Design Strategy notes and links
Thanks everyone for your participation in today’s workshop. I really appreciate the smart questions and the interesting ideas you shared about design strategy. There’s a couple of things I promised to share right away:
- Here’s a PDF file of the slides from the workshop.
- A couple of months ago I did a design strategy case study podcast with Lulu Pachuau and Bob Medcalf of Provoke, a design consultancy in New Zealand. Lulu attended a past UX Intensive event and then integrated much of what she learned into a project for Industrial Research Limited. The podcast and associated presentation share many ideas of how you might adapt and integrate the tools into your work.
- I made reference to the Adaptive Path report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.” We’re now allowing you to download the full ROI report for free. In it, you’ll find detailed explanations of the UX Value Chain and the Linking Elephants model.
Also, I wanted to provide a list of the many references and ideas that were brought up in the workshop and during discussions:
- A blog post detailing one of my examples of experience strategy, the Target ClearRX drug delivery system. There’s several links within to articles and the backstory behind the pill bottle redesign.
- I made a couple of references to Michael Porter and his seminal essay, “What is Strategy?” Unfortunately it’s $6.50 from Harvard Business Review, but it’s also a great read. Also a good read is a recent interview Michael Porter did with the Wharton School of Business explaining why “being the best” isn’t a strategy (requires sign-up).
- And if you want to use numbers to help you make your case for design and UX, Henning Fischer’s essay on Business Case Modeling for Design Initiatives is a great how-to, plus you can download his spreadsheet that shows all his math.
- The value curve example comes from Blue Ocean Strategy, but the authors prior article in HBR is cheaper and a faster read, if you’re looking for short cuts. Another example of a value curve is Scott Weisbrod’s example of the value curve for the Wii.
- I talked about the value of creating tangible expressions of he strategy to define what the strategy is or could be. One of my favorite examples of prototyping and testing new experience-based strategies comes from Kevin Cheng’s presentation on Communicating Concepts through Comics.
- Here’s the Charmr video that I shared, a great example of creating a clear vision of what an experience could be. Here’s more on the Charmr project.
- One way to quickly get to Definition is the sketchboard technique. Here’s an essay on sketchboads with details behind that movie on how we do it and downloads to the tools we use.
- I also referenced this presentation by Leah Buley, How to Be a UX Team of One”. If your interested in these ideas and the sketchboard method, we’ll be teaching both at workshops during UXWeek 2009 this September.
Thanks everyone for a great first day!
Brandon