proposition
- Are their products failing? Why? Or are their products succeeding so well that there’s no room for your product?
- Which competitors directly appeal to your customer segment? Of those competitors, how do you think customers discover them (perhaps paid advertising)?
- What products offer the best user experiences and business models?
- Who is doing something unique?
- What is working well for them?
- What do they have that your users like?
Second, you need to address in the brief if there’s room in the market for your product.
- What opportunities exist for it?
- What gaps could it fill?
- Perhaps your market research and analysis have shown you that your team has hit the entrepreneurial jackpot.
- Perhaps your product is one or all of the following: First-to-market with something unique (such as Pinterest)
- Offers users a better method to use or save time or finances (Amazon Prime saves customers from having to waste time running errands.)
- Creates value simultaneously for two different customer segments (Airbnb does so for hosts and guests; Eventbrite for event planners and attendees.)
This is a blue ocean.
In writing your brief, you must be able to say with certainty whether your product is in a blue, red, or somewhere-in-between purple ocean.
Findings Brief format
- Section 1: Introduction/Goals
- Section 2: Direct Competitors
- Section 3: Indirect Competitors
- Section 4: Cool Features from Influencers
- Section 5: Taking a stand/Your Recommendations
Is this an expensive endeavor to take on or are there ways to de-risk the vision by experimenting with Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)?
Should the team pivot on the customer or its problem?
Does more research need to be conducted to really know if the value proposition is viable, such as with Guerrilla User Research or using landing page A/B tests?
Sample given in the book:
Chapter 6: Storyboarding Value Innovation
Why you do it?
- If your goal is to invent, you need to look for the benefits that will make your product indispensable to users.
- You must break out the UX moments that need to show incredible value before you move into a formal design phase.
- You need to mash up the principles of Value Innovation with Killer UX.
- Storyboard are not deliverables. It’s about using design hacks to focus on your team sharply on identifying and maximizing your product’s potential value innovation.
- It’s about accelerating your thinking through your product’s ultimate value proposition
Techniques for Value Innovation Discovery
Your future customers need to want to choose your solution over any other because:
- it’s significantly more efficient than what’s currently out there,
- it solves a pain point they didn’t know they had, and/or
- it creates an undeniable desire where none existed before.
Four patterns of value innovation:
- The product offers a new mash-up of features from competitors and relevant UX influencers.
- The product provides an innovative “slice” or a twist to a value proposition from existing larger platforms.
- The product consolidates formerly disparate user experiences into one single simple and crucial solution. It becomes the one-stop shop for a user task.
- The product brings two separate and distinct user segments to be table to negotiate a deal that had not been possible before, thus revolutionizing those users’ world.
Four Poaching Techniques for Discovering New Opportunities for Value Innovation
- Identify the key experiences
- Take advantage of UX influencers
- Do feature comparisons
- Storyboard the value innovation
Three steps to storyboarding value innovation
The goal of a storyboard is to tell the story of your key experiences visually.
Step 1: Create you list of panels
- Show the most valuable moments of your customer’s journey through the storyboard panels.
- Show the progression of the entire experience regardless of whether the experience takes 20 minutes or two months in real time.
Step 2: Decide on your visual format (digital montages versus sketching on paper)
- Choose a format that is fast and easy for you and your team to pull your storyboard together.
- Create, draw, or gather all your images and make certain that they are the same approximate aspect ratio and that they fit nicely onto your canvas.
Step 3: Layout your storyboard on a canvas, add captions below each panel
- Now, review your storyboard.
- Keep the captions brief and in lower cases — less than two lines.
Storyboarding examples from the book
Chapter 7: Creating Prototypes for Experiments
“Do not burn time or money or efforts on a product no one may want to use. “
“Test Product/Market Fit by using Prototypes.”
Goal of prototype
Force your team to create the minimum amount of screens necessary to demonstrate the key experience of the interface, the value proposition, and a sneak peak of the potential business model of the product.
avoid coding and designing until you have true validation that your solution is desired and can be sustained by your hypothetical customer segment
How
- Use your storyboard as the starting point for creating a solution prototype
- Copy the interface and artwork from other websites and type set the content
“Make sure it is easy to use and understand for users, no imaginations on parts of users”
What does the solution prototype include?
- Setup
- Key UX 1 (1–3 screens): shows the crucial interactions that show value innovation
- Key UX 2 (1–3 screens): shows the crucial interactions that show value innovation
- Pricing strategy: shows the cost of the app, monthly fees, package costs and so on
Chapter 8: Conducting Guerrilla User Research
“For clients with little time or no budgets, traditional user research such as ethnographic studies would take too much time, and usability testing just isn’t relevant to help determine if your value proposition is on target or your key user experiences provide value innovation.”
What is Guerrilla User Research?
It’s cost-effective and the mobile tactics should help you to validate the following quickly:
- Are you targeting the correct customer segment?
- Are you solving a common pain point the customer has?
- Is the solution you are proposing (demonstrated in the prototype of key experiences) something they would seriously consider using?
- Would they pay for the product, and, if not, what are the other potential revenue models?
- Does the business model work?
The Three Main Phases of Guerrilla User Research
Planning phase (Duration: one to two weeks)
- Determining the objectives of the research study.
Define which aspects of the value proposition and UX are being examined.
“What is the most important thing I need to learn to determine if this product really has any purpose, marketability, and viability?”
What this means is that you need to ask what is the riskiest assumption(s) still on the table at this point in your process.
- Preparing the questions to be asked that will get us validating.
Then, rehearse the entire interview along with giving the prototype demonstration.
create your interview around two great approaches: the problem interview, and the solution interview, from Running Lean
- Scouting out the venue(s) and mapping out logistics.
- Advertising for participants.
Popular ways for finding participants: craiglist, meetup, facebook friends, linkedIn, local university etc.
- Screening the participants and scheduling time slots.
Interview phase (Duration: one day)
- Prepping the venue Participant payments, café etiquette, and tipping
- Conducting the interviews
- Taking succinct notes
Analysis phase (Duration: two to four hours)
Objective is to extract “Validated Learning” from interviews
Can make following assessments
- Assess to determine if the correct customer segment was reached
- Assess if the problem that your product is trying to solve is an actual problem.
Is it a big problem or small problem? - Assess if the solution that you showed was on target.
Were participants excited about solution?
If the value proposition was not validated, assess why immediately?
Was it because you had the wrong customer, problem, and or solution? Is it fixable? How can you change the product or user experience?
Chapter 9: Designing for Conversion
What is Conversion centric design aka Growth hacking?
Growth hacking entails continuous tinkering with the product’s sales funnel so that it is fully optimized for acquiring new users and getting them more deeply engaged.
It is modern-day marketing using techniques such as
- A/B tests,
- landing pages,
- viral factors,
- email deliverability,
- social media integration
- collecting data on every touch points for various stages
“requires a cross functional team of designers, developers, product managers, and marketers”
Customer acquisition funnel
Typical digital product’s acquisition funnel example:
Funnel matrix tool
Use cases
Growth-hacking techniques and above metrics can be helpful
For existing solution
- to improving user experience and customer engagement
- to increase customer base
For new value proposition
- to determine if value proposition needs a pivot
- to acquire leads for a value proposition
