UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want
UX design and UX strategy are two different things. When you are doing design, you are creating something. When you are doing strategy, you are coming up with a game plan before creating something.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. 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." It is the high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainty.Page: 7
Customers have to see the value in the new way before they'll consider abandoning the old.Page: 8
STELLAR UX STRATEGY IS A MEANS TO ACHIEVING DISRUPTION IN the marketplace through mental-model innovation. Page: 11
In the digital world, strategy usually begins in the discovery phase. This is when teams dig deep into research to reveal key information about the product they want to build.Page: 12
My formula is this: UX Strategy = Business Strategy + Value Innovation + Validated User Research + Killer UX Design. It's not enough to understand your marketplace if you don't talk directly to your customers. It's not enough to validate that your product works if you're not creating something unique.Page: 15
A competitive advantage is essential to the company's long-term existence. The two most common ways to achieve a competitive advantage: cost leadership and differentiation. When prices hit rock bottom? Then, the battle needs to be about what makes the product better.Page: 16
We need to recognize that building a business strategy isn't about formulating and executing a perfect plan. Instead, it's about being able to research what's out there, analyze the opportunities, run structured experiments, fail, learn, and iterate until we devise something of value that people truly want.Page: 21
In 1984, Michael Lanning first coined the term "value proposition" to explain how a firm proposes to deliver a valuable customer experience.Page: 22
When producing digital products, we must continuously research, redesign, and remarket to keep up with the rapidly evolving online marketplace, customer values, and value chains that are required to keep our products in production.Page: 23
User research is how you verify that you're on the right track with your value proposition.Page: 27
Validation is the process of confirming that a specific customer segment finds value in your product. Without validation, you are simply assuming that customers will find use for your product. Page: 28
Eric Ries popularized the term Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It simply means learning if potential customers want your product by building just the core features of your value proposition. Page: 28
The "user experience" (UX) is how a human feels when using the interface of a digital product while attempting to accomplish a task or goal. The common problem that many product makers don't realize is how much their UX decisions are tied to customer acquisition. Page: 30
Experiments need to be focused on how successful the value proposition can be communicated to the customer from the moment the customer opens the landing page. They learn everything about the existing market space to identify UX opportunities that can be exploited. They talk directly to potential users or existing power users of the product to discover and validate its primary utility with respect to the problem that must be solved. Page: 31
You first need to figure out what problem you're going to solve and what kind of customer needs it solved the most.Page: 37
a value proposition takes the form of a statement and is usually the first sentence out of the mouth, as it was for my movie producer client. Think of it as an elevator pitch — when you distill something into a discrete, easy-to-remember, compelling, and repeatable phrase. Its primary purpose is to communicate the benefits that the customer can expect from your offering.Snapchat is the fastest way to share messages, photos, videos, texts, and drawings with friends for a limited amount of time. Page: 40
Step 1: Define your primary customer segment. Step 2: Identify your customer segment's (biggest) problem. Step 3: Create provisional personas based on your assumptions. Step 4: Conduct customer discovery to validate or invalidate your solution's initial value proposition. Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned! Page: 42
Your primary customer's pain point must be severe, because there is a lot of risk involved in trying to change how people do something in a familiar way to an unfamiliar one in an uncontested market space. Page: 43
Write out the customer and problem hypothesis in a statement. Which, if proven true, would validate an important need for the value proposition: Don't build your product's UX around a value proposition unless you have tangible evidence that people will want the product! Page: 45
Don't believe your own hype. Instead, approach every new product or project like an experiment. Personas can be a helpful tool in giving stakeholders and the product team an empathetic sense of what the end user's needs, goals, and motivations are. In this way, they can make a product more "user-friendly." Page: 46
By the third edition of Cooper's book About Face in 2007, he added a new section called "When Rigorous Personas Aren't Possible: Provisional Personas." Thus, you can think of a provisional persona as a "back-up" or "low budget" persona, which is better than having no persona at all. The provisional personas will collect and present the assumptions you are making about your primary customer segment. You want to focus your personas on what you assume is important to customers and how they are currently dealing with the problem. Page: 48
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; it is essentially conducting user research. "Get out of the building" and get customer validation. Page 51
During customer discovery, the goal of the interview is to talk to real people.Page: 52
good screener questions must help you quickly weed out the wrong people. They should seem nonintrusive to the participant, but you know they are deal-breaker questions. It might be helpful to work backward. What are the exact answers you must hear from someone to qualify them for this mini-experiment? Page: 54
Phase 1: The screener questions
Phase 2: The interview
Customer discovery is about listening and not selling.
You end with your money-shot questions, which are when you actually pitch your hypothetical value proposition. Again, you want to listen and not sell.Page: 56
Step 5: Reassess your value proposition based on what you learned! (And continue to iterate until you have product/market fit.)Page: 59
Value propositions of products evolve with a great understanding of customers' needs. Page: 62
Conducting Competitive Research
NOW THAT YOU HAVE A STRONG POSITIVE SIGNAL THAT YOU'RE ONTO something, you need to ask, "Why hasn't this solution been built yet?" Page: 63
Chances are you actually are entering an existing market. Therefore, you want to study how all the current digital solutions address the needs of your target customers.Page: 66
First, you look for direct competitors — products that compete head-to-head with your value proposition.Page: 72
Competitive Analysis Matrix template
To beat your competitors, you need to know exactly what they are doing. You want to know the unknowns. In many cases, the only way to learn this is through your competitor's experience and/or sales funnel by becoming a user yourself. Page: 76
Create one global username and password for use on all the products in your audit. If you are creating profiles on social networks, do not use your personal or work email address! Instead, create secondary accounts on Gmail or Yahoo first. Then, use these fake email accounts to create fake profiles. Page: 77
The purpose of the site is why it exists; it's basically the high-level description of the product or the value proposition. Think about how the competitor might explain it to a user or investor. "About" or "About Us" section The value proposition is often written here by the competitor. Page: 78
Check out Compete.com, Quantcast, and Alexa. You can pilfer free data from these sites and many others. By looking at multiple data points, you can triangulate an average of the traffic data, which is a lot better than not having any traffic data at all.Page: 81
Primary categories If the site is selling products (like Honda.com) or offering content (like Oprah.com), you need to understand how everything is categorized. The site probably (hopefully) already does this, so check out the site's global navigation menu.
Social networks: You need to determine what social media strategy each competitor is trying to harness well.Page: 82
Content types: what type of content is on the competitor's site, as depicted in Figure 4-21. Page: 83
Personalization features: Does it display the user's name? Does it remember and display the last item the user looked at? Does it let the user make a list of favorite items?
Community/UGC features User-generated content (UGC) or crowd-sourced content is content that is created by the users.Page: 84
Competitive advantage: distinct features that a product provides that are not found in its competitors. Figure out the top three differentiators of each product and list them in this cell. Ask yourself questions such as which features were successful because the product was first-to-market? Can those features be easily replicated? Which is better, the filtering or the large database. Heuristic evaluation Heuristic is a fancy word that means experimentation and trial-by-error, using the product to see how it works for you, personally.Page: 85
Customer reviews
General/miscellaneous notes
Questions/notes to team or self
One last note: often product teams and stakeholders don't keep an eye on the market after they've moved on from the research process.
The competitive landscape is always shifting; consequently, competitive research will never be final.Page: 87
When analyzing things, you are essentially trying to convert a lot of information into smaller actionable bites.Page: 92
A data point is a discrete unit of information. Any single fact or observation is a data point. In our analysis, data points can help us illuminate whether something is a failure or success.Page: 95
your goal is to make it easier to identify which factors give other products their competitive advantage.Page: 97
When you benchmark the indirect competitors, you're analyzing how these digital products offer alternative ways to solve a problem.Page: 99
Often, you will notice common patterns being repeated across many sites within a vertical market. You might wonder why they're all broken in the same way. You might realize that they are all overlooking an especially useful capability that could be the secret sauce you use in your value innovation. Are most of the losers missing on content, traffic, stickiness, personalization, a bad browse or search experience? Determine the causes. You 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.Page: 99
Abductive reasoning is a form of logical inference that goes from observation to a hypothesis. It accounts for the reliable data (observation) and seeks to explain relevant evidence.[38] It shapes your rationale for making recommendations, and making recommendations is the purpose of the Competitive Analysis Findings Brief. Page: 101
This document will be what your client takes away from your research.Page: 102
Which competitors are closest to delivering a similar value proposition (that is, an online shopping site featuring high-end brands)? 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 (wealthy men)? 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? What opportunities exist for it? What gaps could it fill? Page: 102
In short, your goal is to determine if there's room to win, and that's when you need to address the opportunities based on the research.Page: 103
need to show incredible value before you move into a formal design phase.Page: 117
the patterns aren't about building replicas of existing products. Instead, you want to build on existing design conventions and take those capabilities to the next level.Page: 123
there is nothing illegal about poaching features and interaction patterns that are the general approach to solving a common type of problem. Page: 124
"A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is just enough product to validate your key experiences (value proposition)." The key experience is the feature set that defines your value innovation. It must exist in order for your product to have a competitive advantage. It defines the experience that sets your product apart from all others. To get your idea juices flowing on the key experience, ask yourself these questions: What will make your provisional personas (hypothesized customers) love this product? What moment or part of the user's journey makes this product unique? Based on your competitive research and analysis, what scenario or feature resolves a big shortfall? What kind of workarounds are your potential customers currently doing to accomplish their goals?Page: 125
What is an example of the most important thing the customer can do with your product that they can't do with other competitors? What is the pain point that you are trying to solve that is not currently being solved by competitors? How would your solution be presented to the customers on a screen? Is it an interactive interface or a displayed result? Express the benefit that users will see. Finally, what would customers do next after they saw this screen? Would they realize the value proposition? Again, express the benefit as a scenario that the user will see.Page: 127
The storyboarding process has been around since German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger. The goal of a storyboard is to tell the story of your key experience(s) visually. Page: 135
Step 1: Create your list of panels. Keep in mind that you do not want to demonstrate all the features of the product only showing the most "valuable"
Step 2: Decide on your visual format (digital montages versus sketching on paper). Do not waste time wireframing a storyboard.
Step 3: Lay out your storyboard on a canvas, add captions below each panel.Page: 136
you need to jump from your storyboard to an MVP or prototype of your product. You'll then take it into small, structured, lean experiments to learn as soon as possible if your team's latest assumptions are on the right track and to force you to confront the reality of what it would actually take to make your business model work in the real world.Page: 144
The goal is to discover whether your hypothesis is right or wrong based on measurable results. After the experiment, you should be able to evaluate your results and accept or reject your original hypothesis. No matter what type, though, experiments are all about testing a variable in order to falsify a hypothesis.
Any item, factor, or condition that you can control or change.Page: 148
do a lot less but do it well.Page: 152
You are simply de-risking your product by simulating as many of the frontend key experiences as possible without the interface backend to see what goes wrong and what goes right.Page: 155
MVP. But, what if you don't have an actual website yet? What if you just have a storyboard and an idea? That's when a prototype comes in handy. The goal of a prototype is to avoid coding and designing until you have true validation A prototype is anything that serves to familiarize the user with the ultimate experience you are trying to create. These can be low-fidelity paper prototypes or high-fidelity mockups. In the tech industry today, prototyping is a big deal. Digital teams create highly detailed ones in programs such as Axure or OmniGraffle. These prototypes can be useful for tactical usability testing and conveying functionality to the development teams. Conversely, they can easily become resource overkill just making something "clickable" to convey a strategic concept, a prototype that you don't learn from is a waste of time. Page: 159
Step 1 Write a simple list or an outline of the screens you are going to show.Page: 160
Step 2 Start creating mashing up the images that tell the story.Page: 161
Step 3 Paste all the screenshots into the presentation tool.Page: 170
The users need to feel like they are using the interface even if it isn't interactive.Page: 170
Most experiments fail, so just think through the outcomes and focus on the worthwhile takeaways. Sometimes, the results will not be black and white. Thus, you will need to interpret them by having collaborative team-debriefing discussions following each experiment.Page: 174
The purpose of conducting user research is to understand the needs and goals of your target audience in order to inform the value proposition of the product.Page: 180
techniques. The two recent ones that I like are UX for Lean Startups by Laura Klein[56] and The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley.[57]Page: 180
UX for Lean Startups by Laura Klein[56] and The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley. User research usually involves usability testing and/or ethnographic research. Usability testing focuses on whether your products work by discovering how people use the product in real time.Page: 180
Traditionally, usability testing is conducted in special usability labs with two-way mirrors or on the premises of large corporations. Nowadays, it can be conducted remotely by using online services (such as Usertesting.com) that provide quick, reasonably priced screencast videos that record how people use your product or prototype while speaking their thoughts. Page: 181
In contrast, ethnographic research — the study of people in their natural environment Page: 181
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. That's where guerrilla user research comes in — 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? Page: 182
The planning phase is the most complicated of all three phases because it involves everything from finalizing your solution prototype to scheduling the participants. Everything must be thought through, timed, and rehearsed.Page: 184
The five steps that I will teach you to ensure a successful planning phase include the following: Step 1: Determining the objectives of the research study. Define which aspects of the value proposition and UX are being examined. Step 2: Preparing the questions to be asked that will get us validating. Then, rehearse the entire interview along with giving the prototype demonstration. Step 3: Scouting out the venue(s) and mapping out logistics. Step 4: Advertising for participants. Step 5: Screening the participants and scheduling time slots.Page: 184
The interview phase can be the most nerve-wracking and exhilarating of all three phases, because you must prep the location, coordinate the sessions, and conduct the interviews.Page: 185
Prepping the venue Participant payments, café etiquette, and tipping Conducting the interviews Taking succinct notes Page: 185
Analysis phase Page: 185
Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal.Page: 200
A journey map looks like a flowchart and shows all touch points. It's a visual representation of the user's journey and interaction through the UX of your product. It is generally created from output following a collaborative brainstorming session with product stakeholders. Sometimes these maps are quite complex to decipher, especially if you were not a participant during the session. If you haven't seen one of these maps, do a keyword search for them on Google Images.Page: 211
The rows in the Funnel Matrix contain the stages of user engagement for your online product. These stage labels should be directly correlated to the business model of your product, Page: 213
Suspect stage A suspect is a user who might possibly require your product or service. Page: 215
Lead stage A lead is a potential sales contact, an individual, or an organization that expresses an interest in your product Page: 215
Prospect stage A prospect is anyone who has a need and strongly wants this need met through the purchase or consumption of your particular product. He is now in the negotiation phase toward becoming either a paid customer or engaged user (to be defined in the next stage).Page: 215
Customer stage A customer is a person or organization that is valuable to your business model.Page: 216
Repeat User stage Repeat users are customers who "regularly" use your product or service.Page: 216
Reference User stage A reference user is somebody who refers others to the site based purely on her initial or continued experience. She brings other suspects to your product by spreading the word.Page: 216
The Horizontal Axis User's Process The User's Process (see Figure 9-8) describes the types of activities that users will be engaging in at each stage as they experience your product.Page: 216
Desired Action The Desired Action for the Funnel Matrix (see Figure 9-9) is what you hope users do in response to the "process" they just experienced. Page: 218
Business Task Now take off your UX strategy hat and put on your marketing cap. It's time to look at the Funnel Matrix from the standpoint of your business goals, as illustrated in Figure 9-10.Page: 219
The basic concept is to build marketing organically into the product,Page: 219
What goes in metrics columns are those quantifiable "things" you plan to measure at each stage that specifically tie a user's action to a level of engagement.Page: 220
Lean Startup guru Eric Ries states that the real metrics are "actionable metrics that either confirm or refute a previously stated hypothesis (stated in customer discovery)." This means that you want to measure things that demonstrate your product is actually working and that the users are engaged. However, investors and stakeholders like totals and percentages, so a common trap is to look at page views or other vanity metrics that don't represent anything more than your ability to buy or drive traffic to your landing pages.Page: 221
Required Functionality: Each feature needs to be something that will make the product better and easier to use rather than more complicated.Page: 222
By now the funnel matrix exercise might feel like a science experiment. That's because it is. You are conducting a methodical procedure with the goal of validating or falsifying your hypothesis — your product's unique value proposition to your perceived customers. Page: 224
A landing page is a web page that is not the home page of your product. Landing pages are designed to specifically elicit one key action from users. They are also sometimes called lead capture pages, squeeze pages, and destination pages. Page: 226