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Where to Find Help with UX Strategy
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Published: March 18, 2013
“Finding information resources regarding a strategic approach to UX design is a challenge because most UX publications and presentations focus on tactical solutions to common design challenges.”
Companies around the globe are realizing that they need to take a more strategic approach to user experience design. UX teams are feeling the pressure to be both better and faster, as agile development squeezes UX processes into short sprints; while analytics provide an instant read on how designs are performing in the marketplace. UX leaders are trying to keep up with changing technology and an explosion of devices, while at the same time trying to be smarter about how they make decisions for their UX roadmap.
Finding information resources regarding a strategic approach to UX design is a challenge because most UX publications and presentations focus on tactical solutions to common design challenges. In this column, I’ll discuss some ways to get help with formulating a UX strategy and communicating your strategy to an organization.
Graduating from Usability to UX Strategy
“Once you’ve solved the basic usability issues for a particular digital experience, your UX team can shift its focus to more strategic considerations.”
Usability is typically a key consideration when creating a Web site, application, or other digital product or service. Customers are quick to abandon an unusable product and move on to a solution that is easier to use. Poor design can cause users to make mistakes that are costly for them, and for you, to fix. When users are having a really difficult time, some will call customer service, adding to your cost of doing business. However, once you’ve solved the basic usability issues for a particular digital experience, your UX team can shift its focus to more strategic considerations.
While the goal of usability testing is primarily to remove obstacles and fix clunky interactions, UX strategy is about building a rationale to guide your UX design efforts for the foreseeable future. Changing your focus from usability to UX strategy is analogous to a person’s progressing from going to a doctor to cure an illness to meeting with a personal trainer to get in peak physical condition.
Usability testing answers the basic question: What parts of our design are difficult to use? UX strategy asks more complex questions such as the following:
- How can our design do a better job of engaging customers?
- What can our product offer that will differentiate it from our competition?
- What data should we be collecting to inform our efforts to deliver better user experiences?
- How can we meet our customers’ needs more comprehensively, providing a holistic solution across all touchpoints?
For complex businesses and designs, UX leaders and teams may find that they need help formulating a comprehensive UX strategy and communicating their strategy in an effective way to the rest of an organization. Here are some resources you can use to obtain the help you need.
The Internal UX Strategist
“Contact a UX Strategist at your project’s inception, as soon as resources are being allocated. … A UX strategy guides the overall design concept for a product, not just its feature set.”
Over the past couple of years, some larger companies have created a new job: UX Strategist. In a previous column on UXmatters, I interviewed three people working as UX Strategists. If a UX Strategist role exists in your company, obtaining help may be as simple as engaging part of a UX Strategist’s time to work on your project. If possible, contact a UX Strategist at your project’s inception, as soon as resources are being allocated. Once your design has started taking shape, it’s probably too late for a UX Strategist to have an impact. A UX strategy guides the overall design concept for a product, not just its feature set.
If the UX Strategist role has existed in your company for a while, it’s likely that many departments and product teams within the company will have realized how critical UX strategy is to a successful design—especially in terms of aligning the user experience with the rest of the business. In this case, you may have difficulty getting a UX Strategist allocated to your product or program. On the other hand, if your company has only recently created the role, it’s likely that there aren’t yet many people who understand the value a UX Strategist brings to the table. To take advantage of this early-stage availability, explain your goals for your program or product and request the participation of a UX Strategist as early in the process as possible.
The External UX Strategist
“The first thing you should look for in an external UX Strategist is experience with large-scale programs and products. UX strategy is based on a wide variety of complex data sources….”
Today, in the vast majority of companies, either there are no UX Strategists, or there are too few to go around. So you may want to bring an external UX Strategist on board to help you formulate a UX strategy or communicate your UX strategy to the rest of the organization. (Disclosure: This is how I make a living, so keep this in mind as you read this section.)
The first thing you should look for in an external UX Strategist is experience with large-scale programs and products. UX strategy is based on a wide variety of complex data sources, business strategy analysis, deep understanding of evolving customer needs and behaviors, awareness of the competitive landscape, detailed interaction modeling, and more. If a UX Strategist can’t demonstrate that he understands these strategic facets of UX design and has created a comprehensive UX strategy in the past, he is unlikely to be the right partner for this kind of engagement.
As with the internal UX Strategist, you need to bring the external UX Strategist into your program early, so he can help get things moving in the right direction from the start. While you can devise and apply a marketing strategy once a product is in its design phase, you can’t wait to devise or apply a UX strategy until that point. A UX strategy helps you to determine what you’re designing, what a product’s feature set should be, how it can meet customers’ needs and expectations, and how it can achieve strategic business goals. Trying to retrofit a UX strategy on a product that already exists just doesn’t make any sense.
The Design Agency
“Before assuming that your agency can help you formulate a UX strategy, take some time to identify what specific people would be taking on this role and determine whether they can meet your needs.”
Larger companies typically have an ongoing relationship with one or more UX design agencies. Even smaller companies often depend on agencies for all or part of their UX design needs. Depending on your organization’s internal UX capabilities and its relationship with a UX design agency, you may expect the agency to handle the UX-strategy aspects of your program. This would, of course, be very convenient for you because you wouldn’t have to hire someone specifically to fill the UX Strategist role. Since you already have a business relationship with the agency, having them play this role would be just a matter of resource allocation and a little paperwork.
However, before assuming that your agency can help you formulate a UX strategy, take some time to identify what specific people would be taking on this role and determine whether they can meet your needs. Because of the importance of this role to your program’s future success, you should go through the same vetting process you would with an external UX Strategist, as I described earlier. Don’t assume that someone with the title UX Director or UX Lead necessarily has the experience they’d need to assimilate all of the relevant customer and business data and existing strategy documentation and produce a comprehensive UX strategy. If the agency doesn’t specifically offer UX strategy services and produce deliverables detailing their UX strategy, it’s likely that their approach would be more tactical, so you may need to look elsewhere for help formulating your UX strategy.
On the other hand, some agencies are well known for their strategic competence. If you are fortunate enough to have one of these agencies as your partner, you won’t have to worry about people working out of their depth. Such agencies tend to charge significantly more for their work than tactically focused agencies, but they will guide your program or product onto the right path. This is a very valuable service and worth the expense.
Do It Yourself
“If you want to play the role of UX Strategist yourself, you’ll need to gather the necessary ingredients for a UX strategy from disparate areas within your company.”
If you want to play the role of UX Strategist yourself, you’ll need to gather the necessary ingredients for a UX strategy from disparate areas within your company. The size and complexity of your company will have a substantial impact on how you go about doing this. In small companies, people wear many hats, so obtaining the information necessary to formulate a UX strategy can be relatively straightforward. In large companies, it may be difficult to track down some or all of information you need, because it lives in different pockets within the company; and people in other parts of the company may feel that, by not sharing the information with you, they can enhance their job security.
If you happen to be a product owner and have the necessary interest and experience in UX strategy, you may be in a good position to take on the role of UX Strategist. But if you are not the product owner, you should establish a relationship with this person as soon as possible, explaining your intention to develop a UX strategy. The product owner may see himself as having this role by default, so it’s best to clarify your intent before progressing too far into a project.
In addition to the product owner, you should establish contact with the people who have the following areas of responsibility or have access to the information that you need to formulate a UX strategy:
- business strategy
- customer experience
- customer research
- analytics
- competitor analysis
- product marketing
- merchandising (ecommerce only)
- content strategy
- social media
- scrum master or front-end development
- platform architecture
Each of these departments, roles, or specialties informs important aspects of a UX strategy. So, even if you’re hiring out the UX Strategist role, you’ll need these people and information sources to provide key inputs. Opening the lines of communications with them early on is a good idea.
Information Resources
“Only recently have UX professionals and businesses begun to recognize that UX strategy is essential to the success of digital products….”
Only recently have UX professionals and businesses begun to recognize that UX strategy is essential to the success of digital products. Therefore, good information resources on UX strategy are still fairly limited. However, here are a few of the available resources:
- UXmatters—My UX Strategy column on UXmatters—including this edition—has been focusing on the topic of UX strategy since 2011. Other authors contribute articles on UX strategy to UXmatters as well.
- UX Strategy and Planning Group on LinkedIn—This LinkedIn group
discusses the topic of UX Strategy and has over 5,000 members from around the world.
- UX Strategy Conference—Leaders in the field of UX strategy will be sharing their knowledge at UX STRAT 2013, September 9–11, 2013. See the conference Web site
- Experience Strategy: A Practical Approach for User Experience Leaders—I am coauthoring this forthcoming book with Stephanie Sansoucie of Kohls.com. Morgan Kaufmann will publish our book in late 2013. The book describes the various inputs, steps, roles, and deliverables that formulating a UX strategy involves, as well as how to communicate UX strategy to your organization.
Conclusion
“UX strategy is a rapidly growing field—and one that will bring a huge return on investment….”
If you want to bring the benefits of a comprehensive UX strategy to your program or product, but need some assistance in doing so, there is a growing number of resources to help you. UX strategy is a rapidly growing field—and one that will bring a huge return on investment to the companies who are savvy enough to dedicate resources to UX strategy early in the digital product lifecycle.
Pick the Right Color for Design or Decorating with This Color Psychology Chart
Colors, we've seen before, quickly convey emotions and affect people's moods. Whether you're choosing paint for a room or are designing a presentation, this Psychology of Color chart, which matches specific Pantone colors, can come in handy.
Created by the Carey Jolliffe Graphic Arts agency, the chart covers a wide spectrum of colors (not just "green" for example, but ten shades of green/green-blue). It identifies the positive connotations for each color and, where applicable, negative ones too. Here's the full chart (click to expand or right-click to save):
SEXPAND
By the way, Pantone has a paint finder tool for matching Pantone colors.
For more on color theory and graphic design principles, check out Carey Jolliffe's blog.
Mood, Emotions and Color | Carey Jolliffe Graphic Arts via Centsational Girl
Evaluating the Usability of Web Photos
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Photos have a huge impact on the usability of digital products and services.
In every research project I work on I see how photos influence the way people use things, make decisions, and buy products. I find it strange that we seem to disregard them from a user experience perspective during the design process, despite the huge impact they clearly have on the end user.
Photos are the unsung heroes of user experience design, and I’ve embarked on a mission to improve the usability of web photos.
In order to improve the situation we need to first understand what makes a photo usable and effective. I’ve struggled to find any information online regarding this so I’ve created my own photo usability checklist, which you can download for free.
The checklist forms part of my new eBook Usability of Web Photos which is one of the new Pocket Guide series from the guys at Five Simple Steps.
The book explains just what usable photos are and why they're important. I also share some photo usability stories from my own research, uncover why so manyweb photos are so ineffective, and present some user-centered design techniques to improve photo usability.
The Thinking Behind the Checklist
My checklist is based on the art of using language to persuade others: rhetoric. Persuasiveness is one of many qualities you might want in an effective photo, but rhetoric goes further by identifying what qualities any method of communication must have in order to be effective.
Aristotle defined three types of rhetoric, which we can use to help determine the effectiveness of a photo. He called them ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos relates to the credibility and perceived authority of the communicator, pathos is about persuading by appealing to the emotions, and logos is about presenting a logical argument to persuade people through reason.
For a photo to be effective and usable it must be credible (ethos). It should also elicit a desirable emotional response (pathos) and help answer practical questions (logos).
The Checklist
The checklist is made up of three parts, which structure the evaluation around the principles of rhetoric as well as the pillars of usability: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Part one evaluates whether the photo is legible or credible. These are fundamentally important elements because if a photo cannot be seen properly or lacks credibility it will be immediately disregarded.
Part two helps you to determine the messages that the photo is communicating. This section makes you think about what the product owner may want a photo to communicate and, critically, how users will actually interpret the photos.
Part three brings everything together so you can determine how useful and effective the photo is. It questions how well a photo is helping a user with their task and whether the photo is having the impact on user behavior that it was designed to have.
You can use the checklist as a prompt when user testing or as a pure “expert review” tool if you can’t get any input from representative users.
If you wish, you can score the different parts to quantify how usable and effective your photos are or just use it as a qualitative tool. The approach you take is likely to be determined by just how many photos you need to evaluate. For large evaluations you should pick a representative sample of photos that are used within key parts of the user journey such as product pages and article pages.
You may find that only some of the checklist is relevant to you given the context of your work. Just give it a try and let me know how you think I can improve it.
Let’s Evaluate Some Photos
It’s freezing here in the UK at the moment and work is busy. I’m thinking about booking a holiday. I’ve found a site called Childfriendly and have used it to find out what is available in the Isle of Wight.
I have a young family, so where we stay while on holiday is particularly important in terms of safety and space. I also want to get excited about staying somewhere and imagine myself there during the tricky days at work in the months before I go!
I’ll demo the checklist by evaluating just how usable and effective the accommodation photos are on this page.
1. Legibility and credibility
Can you clearly see the contents of the photos?
Not really. The photos are small and I can’t click on the ones at the top to enlarge them. The photos at the bottom launch a lightbox but could stand to be at least 30% larger when displayed this way. The photos are in focus, are well exposed, and the composition is ok. The photo quality is decent but some look a little pixelated.
Do the photos look credible?
Yes, they are appropriate and believable. They don’t look manipulated and are relevant to the topic of the page.
2. What messages do the photos communicate?
What does the business or product owner want the photos to communicate?
They want to make the accommodations look as good as possible. The room is tidy and looks to have high-quality furnishings. The bright lighting makes the room look more luxurious. The exterior shots of the hotel show how close the property is to the sea.
What messages should the photos communicate to meet user needs?
I want to see the facilities that relate to how child-friendly the accommodations are. I want to be able to imagine staying there and to understand what I will get for my money. I need to be sure that this is going to suit my family and be a great place to stay during my precious time off.
What messages do the photos actually communicate to users?
The bedroom looks small because or the relative size of the bed in the photo. I have no idea if we could fit a cot in that room and that’s a problem for me. The living room looks a bit too flashy and impractical given that I have a one-year-old who likes to destroy things. I have no idea why they display two identical photos of the place settings. It looks more fine-dining than family friendly.
3. Usefulness and effectiveness
Do the photos result in the desired emotional response?
No. I really can’t see this hotel being an option for us, and it’s interesting that I’ve ruled it out completely just by looking at the photos. I haven’t and wouldn’t bother reading any of the text or checking the price.
Do the photos help the user with their task?
No. Because I’m viewing the photos within the context of a website that specializes in child-friendly hotels. The job of the photos is to make the accommodations look both safe and desirable.
Will the photos influence the behavior of the user?
Not in the desired fashion. The desired outcome from browsing these photos is to investigate the property further and they have not made me want to do that. I think it’s become fairly clear where I won’t be staying this year on my holiday.
The Power of the Checklist
The checklist is useful because it forces you to think about the job that the photos should be doing from abusiness and a user perspective and how well they are performing. It’s quick to complete and, as this example shows, you can use it to evaluate a group of photos in one hit.
As with any sort of expert review or evaluation it’s always easier to comment on a context that you understand or that has some sort of meaning to you. This evaluation was easy because I knew what was important to me, but if I was evaluating something I din’t understand, such as photos of electronic components, then it would be much harder.
As ever, if you find yourself needing to evaluate some photos try and involve real users in the process and use the checklist to structure your test plan. You can employ the checklist in the same way you would a set of usability heuristics, but you won’t be able to answer the question that covers what messages the photos are communicating to users without their help.
You can also use this checklist as part of your content strategy toolkit. It gives you a simple framework to use to evaluate photos when conducting content audits. You can also use it to determine your photo requirements when commissioning new photos to be taken.
In Summary
Thinking about photos in terms of their usability may seem a bit odd, but I hope that this example shows just how relevant and important it is. I believe this is the first framework of it’s kind, developed to be used for evaluating the usability and effectiveness of photos from a user experience perspective.
It’s brand new, so please join me on my mission to improve the usability of web photos: give it a try and let me know how I can improve it.
Cheers, @chudders
Image of vintage lightbox courtesty Shutterstock.
Evaluating the Usability of Collapsible Sections (or jQuery’s Content Toggle)
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After my post on Organizing Page-Level Content, a couple of people asked me about the usability of collapsible sections, also known as content toggles or dropdown hotspots. These are sections that are collapsed upon initial display and then expand when clicked.
Here’s an example:
You can implement collapsible sections in several ways. In Flare, you can insert drop-down hotspots from a quick button on the ribbon. In Drupal, you can use the Collapse Text module. In WordPress, you can use the Collapse-O-Matic plugin. The theme I’m using (Canvas from woothemes) has collapsible sections built directly in.
You can also code the sections directly using jQuery through the Toggle method. For example, if you wanted to toggle a section with the ID “section” so it appeared in an expand/collapse state, you would insert a reference to the jQuery library in script tags, and then insert another script like this:
1
| $('#section').toggle(); |
In the above code, #section is the unique ID of the element you want to toggle. (Including the twisting arrows is more complex.)
Wikipedia’s mobile pages use collapsible sections by default. Here’s an example if you want to explore collapsible sections a bit more.
Problems with the Collapsible Sections
Collapsible sections are cool but somewhat problematic. One person commented:
I really like collapsible sections, but I’ve encountered some usability issues with them (searches won’t look in collapsed sections, users might not know which section contains the info that they want). It would be great if you could search for something and the search result would auto-expand the correct section, but I haven’t seen that.
Another person asked via email:
How have users reacted to having to use progressively disclose the information by clicking? I ask because I received negative feedback when I incorporated togglers in Flare at a previous company.
Are collapsible sections really a best practice for help documentation, or do they just present more problems?
Overall, I think collapsible sections provide a strong advantage in organizing content and should probably be followed despite the drawbacks. Collapsible sections do all of the following:
- Collapsible sections compress a lot of information into a small space that users can visually scan in a quick way.
- Collapsible sections hide the length of information so that the content looks simpler and lighter to users (until they expand all the sections to see just how much content is there).
- Collapsible sections allow you to include content in a way that adjusts to the user’s need. If users want more information, they click the link to read more. But if not, users aren’t burdened by all the content.
- Collapsible sections allow users to interact with the content so they’re choosing what they want to learn.
If you trend toward longer pages, collapsing the sections can provide a huge win for navigation and usability.
Now for the downside. If a user searches for a keyword that’s buried inside a collapsed section, the user might be bewildered by not seeing the highlighted keyword on the page, because the collapsed section remains collapsed even in search results. (Seems like there would be an easy workaround for this, but I don’t know it.)
Keep in mind that Google doesn’t highlight keywords in search results. Google bolds keyword matches in the search engine results page summary, but when you click the result link to view the page, nothing is highlighted or bolded. So it seems a bit unfair to require help to highlight keyword matches on the full-page view.
Another drawback may be with content re-use. With Flare, you can store all of these collapsed as snippets and re-use the snippets, but what if you’re using another tool or platform that doesn’t have a snippets-like feature? You may be limited to only reusing larger chunks of content.
Finally, some users may find it annoying to have to expand content before being able to read it.
In looking at help systems, I don’t see many tech writers using collapsible sections. This may be due to limitations with the tech writer toolset, but I think a greater reason is that most topics are short, and the TOCs are massive. We’re still writing in the book paradigm rather than following the Every Page Is Page One style. As soon as you switch to a style that favors longer help topics, collapsible sections are about the only way to avoid intimidating the user with too much text.
Convertible Content: One Piece, Many Ways
It is no secret that creating content is a time-consuming venture. It takes time to brainstorm, plan, assign, create, revise, publish and promote content. Much emphasis has been given to re-purposing your content, mostly, from the angle of after the piece has already been published once. However, I think more can be done upfront to start thinking about multi-purpose content (a.k.a. “convertible content”) at the outset, so, like the incredible convertible dress, you can get more mileage out of your content wardrobe.
Here’s a quick example of how to take one piece of written content, and turn it into 5 different pieces.
Step 1: Start with a content concept.
Instead of thinking about content in terms of its specific use, i.e., blog post, Facebook post, etc., think of the concept you’re trying to convey first. Then write as much context as you can so the concept is built out enough to “re-fashion” it.
Step 2: Determine the relevance to your audience.
Write down three reasons your audience(s) will care about this piece of content. What’s in it for them? Why are they going to seek out and consume this information? This step in the process will ensure that every piece of convertible content you create is in line with your overall content strategy and messaging.
Step 3: Decide which outlets your content will be published to.
How does your audience prefer to consume content? Which of your content communities will most appreciate the content you are creating? Is the content meant to be short-lived and timely or evergreen? Answer these questions to have a clear publish plan once your content is created.
Step 4: Create
Starting with your content concept document, now fashion the different pieces of content. Write a press release announcement about the concept. Then turn the press release into a blog post. Turn the concept into a statement and question for your Facebook audience, and then compose a tweet. You can even take the concept, script out a video post where you discuss it, talking-head style. Turn it into a top-10 list complete with graphics and make it an infographic…you get the point.
I think more and more content marketers are going to start developing content in this way to allow content to be more fluid across multiple platforms.
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