They bought advertising in print and online publications; talked to industry experts; and found many business-side partners interested in their value proposition and who wanted to be a part of it. He could solve a market problem and at the same time help people with a personal problem about which he was very passionate. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. This is part of why traditional business strategy principles do not perfectly map to digital product strategy. UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. I couldn’t imagine just being a wireframe monkey anymore. Tinder—the dating app that is threatening former dating-site disruptors such as OkCupid and eHarmony (Figure 2-10). Read this book and learn how to get out of your customers’ way and create value for everyone who touches your stuff.”, – Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Present Shock, “Jaime has been amazing me with her dazzling digital products since 1993. And if users don’t like what they see, we need to either pivot to a different customer segment or pivot to a different problem that our value proposition can address. I have a clear understanding on what it takes to iterate on digital product ideas and ultimately provide value to startups (who court my services). In Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker discusses how customer values shift over time. Over the course of the book, I will discuss several case studies of products that have killer user experiences. It's a basic read, I was expecting something a little more in depth. 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. They hired public relations, marketing, and search-engine optimization (SEO) firms. I never looked at it because I had moved onto to another interactive agency (HUGE) with other high-profile clients. This complimentary toolkit allows for you and your team to collaborate on competitive research/analysis, user research studies, and funnel design strategies. Who are the users? Eric Ries popularized the term Minimum Viable Product. So, with all that said, cue the drum roll to introduce my UX strategy framework, as presented in Figure 2-2. You’ll meet two of my students  — Bita and Ena  —  who participated in a UX apprenticeship in which they chased a made-up value proposition in order to document my UX strategy process. They learn everything about the existing market space to identify UX opportunities that can be exploited. 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. But during the course of his research, he discovered that reputable treatment centers also struggled with certain things: they constantly had empty beds; they had difficulty sifting through referrals for appropriate patients; and it was a hassle to collect payments from insurance companies. Too often, I have seen UX designers work on products without being informed of the overall business strategy. Please fill this out so we can send you a link! Please try again. You’ll learn how to fail smartly by doing small-structured experiments to validate that your strategy is moving your team in the right direction. In the digital world, strategy usually begins in the discovery phase. We work hard to protect your security and privacy. When it was released in 2006, Twitter confounded users with their 140-character limit. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. 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. There were hundreds of pages of wireframes and functional specifications traded between stakeholders, designers, and developers. This book will help put things into perspective/reality and guide your product development. Airbnb achieves this value innovation by coupling a killer UX design with a tantalizing value proposition. For this to happen, the business mustcontinually identify and utilize a competitive advantage. I don’t want to talk about any of these traditional methods. So what is UX Strategy anyway? Fantastically useful book, written well and an easy read, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 7, 2016. As a UX strategist, I am paid to help my clients face dilemmas and chase dreams. When you are doing design, you are creating something. As Steve Blank writes, a business model describes the “flow between key components of the company.” [7] This quote comes from Blank’s Customer Development manifesto in which he challenges product founders to stop writing static business plans. Stand up and ask for the extra week or two to conduct validated user research. Value innovation occurs when companies align newness with utility and price. We’re unashamed fans of books. Please try your request again later. Lean Startup forced user research to become measurable. UX Strategy Book | JaimeLevy.com. It is the missing manual for the Lean Startup and Lean UX techniques that you’ve always wanted.”, – Jason Calacanis, Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author of Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups, “Jaime executed breakthrough UX long before it was called UX. But the discovery brief was never referenced again. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Polish Edition To get a sense of these key components, let’s take a look at a tool called the Business Model Canvas. They weave the UX through all touchpoints—online and offline—enabling an experience that is frictionless. The advantage behind cost leadership comes from offering the lowest price for products in a particular industry. In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, he analyzed the value chain of high-tech companies and drew a distinction between those just doing sustaining innovation versus disruptiveinnovation. There were no user profiles. User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. You’ll see how the journey is a reward, no matter if you’re the teacher, student, or maker. Yet, it’s the passion to solve a problem, change the world, and make it an easier place to live in that makes for game-changing products. Jaimie Levy does an exceptional job setting a framework and detailing everything from guerilla research to heuristics evaluations. The UX Strategy Fundamentals course is for User Experience Professionals, UX Designers, UX Strategists, Product Managers, Web Designers, Business Analysts, and anyone who wants to learn about UX Strategy in the organization. Categories such as key resources and partnerships aren’t something that a digital product manager or UX designer should think up in a vacuum. We explore techniques such as storyboarding that will weave key experiences together in simple and elegant ways. The book will pay itself off in the first couple of pages. How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want, Practical Techniques for Designing Better Products, A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams, O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (June 9, 2015). Yes, we can say a door handle is an interface and go off the nondigital highway into the world of 100 percent physical products. Level up this holiday! Still, a good business model doesn’t just define the revenue stream of a product. Use your research to validate your decisions and ensure that the product vision is aligned with the end user’s needs. Instead, the goal of many entrepreneurs is mass adoption. Stale mental models are overturned. —Sun Tzu, Art of War. There are a few places you can go to gain … If I didn’t have Eventbrite to experiment with as a promotional platform, there might have been no book for Jaime Levy. A sustaining innovation, he described as any innovation that enables industry leaders to do something better for their existing customers. And, of course, he and his team developed a consumer-facing website for customer acquisition. Our 100% guarantee that you’ll succeed. It’s about breaking a few rules that aren’t quite rules yet or even inventing your own game that creates an uncontested new marketplace and space for users to roam. The output of the discovery phase should be based on empirical data, such as getting direct input from target users before going straight from an idea to wireframes and development. In contrast, a product designer actually fabricates the thing. What’s relevant to us in this book is how many of these components align with the UX strategy for a digital product. But it’s easy to confuse these branding efforts and goals with a UX strategy. Currently she runs a User Experience Strategy and Design consultancy based in Los Angeles. UX Strategy Demystified. I would have liked to see a bit more about the actual mechanics of web design for conversion and the like, but the amount offered is a good primer for a beginner. Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2016. UX strategy is a way of thinking. I have seen them in play every day since my first discovery phase. I have to say it is a fantastic read(Love the stories) and it has been very useful for the project I am doing at the moment! Her practice caters to startups and enterprises that are open to practicing "lean" principles for transforming their business concepts into sustainable and scalable online solutions. Even though envisioning innovative products is fun, it’s hard to get people to change their behavior. How can you quickly prototype your ideas and get them in front of users? Before we dig into value innovation, let’s discuss the word value. A perfect example of a company that took advantage of a blue-ocean market is Airbnb. Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2020. You can make a duplicate of it to your Google drive or download it to work in your favorite spreadsheet program. This discovery opportunity helped us (the stakeholders and product team) in examining our goals to make a better platform for the millions of devoted Oprah fans in the world. We look at ways to poach and cherry-pick features from both competitors and noncompetitors so that we can put them together in new ways. By merely driving around with Waze open, users passively contribute traffic and other road data to the network. In the corporate world, the impulse to compete by destroying your rivals is rooted in military strategy. Actionable UX strategy guide from Robert Hoekman Jr., acclaimed designer and author of 8 design books including "Designing the Obvious" and "Experience Required". Google doesn’t have to announce it anymore, and when it’s bad, it’s all the more jarring. And this passion is not limited to entrepreneurs who quit their day jobs. It clearly explains numerous techniques for de-risking value propositions. In this case, they intersected in a blue ocean because of how Airbnb broke and reinvented some rules. * “Priceline Type Bed Auction Service Has Potential to Radically Transform Addictions Biz.” Treatment Magazine, January 12, 2012. http://tinyurl.com/8lj5wqa. In June of 2013, Waze (an Israeli startup) was acquired by Google for $1.1 billion. They then revise it as they move through the discovery phase, and it’s something you’ll see as we develop all the techniques in this book. One of these items ships sooner than the other. A full year later, the redesigned site launched. It should rely on empirical, lightweight tactics that quickly move you and your team (because let’s face it, you’re probably not doing this alone) toward your desired destination. Stakeholders are dreamers in that they assume what is valuable to their customers instead of verifying it. Value innovation is the key. Initially they blamed their site’s “user experience.” But by looking at the big picture, we showed them how a lot of their UX was actually getting hamstrung by other things that went beyond the digital interface. A UX Strategy can help businesses eliminate risk by spending time up front to research, plan, test, and validate ideas. Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2017. I highly recommend this book to anyone involved with UX strategy, whether you are the strategist or simply working in a field that requires UX strategy. The discovery phase is where UX strategy begins. 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. Our software engineer was just that type of person  —  after a difficult personal experience, he wanted to solve a problem so that others would not have to experience his pain. Now, Waze still offers its distinct UX to its users, but its data is also channeled into Google Maps. This book debunked all of my questions and the mysteries behind UX for me. This is especially relevant in products such as Airbnb and Uber in which the transaction begins on the Internet, is fulfilled in the real world, but then loops the user back to the interface to write reviews. However, I do want to acknowledge that my methodology is my version of UX strategy and might be different from other strategists. It required its users to change their mental models. If you get a “no” or are too afraid to ask, it’s time to start working off-hours. [1] In 1984, Michael Lanning first coined the term value proposition to explain how a firm proposes to deliver a valuable customer experience. Thanks again for contributing this piece to the world Jaime! Russian Edition That’s what happens when a new discipline or methodology arises: people will find their own approach, but even within those differences, there are connective tissues that bind them altogether to make UX strategy identifiable and unique. They help determine the key moments and features that are absolutely critical to your product. It also needs to be valuable to the business so that the business can sustain itself. Jaime Levy is an author, college professor and User Experience consultant based in Los Angeles, California. There's a problem loading this menu right now. I read this book to understand various facets of UX and not just the design parts. She was also staying at an Airbnb, which could have been paid for using some of the revenue ($550-plus) from her transaction with us. Recruiters for enterprises and agencies identify UX design with the job titles that create these deliverables, including interaction designer, information architect, and, shockingly, UX designers. It is a process based on a reality-check that focuses on direct feedback from interaction with users. We must understand how and why people use their digital devices and what defines a successful and failed UX. Nonetheless, the users didn’t come. Without a doubt, buy it now and begin this UX strategy journey! Please try again. Their publicist continued to find media that were interested in the concept, but the outlets wouldn’t run the story without some activity on the site. It’s found in almost all traditional and contemporary business books since the 1970s. As consumers, we choose one product over another based on the things we personally value, ranging from the product’s usefulness to how much pleasure we derive from it. In their book Lean Entrepreneur, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits say, “Marketing can increase awareness for the product, but if the product sucks, that’s what the buzz will be.” Apply this thinking to Google. At a high level, I recommend the following actions as you make UX your business strategy: • Link your design metrics to your business metrics. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team craft innovative multi-device products that people want to use. Enjoy! It ensures the long-term growth and ... Tenet 2: Value Innovation. For a business to generate wealth, it needs to offer a superior product to that of its competitors but at a manufacturing cost below what customers pay for it. There are many other products causing widespread disruption to the status quo through their combined value innovation of cost leadership and differentiation in blue-ocean marketplaces. At the end of his journey, the software engineer saw the opportunity to embark on a different kind of adventure. It accounts for the user’s entire journey down the funnel. A vague affirmation that sounds like a good Hallmark card—“You, too, can achieve Social Lean Disruption.”. And through their UX strategies, they are ultimately making people’s lives easier, bringing together customers in new ways and smashing mental models. Three Product Managers from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft teamed up to write the ultimate guide on tech and business strategy for Product Designers! But the limit turned out to be a valuable perk, especially with respect to updates. “It must be the user experience,” the team hypothesized, which is when and why they came to me. Everybody won! That perceived value is what transforms a simple little café and cup o’ joe into the crazy success story of Seattle-based Starbucks. Along with the other team leads, I flew into Chicago to kick-off our discovery phase. It’s weird to admit, but before 2011 when Eric Ries’ Lean Startup [7] (which you must read) went critical mass, founders didn’t make it their mission to confront customers early and often. Terms can be slippery in the digital design world; when I bought this book, I thought it would be focused on how to plan new features and create product roadmaps. But, all those terms apply to physical products. This book literally changed my life and has given me an opportunity to grow my learning in so many ways. Formerly unwritten social etiquette now had to come into play if users were to host strangers or stay in a stranger’s home and for both parties to feel good about it. Interfaces and user flows should be geared toward the desired response of the user. A creative permutation of trending buzzwords that were just used by another startup that raised financing—for instance, peer-to-peer sharing economies. Japanese Edition My goal in writing the book UX Strategy is to demystify the practice of UX strategy so that you can do just that. I’ve just bought this book. For me to suggest doing validated user research or creating an MVP to test during the design phase is blasphemy because it’s counterintuitive to the agency model. Along with business cases, historical context, and real-world examples throughout, you’ll also gain different perspectives on the subject through interviews with top strategists. Consider how Waze found a sustainable business model—sharing its crowd-sourced data made it lucrative to other companies such as Google. (For more on this, see Chapter 9 in the book UX Strategy.). When conversations with … It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. You’ll be able to immediately apply UX strategy techniques to your projects in a variety of work settings to keep you and your team from getting overwhelmed no matter what limitations you face. Because what’s the point in spending time and energy crafting a digital product that isn’t unique? Thank you Eventbrite for enabling the one value innovation that other platforms like Meetup failed to offer: the ability to host paid ticketed events. A generic set of motivational statements such as Go Team Challenge Conquer, An arrogant statement from some expert—“Our product sprung from the genius of Professor Iam Awesome, the visionary of Social Lean Disruption.”, A hypothesis that has unvalidated risky assumptions—“Well, all women DO like pink.”. The personas and proposed solution were never validated by existing customers. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 10, 2020. While devising a UX strategy, you will need to take risks and accept failure. —NEIL YOUNG (1972). But we refused, because they didn’t just need a new UX design. You’ll also see that no matter the project or the circumstances, devising products is like being on a rollercoaster, and the only way to keep the product on the rails is to use empirical, cost-efficient strategy techniques. This helped open the clients’ minds to other possible business models, such as a business-to-business (B2B) solution. Airbnb’s entire UX was built around the idea of ensuring that each guest and host was a good customer. With differentiation, the advantage is based on a new or unique product or a unique aspect of the product for which customers will pay a premium because of its perceived value. However, that doesn’t mean that you can easily substitute one for the other (even if my parents think my little brother [a product director/manager type] and I do the same thing for a living). We must learn as quickly as possible if the idea we are working on is stupid and worthless. And when my team eventually went out and asked his target users, we discovered that they wouldn’t pay for the product as it was being positioned. Instead of booking a hotel that would have cost us upward of $1,200 (two rooms for two nights at a 3.5 star hotel), we used Airbnb and spent half of that. Remember our software engineer at the beginning of this book? The battle gets bloody when one side wants what the other side has—whether it be oil, land, shelf space, or eyeballs. The UX design should be very concerned with barriers to entry, which can prevent customers—even validated customers who have previously engaged with the product—from converting to customers. To achieve that disruption, we need a framework from which to connect all the dots that will build a cohesive UX strategy. The software engineer’s team knew that whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working. Top subscription boxes – right to your door, UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions, Define and validate your target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques, Conduct competitive research and analysis to explore a crowded marketplace or an opportunity to create unique value, Focus your team on the primary utility and business model of your product by running structured experiments using prototypes, Devise UX funnels that increase customer engagement by mapping desired user actions to meaningful metrics, © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Aspects of brand strategy can help define aspects of your product’s UX design, and vice versa. The book presents a solid framework on the practice, which lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy. They offer incredible value through feature sets like easy calendaring tools, map integration for browsing, and, most crucially, a seamless transactional system that had not been previously offered by other competitors like VRBO, Homeaway, or Craig’s List. The brief contained typical deliverables such as user personas, concept map analyses, and a recommended feature list. Then, the UX designer can be involved in designing structured experiments for validation. Chapter 2: The Four Tenets of UX Strategy. Business strategy is the top-line vision of the company. No need for customer feedback because you are 100 percent certain you have nailed it! Either way, discovery involves people and data. User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. In my new position, I was able to focus my energy more directly on the discovery phase of projects in which user research and business strategy were given more weight. A revenue stream is how the company gets paid. Without validation, you are simply assuming that customers will find use for your product.