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Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Kantamneni, Satyam, author.
Title: User experience design: a practical playbook to fuel business growth / Satyam Kantamneni.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, [2022] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022008654 (print) | LCCN 2022008655 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119829201 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119829379 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119829386 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: User interfaces (Computer systems)—Design. | Design—Human factors.
Classification: LCC QA76.9.U83 K3257 2022 (print) | LCC QA76.9.U83 (ebook) | DDC 005.4/37—dc23/eng/20220308
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008654
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008655
Cover Design and Images: UXReactor / Diana Ximena Sánchez Sánchez
“Satyam shares his extensive expertise in UX leadership, design, and business strategy through an actionable series of playbooks. These playbooks will help organizations transform their approach and leverage best practices in user‐centric design and experience strategy. This is a valuable reference no matter what stage of user experience design maturity your organization has reached.”
—Amy Lokey, SVP and Global Head of Design, ServiceNow
“Satyam brings a holistic business perspective to the concept of design and has written a highly entertaining, insightful, and practical guide for how the best companies leverage design to drive disproportionate returns. The book is expertly illustrated, making it easy to read, and contains a treasure trove of anecdotes, case studies, and practical examples to help you on your journey. This book is a shining example of a product designed for its users!”
—Lewis Black, CEO, Actian Corporation
“I first met Satyam in 2014 and was struck by his passion for and insights in user experience design. He was ahead of the times in recognizing the strategic importance of good user experience for business and anticipated the movement towards consumerization of enterprise applications. This book should be a required reading for business leaders—even a cursory reading of this book will influence their mindset and help them realize that investment in superior customer experience could be a significant and long‐lasting strategic advantage.”
—Venk Shukla, General Partner, Monta Vista Capital
“A treasure trove of experience frameworks, best practices, plays, and insights for enhancing design impact to the next level. I wish I had these experience frameworks early on in my career. A must‐read for all design and business leaders. Absolutely priceless.”
—Arin Bhowmick, Chief Design Officer and Group Vice President, IBM Products
“Satyam strikes a perfect balance between demystifying experience strategy and elaborating its practical application in this book. A must‐read for not only UX professionals but also for executives of all functions. And I can see how this book will be equally helpful for early career employees and seasoned leaders. Why has nobody else written about this before?”
—Bora Chung, Chief Experience Officer, Bill.com
“The ‘experience economy’ has taken hold, and excelling at experience design has become a decisive success factor for any organizations creating genuine value for consumers, enterprises and the public sector. This is a well‐structured and a pragmatic playbook validated by products and services that are transforming businesses, which also doubles as a thoughtful guide orienting game‐changing collaboration with confidence.”
—Jose de Francisco, Chief Designer, Distinguished Member of Bell Labs, Nokia CNS
“User experience design is still a topic not well understood by most. Satyam has taken his decades of experience in user experience design and distilled it into easy‐to‐read and ‐consume topics. A must‐have book for all business leaders that struggle to understand what the heck does the design team do besides arguing over color palettes for the user interface.”
—Anoop Tripathi, Chief Technology Officer, Interactions LLC
“This playbook is a must‐read for all practitioners and leaders engaged in crafting experiences. Satyam shares an easy‐to‐implement toolkit to transform an organization through user‐centricity and experience design.”
—Gaurav Mathur, VP of Design, Flipkar
“Satyam achieved something uncanny—he wrote a book about the practice of user experience design that is equally important for design leaders and practitioners, business executives, product managers, and engineers. User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth provides the shortest path to making products, teams, and organizations user centered. Highly recommended read.”
—Marcin Treder, UX Manager, Google Inc.; ex‐CEO, UXPin Inc.
“A must‐read for all product marketing, development, and management professionals looking to compete in the digital age. Satyam crystalizes years of experience into a replicable framework and toolkit for utilizing the power of design thinking and user‐centered innovation to drive meaningful organizational change. He utilizes real‐world examples to expose and question the business assumptions used to stifle innovation and propagate the status quo while teaching the reader how to overcome these misconceptions and discern where to invest (and not invest) resources to generate real value and engagement with customers.”
—Samuel Finger, Former Director of Solutions Management, Nokia Software
“Very few people are able to nail ‘business growth by design’ as articulately as Satyam’s (or this book) did. The step‐by‐step breakdown of mindsets establishes a solid playbook for any business leader with a user‐centric mindset to bring a successful revolution by design to their organizations.”
—Dhwani Soni, VP for Product and User Experience Design 8x8
“The PUX™ plays in this book provide a disciplined and practical approach that teams can use to make better design decisions across the customer journey. By focusing on bv.d, teams can scale up and maintain a focus on creating ongoing customer value.”
—Thomas DeMeo, VP of Product Management, Coupa Software
“As experience continues to become more central to the value that organizations create and deliver, it becomes even more important to teach people at every level in the organization how to design the right experiences. With that being the case, this is one of the most important books to be published in the last decade and will certainly help you (and your organization) understand how to employ the right mindset in everything you do.”
—Justin Lokitz, business model and strategy expert and coauthor of the bestselling books, Design A Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation, and Business Model Shifts: Six Ways to Create New Value For Customers.
“Satyam Kantamneni outlines a set of extremely practical best practices that will help teams and organizations deliver services to their customers that they will value and love. The book is essential reading for business leaders who want to understand how better UX unlocks business growth.”
—Greg Petroff, SVP of Research and Product Design, Compass
Dedicated to my wife, Gayatri, and wonderful daughters, Veda and Mantra, who have unconditionally supported my entrepreneurial journey, which has made this playbook possible.
Satyam is the founder of UXReactor together with his brother, Prasad. Under his leadership, UXReactor has become the fastest‐growing specialized user experience design firm in the US, with a team of 60+ employees spread over three continents.
Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Satyam served as managing director of product design at Citrix in San Francisco, where he played a crucial role in growing the product design team from four members to more than 100 practitioners. Satyam was instrumental in building PayPal’s Global Design Center in India while leading a design team in Silicon Valley.
He is a perpetual learner with educational background representing a unique trifecta in engineering, human‐centered design, and business. He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School’s famed General Management Program, studied design thinking at Stanford University, and holds a master’s degree in human factors from Wright State University.
While at Harvard, Satyam realized that most businesses aren’t leveraging the full power of user experience (UX) design as an engine for strategic growth. Companies either don’t have the in‐house design expertise or relegate design to a support role—even when hiring external UX agencies.
Satyam resolved to change that. Through UXReactor, Satyam is demonstrating that UX can and should drive enterprise‐wide innovation and business outcomes. UXReactor has enabled clients to generate multiple hundreds of millions in additional revenue from user‐centered innovation.
Satyam has also advanced the UX discipline by developing and curating the PragmaticUX™ framework: a consistent, replicable, measurable, and scalable approach to innovation in a digital world. UXReactor relies on this proven framework to lead user experience and product innovation for multiple Fortune 500 companies.
He lives in Dublin, California, with his wife and two daughters.
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To win and keep market share, businesses need to differentiate on experience. It’s no longer enough to upgrade your features or platform design. Your buyers demand intuitive, seamless solutions that make users better and more powerful, with less effort.
When you can do that, you can earn untouchable loyalty.
We specialize in transforming experiences for complex B2B organizations. Most UX design agencies avoid the complexity of enterprise systems. And they aren’t prepared to navigate the organizational silos in large B2B firms.
UXReactor thrives on those very UX challenges. We’re at our best creating seamless experiences out of complexity. That’s why enterprise software companies and leaders across industries choose UXReactor.
We help organizations
Every engagement we lead is focused on improving the metrics that matter most. UXReactor’s experience design work is a force multiplier for greater adoption, retention, CLTV (customer lifetime value), satisfaction, efficiency, engagement, revenue, and more.
For clients such as ServiceNow, Tekion, Nokia, Actian, Extreme Network, and CloudKnox, UXReactor has helped them reach significant business milestones and win coveted awards. Recently, we celebrated CloudKnox’s acquisition by Microsoft, who came to us with a back‐of‐the‐napkin idea; Tekion’s hyper‐growth and a valuation of $3.5B in five years; and a 100% increase in customer growth rate within one year for one of the UK’s largest cell phone service providers.
Founded by executives who have led innovation and design at some of the most iconic tech companies in the world, the firm has codified proven techniques based on decades of industry experience.
Our diverse team of 60+ includes experience design strategists supported by specialists in user research, interaction design, and visual experience design—all aligned around UXReactor’s proprietary PragmaticUX™ framework; this playbook is a treasure trove of some of those leading techniques.
And UXReactor is truly global. We’re headquartered just an hour outside San Francisco, in Pleasanton, California, with offices in Hyderabad, India, and Medellin, Colombia.
Learn more 
The story of this Playbook started in late 2012 when I was a design leader at a large software company leading the centralized design group responsible for the user experience (UX) design for most of the company’s leading products. At that point, I had spent close to six years in UX design leadership in two separate organizations, starting as associate UX manager before being promoted to managing director of design.
As part of my career planning conversation with my manager, the topic of aspirations came up. I was itching to transition my role from design leadership into business leadership, where I felt that I could make a more holistic impact in the organization. As a result of this conversation, the company sponsored me to attend Harvard Business School’s famed General Management Program, an executive education program designed for senior leaders to get an end‐to‐end management training. The program was a transformational experience for me, as I was surrounded by more than 100 accomplished leaders who had achieved a lot and were now in the similar pursuit of gaining more formal business learning.
There were two key takeaways for me here: First, I learned the power of frameworks; the professors would consistently iterate and set up simple frameworks that students could understand, teach, and replicate. From SWOT analysis, to the “Five P’s of Marketing,” to the Balanced Scorecard, I built an appreciation for the power of frameworks and have used the same approach as we share the plays later in the book.
Second, as I engaged with each of my peers, I recognized that the designer’s toolkit I had been exposed to could solve a multitude of business problems. Rapid experiments, a cornerstone to a designer’s toolkit, could be adapted to increase innovation. Journey mapping users and their processes could help an organization unlock efficiency. And conducting user research could validate product‐market fit.
My thoughts were overflowing with possibilities. Interestingly, most of my fellow students would never have considered engaging a “designer” like me to solve their business problems. This was primarily because all the designers (marketing, interior, industrial, graphic, or UI) they had previously worked with were skills‐based contributors.
At the end of the program, I had made up my mind that I was going to double down on continuing on the design leadership path. I knew that I—and the larger design profession—still had a lot of impact to make.
My inspiration in this pursuit was an accounting professor in Chicago by the name of James McKinsey, who in 1926 founded a small firm with a similar vision that the accounting practice could be a key factor in creating business value. The rest is history, as he went on to generate significant value for every company that engaged his firm. As part of his body of work, McKinsey is credited with establishing budget planning as a management framework that is still used in business today.
I spent the next year and a half looking at ways to elevate design as a business driver; however, it was easier said than done. I still remember a conversation I had with one of the general managers who was responsible for a product suite that generated more than half a billion dollars in revenue. I shared my opinion that good design is good business and that we should invest more effort on design to make the product suite more usable and seamless. The candid answer I got was, “Why would I do that? I can put that $1 in sales (boots on the ground) and it will give me $10 back.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a rebuttal for his insight, because I couldn’t really articulate how $1 in design could deliver value in return. While I believed in the power of design, I struggled to show its impact in a consistent manner. There was always something getting in the way: Sometimes it was the organizational priorities, sometimes it was the designers’ capabilities, sometimes it was lack of tools and processes; there were myriad reasons.
On further analysis, I could root the challenge in four key areas: the attitudes (mindsets), the people (or lack of), the process (or lack of), and the organizational environment. This was a much deeper problem than I had anticipated.
I subsequently decided to spend the next phase of my career trying to get back to the drawing board and look at it afresh through an “experimental medium” we called UXReactor. Fundamentally, we focused on the four key variables (mindsets, people, process, and environment) that we wanted to experiment with. For the next seven years, we hypothesized, experimented, iterated, and evolved our learning into an internal playbook called the PragmaticUX™ Playbook.
Over this time, we had built more than 100 frameworks (plays) around practitioner intents, such as how to plan strategic investments, how to prepare for a design kickoff, how to ensure the whole organization has deep empathy for the user, how to conduct a design interview, and even how to summarize the weekly status as a report. We had frameworks for everything. Everything that could be codified with better ways to handle the mindsets, people, processes, and environment—we studied them all.
With this Playbook as our backbone, UXReactor has grown and helped our client partners create millions of dollars in value and impact. At the same time, we’ve gained recognition for our work, including the 2019 FastCompany Innovation by Design Award, as well as being named the fastest‐growing specialized user experience firm in the US on the esteemed Inc. 5000 list for two consecutive years.
As we engaged within various contexts and client‐partners, we got better at updating and evolving the plays in the Playbook. Soon, we were fielding inquiries from prospective clients about the Playbook itself, in addition to our consulting services. Interestingly the alumni (ex‐teammates) of UXReactor would also report back that they were adding way more value in their new organizations than peers with twice their experience because they were trained by our Playbook. Universities also started approaching us to include our plays as part of their graduate‐level curriculum.
We realized that it was time to publish this to the wider world so that more business and design leaders and practitioners could leverage these plays to help fuel their own business growth.
Writing this book was, in itself, a user experience design process. Our intent is that it becomes a reference and an accelerator for anyone who intends to drive their business by leveraging the power of experience design.
It was not an easy task, because we had to solve four specific design problems in order to produce the book that you’re now engaging with:
I am confident that we’ve taken a solid stab at solving these four problems. Like everything user‐centered, the user’s input is essential. So I and my team would love to hear from you—please do not hesitate to connect with me through the resources available to you at www.UXDPlaybook.com. It’s also important to note that as my team and I put this Playbook together, we have taken great care to uphold the confidentiality of our clients and/or situations that we have been privy to. We have done this by using fictitious company names, by changing names of individuals, or adjusting the context of the data. We did this while ensuring that the relevant facts and insights were not lost.
Finally, I hope that this book will provide you with the mindset, the mindfulness, and the tools to create 10X value in every organization that you are part of. I can wish nothing but the best as you pursue a goal of making the world a better place—one experience at a time.
“If you don’t play to win, don’t play at all.”
– Tom Brady
“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough‐it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
– Steve Jobs
AltEdukation1 (a fictional company inspired by real life) was a well‐established company providing after‐school enrichment programs to K–12 students across the West Coast. By 2019, after decades of growth, the organization was operating 20 locations in California, Oregon, and Washington, working with more than 4,000 paying students at any given time.
The company grew its revenue by more than 40% in 2019. Then, in early 2020, the COVID‐19 pandemic erupted. By March, state governors were issuing shelter‐in‐place orders. Unfortunately, all of AltEdukation’s in‐person sites shut down for an extended period.
Upper management quickly convened a meeting to determine how to move forward. They had to transform to survive, so they asked their small but effective design, technology, and education teams to digitize all training and to find tools enabling their enrichment programs to go fully virtual. It was imperative that the current programs not stop due to the shelter‐in‐place orders. Otherwise, the company would need to refund students’ fees en masse, which would set the business back significantly.
For the next month, the team worked hard to select and transition to various online tools and platforms. They digitized booklets and tests; integrated tools for student collaboration, curriculum tracking, and online payments; and chose a web conferencing tool for instructors to use. Everyone at Alt‐Edukation felt good about all they had achieved in such a short time.
But to their surprise, satisfaction scores and enrollment rates dropped dramatically over the next few months. Students found it difficult to navigate different tools, locate course material, and collaborate with their peers, while instructors struggled to adapt to the new pedagogical approach required by online teaching.
Although these digital tools allowed the programs to proceed, the experience was not the same. Students felt that all they were doing was watching instructors lecture via web conferencing software. Since AltEdukation was not providing an enhanced learning experience, students might as well watch YouTube or Khan Academy videos instead—at least those were free.
Upper management knew that they had to act fast to save the company, but they had no idea how to move forward.
There were more questions than answers for AltEdukation’s leadership team.
Why was going digital not enough? To understand that, let’s deconstruct AltEdukation’s digital ecosystem.
Students learning from home were expected to navigate and master multiple digital systems:
What’s more, these systems didn’t account for the different needs between kindergartners and high schoolers.
Meanwhile, parents were expected to support their children in multiple digital systems:
Teachers/instructors had to master and deliver curriculum in multiple digital systems:
And finally, customer support teams had to develop and administer multiple digital systems:
AltEdukation was not alone in this situation. In fact, this exact scenario has been playing out throughout the rest of the world and across very different industries. Businesses were expected to rapidly transform to ensure viability or risk becoming obsolete.
Judges, lawyers, and plaintiffs litigating on a web conferencing tool;
Million‐dollar real estate bought through 3D walkthroughs and online notarizations;
Business‐critical brainstorming sessions via online collaboration tools, with limited face‐to‐face activity;
Medical and mental health appointments being handled via a mobile app in the comfort of home;
Candidates interviewed and offered roles to work remotely without even having met a single coworker in person, then working from home and interacting entirely via digital tools.
Every facet of every business now was being run by multiple, disjointed digital systems in the garb of digital transformation. While these business transformations were being put in place, the contrast of users’ expectations between their personal applications and their work/business applications became increasingly stark.
What became clear was that consumers, having been immersed in technology for nearly two decades, are no longer willing to accept disjointed digital experiences.
The pandemic brought to the forefront a critical insight for many businesses: Going digital was not enough. The user’s experience was the new problem to solve.
“Users were no longer willing to accept disjointed digital experiences.
A study by Design Management Institute (DMI) found a 228% differential between design‐centric companies and the S&P 500 Index. Corporations that made the list include Apple, Coca‐Cola, Ford, Herman‐Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell‐Rubbermaid, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney, Whirlpool, and Nike.
In a separate 2018 research study of the business value of design by McKinsey, the data also showed that top design‐centric companies were outperforming their competition by as much as a 2X multiple.
“Design‐centric companies were outperforming their competition by as much as a 2X multiple.
DESIGN MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE: DESIGN VALUE INDEX
At the same time, the beginning of this millennium brought technology and digital systems front and center in people’s work and life. It’s not surprising that eight of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today are technology companies. Technology is revolutionizing everything, and the world is getting rapidly digitized. Can the same emphasis on design continue to propel organizations forward? The answer is: It depends.
An updated playbook is needed to merge the dynamic nature of technology with traditional design practices. Differentiated digital experiences that are created when digital tools are built and deployed thoughtfully by user‐centric design can yield a market share gain between 1 and 5 percentage points. This data is from a 2019 McKinsey report detailing various digital growth strategies and how industrial companies can sustainably outgrow their peers. To clarify, we’re talking percentage points, not basis points (1/100th of a percentage), so this can easily convert into millions or even billions of dollars in business value.
Differentiated digital experiences don’t just magically happen. They must be deliberately designed. And organizations that fail to recognize this are not playing to win.
It’s not a fluke that digital companies such as Apple, Amazon, Uber, Nest, and Airbnb are so successful in generating business value. They understand and harness the union of technology and experience design to fuel growth. They are category leaders not just because they have the best technology but rather because they understand their users and create awesome experiences for them each and every time.
The Nest thermostat is a case study in the power of a superior digital experience: In just four years, the company leveraged that competitive advantage to build a $3.2 billion business that Google acquired in 2014. Not only did they build a beautiful, well‐designed physical thermostat, but they also designed the multiple user experiences that went with it: the ordering experience, the unpacking experience, the installation experience, the configuration experience, the scheduling experience, the monitoring experience, and the mobile experience. Again this value was created by deliberate user‐centered design.
“Differentiated digital experiences don’t just magically happen. They must be deliberately designed.
Even though organizations and leaders understand the power of designing differentiated digital experiences, it is fairly evident in my two decades of experience (the majority of it leading and supporting organizations in Silicon Valley) that most are not able to leverage this to fuel business growth.
There are different reasons and challenges, and my goal (via this book) is to unpack them and provide a mindful framework for business leaders, design leaders, design practitioners, and design collaborators to achieve the full potential of the union of design and technology.
“56% of users of digital services stated that they are dissatisfied by the user experience.
Global market intelligence leader International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts an investment of $6.8 trillion for a three‐year period ending 2023 to transform organizations into digital‐at‐scale enterprises (organizations that build and grow through significant investment in technology). At the same time, 56% of users of digital services stated that they are dissatisfied by the user experience, according to a 2021 McKinsey Global Digital Sentiment Insights survey.
In other words, businesses are “sinking” staggering amounts of money into digital products and services that people (users) don’t find usable, useful, and desirable. For that investment, some businesses will generate growth, but most will lose trillions of dollars simply because they don’t understand the new problem where the user’s experience directly affects current and future business outcomes.
In simple terms, the experience problem means ensuring that each user that engages in the business ecosystem gets what they want, when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it, every time they experience the digital product or service.
Every company is now a technology company, either because it offers technology products or has made (or will make) immense technology investments for internal operations. To thrive, companies must create the best user experience for all users engaged in their business ecosystem. This includes (but is not limited to) their direct users, their employees, and any partners and vendors who are part of the system.
Companies need to recognize that they are not creating value1—and in fact are losing value—by doing the following:
Conversely, users today are making decisions based on attributes such as:
According to research by Credit Suisse, the average age of an S&P 500 company is now less than 20 years, down from 60 years in the 1950s. Researchers directly attributed this shift to the disruptions caused by technology transformation. Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Nokia handsets vs. Apple iPhone, Borders vs. Amazon—examples abound of companies that perished while competitors thrived.
Businesses today do not have the luxury to sit around and slowly evolve, as the competition is just a click away. With the cost of technology innovation exponentially decreasing, competitors can easily and quickly launch a better alternative. Consider that it took eBay years to build an e‐commerce platform that can now be launched in minutes on Shopify.
Leaders who understand and leverage the power of user experience by constantly delighting their users with useful, functional, and desirable solutions will ride this wave to growth. That is the fundamental thesis of this Playbook. Those who do not will be left wondering what just happened and how they missed the opportunity of the decade.
As businesses focus their investment in user‐centered experience design across their digital ecosystems, they need to understand the various ways to create user and business value by understanding what I call the experience value chain.
There are three ways businesses can create value in the context of digital technologies and systems. The first is at the user interface (UI–Screen UX) level, the second is at the product user experience (Product UX) level, and the third is at the experience transformation (XT–Organizational UX) level, which represents a deliberate shift across every aspect of the organizational ecosystem.
To illustrate the differences between the three:
Organizations operating at the user interface (UI) design level concentrate on value creation by designing the user interface for various digital modalities (mobile, desktop, web, over‐the‐top (OTT), interactive voice response, kiosk, tablet, etc.)
They focus on design tasks such as:
UI design is critical and is the minimum value that users expect in any digital system. While this is a foundational area of focus and expertise, most organizations unfortunately think this is all it takes to build a great experience, without realizing that they are just scratching the surface.
Organizations operating at the product design level foster deep understanding of the product and its system, while triangulating it with the user’s intent. Their designers are trained and expected to think about the user and their context in the digital product before focusing on the UI, and they directly influence business planning and prioritization of the relevant design problems. This focus generates a whole new level of value creation.
In addition to performing screen level design tasks, UX designers focus on fundamental problems such as:
Contrary to widespread misconception, UI and UX design are not equivalent (tip: stop using the moniker “UI/UX” while referencing the skill; it unfortunately shows a lack of understanding). Practitioners at this level operate as collaboration catalysts, ensuring that the entire product maintains a user‐first approach.
Experience transformation (XT) builds on the critical foundation laid by the UI design and product UX design levels. XT ensures that each touchpoint in a user’s experience has been carefully designed, orchestrated, and optimized across all departments. Whether the user is calling technical support, engaging with customer success, using the product, transitioning from another product, or working with a system integrator, their experience should be consistent, seamless, and above all, delightful.
To excel at this level, practitioners must be deeply focused on transforming the business, working across the whole organization to design and deliver the best experiences. In short, everyone from the board of directors to the newest intern should be aligned on leveraging the deep understanding of the user to unlock business value by doing things such as:
“Digital transformation is a must to survive; experience transformation is a must to thrive.”
At the XT level, every aspect of an organization is centered on its users and their experiences. And because these experiences extend beyond the product itself to the entirety of the customer’s engagement with the company, they would take competitors years to replicate, even assuming they are able to figure out the why behind all of the iterations. This is because XT change entails a fundamental shift in people, processes, mindsets, and culture—a shift that builds tremendous value.
Although the value proposition is immense, most organizations are yet in the early stages of figuring out how to design and build a user experience–centric world. After studying over 100 different organizations I have found the distribution along the experience value chain looks like this:
There’s an enormous difference between the companies that get UX design and the companies that don’t.
The goal of this Playbook is to enable the vast majority of organizations to deliberately and effectively navigate the experience value chain and unlock the immense business value.
Investment guru Warren Buffet has often stated the importance of an “economic moat” for businesses to succeed over the long term. Investopedia defines economic moat as “a business’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over its competitors in order to protect its long‐term profits and market share from competing firms.”
Interestingly a company’s rise through the three levels of the experience value chain directly correlates to increased value and a deeper competitive moat. As we touched on above:
The following insanity plays out every day in the business world: In their pursuit of the best user experience, organizations are making the same mistakes over and over again, without realizing what they are doing wrong.
It’s not uncommon to consistently see businesses hiring a couple of designers or a design agency or bring in a speaker and assuming they are on the right path of unlocking the business value that the business data is referring to. It takes a lot more than that, but to start with they need to understand the following.
“User experience design” (UX Design) is a deliberately structured term. “User” precedes “experience,” and “design” is at the end. This ordering reflects best practices. However, most organizations jump to designing around the capabilities of their technology before considering either their users or their experiences.
Forty percent of products are developed without any input from end users. Not coincidentally, 35% of new ideas and start‐ups fail due to poor product‐market fit. Organizations burn through billions of dollars with no clear outcome, a waste compounded by lost time and opportunity cost. The modus operandi needs to change quickly if organizations are to be relevant and grow shareholder value.
Developing the wrong solution is costly. But companies that are mindful of the “user before experience before design” principle will build products that users actually want and need as the sequencing protects them.
In 2002, the UK government initiated a £12.7 billion IT project to centralize the entire country’s patient‐health records. In 2011, after years of delay, technical difficulties, and rising costs, the project was abandoned. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley attributed the failure to “imposing a top‐down IT system … that didn’t fit their user’s needs … of the local NHS.” The spectacular implosion wasted billions of pounds that could have been allocated to assist patients and health care workers.
In the pursuit of developing and shipping products quickly, most organizations make the mistake of innovating in the wrong direction. They approach the project “inside‐first.”
In inside‐first organizations, internal stakeholders leverage their business instinct, technology, processes, and sales machines to try to design and engineer a solution for their end users. Typically, they frame the problem by stating:
The above statements demonstrate inside‐first thinking—and no UX designer, design team, or UX design firm can truly add value in this context, as the goal here is to design and create artifacts—quickly.
In contrast, user‐first organizations curate a collective, deep understanding of their users and their experiences before making any business, design, engineering, marketing, sales, or product decisions. They frame the problem by stating:
Effective innovation and marketplace disruption stems from organizations that are User‐First. Unfortunately, too many organizations make the mistake of approaching innovation “Inside first”, thereby making the same mistake every time while expecting different results.
As stated earlier, design is the trailing component of user experience design but important nonetheless. Too many organizations are caught up in the craft of design while neglecting the larger discipline of DESIGN. While craft is a critical element of the process, it’s helpful to metaphorically think in terms of a biodiverse ecosystem: Consider the forest as a whole before focusing on the individual trees.
Visionary SpaceX founder Elon Musk uses the title of chief designer. It signals DESIGN: the realization that everything in this world, business or personal, from arranging a house party, to engineering a company reorganization, to transporting humans to Mars—everything is DESIGNED.
Organizations that are built for BIG DESIGN are destined to be more thoughtful and resilient than organizations that focus on small design craft because their larger pursuit is to deliver value to the user and their ecosystem by consistently understanding the user’s intent, needs, and goals while connecting these dots with the business needs and outcomes.
Remember, that every system being designed has users and related ecosystems, with their related constraints and opportunities. Adopting a BIG DESIGN philosophy also sets the foundation for an egalitarian organizational culture in which DESIGN is the purview of every teammate who cares about users and their experience. BIG DESIGN thinks holistically about experiences.
Take any object, thing, service, or system and apply the reverse‐think technique: Identify all the possible user needs and problems the designer intended to solve to get to the solution you now have on hand. For example, what problems were DESIGNERS attempting to solve when they created:
Practicing this technique will help you master BIG DESIGN thinking. If anything, you will start appreciating that DESIGN is a mindset. Organizations that make this mind shift are able to unlock the full potential of creating value through user experience design.
In the pursuit of shipping a feature as quickly as possible, companies are frequently forced to make compromises. This often translates into not resolving all of the experience problems they’ve identified for specific users. Even when they’ve developed good solutions to the problems, time or technology constraints prevent them from building those solutions out.
Each deferred solution becomes a debt the business owes to the user. In most pragmatic organizations, this is acceptable and normal. However, when these debts start accumulating and compounding, it can become detrimental to the business as a whole.
Organizations carrying a high experience debt are easily disrupted by competitors, who have the advantage of observing the problems, starting from scratch, and building the product or service correctly. In addition, user loyalty is highly compromised; they become open to trying other products that offer a better experience.
Unfortunately, too many businesses are unaware that they are accumulating experience debt. The debt is a ticking time bomb that will explode even with the most well‐intentioned user experience design goals.
While it is important to understand the experience value chain and why most organizations are not able to fully unlock the value, some organizations have been able to successfully get there.
Let’s take a closer look at two remarkable companies, Tesla and The Walt Disney Company. Each one has applied the myriad ideas and practices described in this Playbook, and each one has disrupted their respective industries (or in Disney’s case, the world at large). Of course, experience transformation in the current business landscape is a never‐ending journey—the way forward is one of constant evolution and adaptation without a finish line. Let these case studies be your guide.
“99% of automotive shoppers begin their purchase journey expecting to be frustrated.
It’s not just electric motors that set Tesla apart as a car company. The relative newcomer successfully combined deliberate and thorough experience design efforts with disruptive technologies to gain a significant advantage over competitors. Despite the price premium on many models, the demand for Tesla’s cars is so high that the company can’t keep up with production—as of August 2021, there was a four‐to six‐week wait for the Performance Model 3 and a five‐to six‐week wait for the Performance Model X. But the sought‐after cars are part of a much bigger experience that begins the moment the prospective owner starts considering the vehicles.
“Auto sales could rise about 25% if the experience were better.
If ever an experience warranted a redesign, it would be buying a car. In the traditional scenario, tense, drawn‐out negotiations with salespeople working on commission and against quotas leave consumers cold. A study by DrivingSales found that 99% of automotive shoppers begin their purchase journey expecting to be frustrated. It’s an experience fraught with distrust: Half of consumers reported they will walk if the dealer requires a test drive before giving a price and 43% will bolt if they’re required to give personal information upfront. By contrast, the same study reported that 56% of shoppers would buy more cars if the process were easier, and auto sales could rise about 25% if the experience were better.
Tesla differentiates itself by alleviating the many pain points in car shopping. First, they sell directly to customers, rather than licensing products through independent dealerships. This gives them control over their customer‐facing ecosystem—how they present their vehicles and how their employees express information about the company and their products.
When the customer is ready to purchase, they use an in‐store digital design center, during which pricing is non‐negotiable (read: no angst). A car can also be purchased remotely on Tesla’s website, making the same customizations in a process that feels similar to buying a laptop online. Tesla has a delivery team responsible for guiding the customer through payment, document signing, and delivery. When the car is ready, the customer signs all the documents online and can pick it up at a dealership or if they choose, have it delivered to a convenient location.
This revitalized car‐buying experience shows a deep understanding of several of the plays described in this Playbook—in particular, the user empathy play (Chapter 14: “User Empathy Play”) and experience ecosystem play (Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”), which allows organizations to build an intimate and binding understanding of their customers. That accrued empathy allows brand leaders to map a customer’s optimal experience and design each touchpoint along the way. Tesla excels at fine‐tuning each step, starting from the moment a prospect looks into buying a car and continuing through their experience as an owner.
“The Tesla experience doesn’t end once he customer gets their new car.
The Tesla experience doesn’t end once the customer gets their new car. Rather, this is when the experience can really begin to take flight and delight. Leveraging technology to create better customer experiences enables Tesla to offer innovations such as at‐home wireless software updates that other companies aren’t even remotely equipped to match. Plus, approximately 80% of repairs can be completed remotely, free of charge—a huge incentive for anyone who hates spending time and money at the auto repair shop. When service center repairs are necessary, they’re generally completed four times faster than at a conventional repair shop (as the same amount of care is spent in designing the experience for the dealership employees). Of course, technology alone didn’t create these exemplary experiences—great experiences don’t just happen, they are deliberately designed.
This deliberate design shows up immediately in the physical design elements of the cars. With the Model 3, the minimalism serves as both a reflection of the company’s design aesthetic as well as a testament to Tesla’s philosophy that cars shouldn’t be complicated. Once inside, a large touchscreen replaces the conventional cluster of control knobs and buttons. (The only familiar button inside the vehicle is the control to activate hazard lights above the windshield.)
The more subtle elements of design show up in the experience of driving the car. There are a whole host of Easter egg features in the operating system that continue to delight customers. Take Chill Mode, for instance, which provides a smoother ramp‐up to speed designed to help drivers avoid unintentionally exceeding the speed limit. There are also settings that allow parents to monitor the speed and location of teen drivers. And while the touch screen has many available shortcuts to make it easier to access certain controls, the temperature, music, and navigation can also be voice‐activated. Because so much of the car is controlled by the operating system (OS), the driving experience improves with each update. This iterative approach was seeded early on. When Tesla released the Model S in 2012, they sold 100,000 units to early adopters, allowing them to gain deep and detailed insights from a contained cohort of drivers as they continued to iterate the innovative design of the car.
“A whole host of Easter egg features in the operating system that continue to delight customer.
“We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size,” CEO Elon Musk has said of Tesla, “so we must do so with intelligence and agility.” That agility is reflected in the corporate culture he’s created, which dictates that: “anyone at Tesla can and should email or talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens.”
This is indicative of the kind of organizational design thinking that has put the company in position to act on a broader innovation strategy that will allow consumers around the world to gather, manage, and store their own electrical sources
(something that’s already underway with Tesla’s home solar panels and batteries). This kind of thinking can be put into practice using the design problems and opportunities (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”), which helps identify the right problem to solve and then find a solution that benefits the organization and its customers. By eliminating outdated business hierarchies and focusing on solving problems both internally and for customers, Tesla has a distinct edge.
Despite inconsistent profitability, quality problems in its luxury cars, and a slow production schedule, Tesla has quickly become the world’s most valuable automaker. Their success has spurred competition in the electric vehicle space, but no other automakers have been able to compete (they have built an economic moat through engineering and experience design). Audi, Jaguar, and Porsche recently added new electric models, and there are more budget‐friendly options such as the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf, but combined they’ve barely made a dent in a US market dominated by Tesla.
According to Car and Driver, “Tesla’s Apple‐like ‘one‐stop experience’ proved a huge plus for owners. Its ability to manage all aspects of EV purchase and ownership—sales, financing, service, fast charging, and route planning that incorporates fast charging—were cited by an overwhelming 91% of owners as a reason to buy another Tesla.”
This “Apple‐like” user experience is the kind of technology ecosystem that traditional automakers will find extremely difficult to replicate. The fact that Tesla’s entire business model is built around using technology to design great ownership and driving experiences gives them a tremendous advantage over traditional automakers headed into the EV market. They also maintain a big leg up on like‐minded newcomers Rivian and Polestar, whose head of US operations, Gregor Hembrough, recently conceded to The New York Times, “Right now, there’s only one party in town.”
There’s a reason Walt Disney is often heralded as the world’s first experience designer. According to historian Sam Gennawey, Disney had the ability to use technology effectively by letting it recede into the background so that the story or experience could shine through.
That remains one of the guiding principles of modern experience design. “The technology that works the best is the technology you never notice,” Gennawey says. “[Disney] was one of the first people who found a way to do that.”
“The technology that works the best is the technology you never notice.
Walt Disney expressed numerous tactics and traits that made him a keen experience designer and business leader. In fact, he employed nearly all of the crucial mindsets you’ll read about throughout this book.
One of the central ideas powering experience design is that technology that works for you without interrupting you is technology you will want to use. Another central idea is that in order to create technology that consistently rewards users, the technology must continually evolve as needs and behaviors change. This was something Disney understood well.
Back in 1966, Disney described the plan for Walt Disney World’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (or EPCOT) as “an experimental prototype that is always in the state of becoming, a place where the latest technology can be used to improve the lives of people.” This line of thinking is central to the design mindset (Chapter 8).
Disney was always pushing technology as a means to enhance the ways users could experience a story. Before going into production on Snow White, for instance, Disney created a short film called The Old Mill that let artists test state‐of‐the‐art techniques he wanted to use for creating water effects as well as a new multiplane camera that allowed animators to create depth of field.
He was also fixated on optimizing the mundane, which is where his systems mindset (Chapter 8: “Mindsets of a User‐Centric Organization”) was able to shine. “Think of process as a railroad engine,” Disney said. “If the engine does not run properly, it does not matter how friendly the conductor acts or how attractive the passenger cars look, the train will still not move and the passengers will not pay their fares. Process is the engine of Quality Service.” A well‐defined process makes the whole system work, and when that process is attuned to deliver the optimal experience to users, great things can happen.
“Process is the engine of Quality Service.
When designing the groundbreaking theme park back in the early 1950s, Disney and his team of designers (or “imagineers”) would obsess over every detail within the grounds. Disney understood good design and led by example. He was known for making contractors replace plastic with wrought iron for realism, counting the steps between trash cans to reduce the likelihood of guests littering, and touring the park incognito so that he could test experiences.
He was never completely satisfied. He always asked for more from his team. In his theme parks, this took the form of “plussing,” incrementally improving details and elements of an experience. In modern terms, Disney was always iterating. He wasn’t “adding more stuff”—which so many companies do—he was finding ways to make good experiences even better. Nothing was off limits: getting the sound effects on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride loud enough to rattle the riders; making sure that the animatronic Tiki Birds had dozens of different gestures, not just 10; sending friends and family on rides like Jungle Cruise before they opened to elicit feedback and fine‐tune the experience.
This attention to detail is the lifeblood of an experience mindset (Chapter 8: “Mindsets of a User‐Centric Organization”), and it persists in the parks today. According to “Be Our Guest,” The Disney Institute’s manual on perfecting the art of customer service, “… as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically.” This ongoing attention to detail started with Walt Disney himself and continued on after his passing—his changes and ideas combining with the continual improvements born out of the design culture he created—creating a theme park ecosystem that is always growing and evolving.
MyMagic+ is a recent evolution in the theme park ecosystem, a massive $1 billion investment that overhauled the digital infrastructure of Disney’s theme parks. Bob Iger, the then CEO, is not someone who shies away from making investments in technology. In fact, he held a vision of “embrac[ing] technology and us[ing] it aggressively to enhance the quality of Disney’s product and thus the consumer experience” (Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play”). Indeed, MyMagic+ would enable a fundamental shift, away from delivering a one‐size‐fits‐all experience and “treating [guests] as a giant blob of people.”
“Away from … treating [guests] as a giant blob of people.
Around the time the investment got approved, a number of key guest experience metrics, such as intent to return, were falling (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”). Guests were experiencing a number of pain points, such as long wait time and high ticket prices. With MyMagic+, Disney hoped to use technology to improve the theme‐park experience and encourage more return visits.
“Wait time at the turnstile dropped by 30%.
At the core of MyMagic+ were MagicBands, wearable wristbands with RFID chips that track guests’ movement and store personal information. They allow guests to check in to hotels, enter the theme parks, and pay for food and merchandise with a simple tap against an RFID reader. After MagicBands were made available, wait time at the turnstile dropped by 30%; guests can now seamlessly enter the parks and go on their favorite rides sooner through FastPass+. Frictions resulting from pulling out their credit cards to pay for food and merchandise were eliminated. And, because MagicBand tracks guests’ location and movement, Disney sensors allow Disney operations to know if an area is too congested and then act accordingly, either by sending character parades or open up FastPass availability. The result? 5,000 more guests can now enter the parks on the busiest days.
Underneath the magic of MyMagic+, an extensive ecosystem of cast members, organizations, systems, and technologies were involved (Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”). On the back end, over 70,000 employees were trained on the technology and 28,000 hotel rooms were equipped with radio frequency–reading technology. Moreover, MyMagic+ has to be integrated into attractions throughout the theme parks so guests can, for example, customize the color, shape, and engine of their virtual car on the Test Track attraction at Epcot.
“A hardwired desire to give audience an experience they’d never had before.
Even some of Disney’s close collaborators thought Snow White was going to ruin him. His first feature‐length film came on the heels of many successful shorts with a bankable new star named Mickey, but the mouse was nowhere to be found here. The picture also went well over its initial budget and Disney had to mortgage his own house in order to finish it, with an eventual budget of $1.5 million. The reason he pushed himself and his team so hard was a hardwired desire to give audiences an experience they’d never had before. The film was a staggering success that went on to make $8 million internationally during its initial release.
While producing the feature film Fantasia in 1940, Disney spent an estimated $200,000 to develop the first stereophonic theatrical sound system to give the audience an immersive viewing experience. The soundtrack was recorded across multiple audio channels and reproduced with “Fantasound,” a revolutionary sound system Disney developed with RCA that was an early precursor to surround sound.
The business mindset (Chapter 8: “Mindsets of a User‐Centric Organization”) is all about making profit by creating business and user value, something Disney was always targeting. With his theme parks, his ceaseless behind‐the‐scenes work fine‐tuned an experience so effortless that even wizened adults could suspend their disbelief and become part of an unfolding storybook journey through the park. Not only are these experiences that customers are willing to pay for, they are happy to pay more for them. In fact, Disney claims that 70% of first‐time visitors plan to return to their theme parks (a figure they are actively trying to improve, no doubt).
In an era where customers are shopping more online, Disney invested $480 million to lure customers back into its brick‐and‐mortar stores. The company underwent a major redesign of its retail stores that made shoppers feel like they were on a Disney theme park vacation rather than shopping for merchandise. “We knew we needed to elevate and improve the experiences that we have both in stores and online as retail is changing,” Paul Gainer, executive vice president of Disney retail, remarked in an interview.
In the newly designed stores, giant video screens (OTT) will stream real‐time parades at Disney theme parks. Kids can battle Darth Vader or interact with characters from across the Disney franchise. Touch screens allow customers to select their own Disney music while a magic mirror makes it seem as if Disney’s princesses are speaking to the kids who stand in front of it.
The high‐tech makeover created a more enjoyable, interactive, and immersive experience for adults and kids alike. And it was a fruitful business investment. The store revamp has helped boost profit margin by 20%. Ninety percent of Disney Store guests in North America and Europe also felt more connected to the greater Disney brand that will undoubtedly have trickle‐down effects across Disney’s greater enterprise (e.g. retail, theme park, merchandise, entertainment)—a prime example of how business will reap financial reward by first creating value and delivering magical experiences to users.
“You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut
– Stephen Covey
It’s an ambitious goal: to radically reshape our organizations with a singular, unwavering orientation to the user experience—in order to keep competitors at bay and drive business growth. So how do we begin?
We start with a system that we at UXReactor call the bv.d system. It stems from the lessons I’ve learned in working with and observing some of the largest design groups and organizations in Silicon Valley. As I studied the variations between successful and unsuccessful teams, I discovered that the difference came down to four key variables. Successful teams embraced all four traits, and unsuccessful ones were weak in at least one of them.
Business value by design (bv.d) consists of four key factors that can make or break the intended outcome of becoming an experientially transformed organization:
Groundbreaking results happen when you have a group of effective and collaborative people following a rigorous process and working in a nurturing environment, all aligned on a shared set of mindsets.
Each attribute multiplies and builds upon the other, generating exponential business value. The opposite is also true: If one factor is missing or neglected, the entire system will falter. Let’s examine each of these four essentials.
Everything in the organization starts and ends with the mindsets of the people and the organization. An effective mindset can overcome most challenges, while an ineffective mindset can mess up even the best opportunities.
We’ll dig more deeply into mindsets in Chapter 8: “Mindsets of a User‐Centric Organization.”
A high bv.d relies on a strong process that is replicable, understandable, sustainable, pragmatic, and, most important, effective in driving value for the business and its users. This process needs to be grounded in deep user empathy where variables such as strategic perspective, consistent ideation, design rigor, collaboration, implementation velocity, and above all, governance1 are factored in.
More on process in Chapter 9: “The Experience Design Process.”
Like the adage that it takes a village to raise a kid, similarly, it takes two major groups of people to come together to accelerate business value.
The first is the practitioners (whom we call experience practitioners) who bring the necessary leadership, focus, skills, and accountability to the table. The second group is all the collaborators that work with the practitioners to ensure their work delivers the highest impact to the business and the users.
Read more about people in Chapter 10: “Getting the Right People Right.”
The last but not least factor for a high bv.d is the organizational environment that surrounds the system.
A highly effective environment is one that is centered on a collective empathy for the users. By nature, it’s collaborative, diverse, and trusting. It shares a strategic vision and values a culture of experimentation. In a nurturing environment, people care about the outcome of their work, and user‐centric ideas see the light of day more often.
In organizations that lack the right environment for people to thrive, BIG DESIGN quickly devolves to small design as teams focus more on product attributes than on user needs and expectations. A lack of true purpose becomes highly demotivating. More on this in Chapter 16.
As organizations and practitioners evolve to catalyze business value through user experience design, their focus needs to shift to solving the user’s problems by leveraging different perspectives, not simply applying one tool or another. In essence they need to think like holistic problem solvers.
Leonardo painted masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. He was a visionary inventor, drafting sketches of a flying machine and a parachute. He also understood human anatomy so well that he designed the Vitruvian Man, well known for its anatomical and mathematical accuracy.
Now here’s someone who was always striving to learn new disciplines and explore new fields. No wonder he is known as a great artist, an engineer, a biologist, an astronomer, and a mathematician. He connected dots among seemingly unrelated fields like no one else. The other person in our generation who was able do this successfully was Steve Jobs who interestingly admired da Vinci’s ability to see beauty in both art and engineering.
To apply Leonardo’s example to the digital renaissance we are now living in, practitioners and collaborators have to approach every problem differently. To be successful in today’s fast‐paced digital world, they need to cultivate five critical mindsets, which we mentioned in the previous chapter; we explain them in detail in the following sections:
The first mindset to cultivate is the experience mindset, which is enabled by a profound belief that users care about experiences first, and the practitioner needs to deliberately craft and design every touchpoint of this experience. A great experience will delight the user and will make them appreciate how easy it is, how intuitive it is, and how it makes them feel valued.
The best experience is one where you don’t even need to interact with a UI. The best experiences are like magic where the system and the designers take away all the heavy load from the user.
To adopt this mindset, you need to immerse yourself to understand:
A deliberate shift a practitioner needs to make is to break departmental silos in an organization because these are the single biggest killer of great experiences. Users don’t care how your organization is structured, how your departments are managed, or where the practitioner sits in the organization. All they care about is how they are engaging with your product and ecosystem and whether it is working for them. They expect you to earn their loyalty by thinking through every aspect of their experience.
To illustrate the experience mindset, you can conduct a simple test to have any practitioner design a login screen vs. a login experience. If the problem is framed as a login screen, we typically end up with a display of the standard username, password, forgot password, register, and so forth. On the other hand, when you think about a login experience, some of the best login experiences are about solving problems such as remembering the password and security question answers. In fact, the best user experience is one where the user doesn’t even have to think about any of this. This is what Apple’s design team considered when they created Face ID, the biometric authentication tool for mobile devices.
Use the word “experience” with anything you plan on designing, and your mind will focus on things differently. Think about:
The design mindset is often misunderstood. For most people, the word “design” conjures the visceral (small design) aspects of design that put form above the user’s need and context. On the contrary, the design mindset embraces design as a way to solve a specific problem by experimenting with every variable—both intrinsic and extrinsic to the system at hand.
This means the designer has to deeply empathize with the user, understand the problem that they are trying to address, and ideate and experiment around that problem before actually converging on a solution.
To have a design mindset, you need to:
One huge shift that designers need to make is to stop thinking about screens and how the solution would look before truly understanding the needs of the user. Designers spend too much time designing to requirements, engineers spend too much time building features and enhancements to specification, and product managers spend too much time getting features to the market.
For every design problem, first, understand why the user needs a solution, and try to identify at least three ways for the user to get to their intended outcome.
A great example of this mindset emerged when my firm was working with a Fortune 500 software company. We were given a requirement to design a dashboard screen, which we quickly reframed as a dashboard experience. As part of the client’s requirements, we were provided with a lot of different data elements that needed to be showcased on this “screen.”
If we approached this the traditional way (as they expected), we would have begun by manipulating that data on a design tool and playing with variables such as layout, hierarchy, typography, visualization, colors, and so forth.
But this approach overlooked key insights: Why did the target user need to see this information? Why do they care about this data? What are they looking for? What are they trying to do with the data?
Instead, we empathized with the users we were building this for. As we started going into the why by interviewing users, we realized that most of them didn’t care about all the data or the dashboard screen. They cared about the outcome and the impact this system would enable for them. Ultimately, they cared about three things: the system’s availability, its quality, and its impact. So we framed the problem as “How might we rapidly show the user the data that mattered to them in their context.”
With this knowledge, we experimented with different ways of conceptualizing and presenting this data. We realized that if everything is going well in the system, then the target user just needs a notification email stating that all three variables are doing great and not a dashboard screen. As we wrapped up the engagement, we reframed everything from marketing collateral to screens to defining ROI for customers around these three variables.
While this added about eight more weeks to the project timeline, it gave the client a few years of value creation in comparison to their competitors.
The design mindset allowed us to leverage the empathy we had built for the user by reframing the problem and experimenting with various solutions, which helped us converge on a more effective solution.
Always frame the design problem from the target user’s perspective. Eliminate “solutioning” terms such as “screens”, “browsers”, “clicks”, “forms”, “navigation”. For example: How might we understand that the system is delivering value to us?
The experience practitioner’s unique role in the organization is to engage with customers, frame problems, ideate, and design solutions. Carrying this out requires experience practitioners to have an outcome mindset: taking accountability for solving the overall user experience and business problem, not merely the discrete activities they create along the way. In simple terms, if a user or business has a design problem, until that problem has been solved and verified, the outcome has not been achieved. It may take days or months to get there, but it is not done until the problem has been thoroughly solved.
The goal is not to design six screen variations that look impressive in a presentation. The goal is to solve a root problem, where users can intuitively navigate through complexity and achieve their intended goal each and every time.
To adopt the outcome mindset, a practitioner must articulate, visualize, and measure the outcome they plan to achieve for:
In order to develop an outcome mindset, designers need to stop trying to measure impact by quantifying the hours they have worked and the screens they have created. Instead, the impact is achieved once they have verified and solved the user’s problem.
Adopting this mindset can accelerate a practitioner’s career in any growing organization.
One example of this mindset arose when I was working with a large software company redesigning their next‐generation $1.5 billion product line. We spent nearly 18 months taking apart the various features and functionalities of the product and simplifying them.
When we released the product, we learned that users liked what they saw—but that they were not going to adopt it in the near future. This puzzled us. Upon further investigation, we learned that users had spent significant time getting the prior version up and running, and they were not excited about repeating the process for the updated version. We hadn’t considered their migration experience; more important, we hadn’t identified how we were going to achieve the overall outcome cohesively when we kicked off this initiative. Throughout the design and development journey, all practitioners were busy executing their part of the project, without understanding how the outcome of having happy users was being achieved overall.
In retrospect, this scenario could have been completely avoided. If we had designed the product with the outcome mindset as a team, we would have recognized the user’s predicament well in advance of the product launch. And even though this was not in our scope of responsibility, we would have created migration workflows and cultivated integration partnerships to make it easy for users to adopt our streamlined and elegant next‐gen product line.
To practice this mindset, ask any internal stakeholder to visualize and sketch out how the world will look from your users’ and business’s perspectives when you nish your initiative. The more clearly they can articulate the future state while being agnostic of their individual role, the more likely it is that they can deliver the intended outcome. Cross‐check every decision you make throughout the design process against this mental picture.
The business mindset for practitioners is an acute understanding that businesses exist to make a profit by creating value for their users. If the experience mindset is the arrow, the business mindset is the target. And effective outcomes happen when arrow meets target.
Always look at the multiple of 10: Listen to the quarterly earnings call of your organization or of another publicly traded organization and note what you could do to create 10X value for the business. What solutions can you think about? What user problems can you solve? What experiments do you run?
In January 2007, Adobe launched a beta product for photographers. User research showed that many professional photographers were only using a small portion of the feature set in Adobe Photoshop. So Adobe launched a new product called Lightroom, which became a multimillion‐dollar product line that, most important, customers loved.
Most practitioners don’t fully understand the breadth of user‐related challenges their companies face, from product adoption to customer satisfaction to long‐term loyalty. A practitioner with the business mindset views any and all of these as an opportunity to create value in the system.
To utilize the business mindset, a practitioner must be able to:
An organization that was creating collaboration software conducted formative user research. The research team realized that a lot of medical practitioners were using the product, even though they were not the intended user group the product was being built for.
The researcher and her team applied the business mindset by asking what value could be created for these unexpected users. They further realized that medical staff was using the software to collaborate with other medical professionals across the globe in the absence of an existing solution. But one challenge was that the organization’s product was not HIPAA certified. And through that came the idea of a line of a HIPAA‐certified software with workflow enhancements specific to the medical field. The organization created a roadmap to build that product line as it opened up the opportunity to target an unmet need in a multibillion‐dollar market.
The systems mindset is the philosophy and ability to understand any specific area of focus by understanding the system as a whole, through building a deep understanding of its components, interrelationships, patterns, and idiosyncrasies. As the complexity of technology and its capabilities continue to increase, the systems mindset helps practitioners understand it and tackle problems effectively.
To employ the systems mindset, the practitioner must consider all the:
Early in my career, I was working on a project where the identified problem was to design a report UI for a specific business user, looking to understand their departmental performance in the product. As I started understanding their intent and expectations, a key question arose: How would they get to this business‐critical report if they were not in front of the screen? Could they call customer service and get this data? Could they call one of their financial analysts to get this data?
As we broadened the problem, the product manager and I dug deeper into the system architecture to understand who owned this data and how it was compiled. We further realized that customer service also didn’t have the data handy, while financial analysts who were actually supposed to be entering this data didn’t have it either as they were simply typing in the numbers.
Our investigation made us think about all the systemic implications—which eventually led to multiple enhancements including the creation of a performance report, a new customer support workflow, and a report preview for the financial analysts. Not only did we improve the user experience by devising multiple ways to access the data, but we also reduced user error because the financial analysts could see how the data they entered affected decision‐making in the department.
This is why it’s important to always understand the system. Lacking a systems mindset, I could have followed this “small design” philosophy by creating a beautiful report without further thought.
Every UX practitioner should develop these five mindsets. Together, they establish a mental framework for empathizing with the user, ideating different solutions until you achieve the outcome, and driving clear business value across the system.
To drive effective business growth, a strong user experience design process is needed to consistently take business and user problems and convert them into effective solutions.
In one of the organizations I was associated with, the board of directors mandated that the organization adopt design thinking (similar to the design mindset) as a critical business discipline. And in order to accelerate change management, we sponsored design thinking training for multiple leaders across the organization over a two‐year period. We partnered with a top business school to offer a design thinking boot camp for leaders from sales, HR, professional services, engineering, and customer support.
Despite the investment, it was becoming evident that while many people were getting attuned to and excited about the power of design thinking, the philosophy wasn’t trickling down to the departments. There wasn’t a process to deploy design thinking across the organization in a sustainable way across all departments and roles. This became a significant bottleneck to manage the transformation in the organization.
Unfortunately, many high‐potential organizations have not invested in the process and therefore are never able to build momentum or sustainability in their design practice. In the absence of a cohesive process, it becomes a free for all, purely based on the individual experience and motivation of each practitioner.
Without established processes for strategic planning, product prioritizing, user research, and design, organizations struggle to produce high‐quality experiences on a consistent basis.
We need a process that allows practitioners to maneuver and navigate the ambiguity and complexity of the various business and user problems being solved—at scale.
“Eighty‐five percent of reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and processes rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering the individuals to do better.”
– W. Edwards Deming
From the beginning, my team at UXReactor looked to meet the process challenges of bringing the power of the design mindset and experience mindset to unlock business value at scale. And this effort required rethinking and experimenting with existing business processes to learn more about:
Our team converted what we learned in asking these questions (and more) into plays as part of an internal guidebook we called the PragmaticUX™(PUX) Playbook. This living and evolving playbook has become the basis of the UXReactor practice, for the seven years of our existence.
The playbook was structured around four pillars:
The 27 plays included in Part 2 are a subset of the larger PragmaticUX™ Playbook.
In the pursuit of creating user and business value as we go after various experience problems, we need a robust and rigorous process that allows us to tackle the challenges that come to understanding and focusing on the problems. The PuX™ design process was UXReactor’s structured way to effectively do this.
The first step to solve the experience problems is to start with building deep empathy for the user and why the experience problem exists. Specifically, understanding who the user is, what the problem is, what the intent is, what the journey is, and where they are in the process. This is done by leveraging the powerful plays of user research.
Through this research, three key elements should emerge. The first element is the user insights. Insights would include data such as, What is the user looking to achieve? What is the context? What are the pain points? What are the opportunities that we can go after? So there’s a lot of insights that can be gained when you start understanding and studying and experiencing the problem for a specific user or a group of users.
The second element is a collection of design problems that need to be solved from the user’s perspective for the experience problem to go away.
And finally, the third element is an understanding and identification of the metrics of success from the user’s perspective if everything went well in their experience.
With this data a good experience designer should be able to design and ideally prototype a high‐level vision of how the user’s world would further evolve or be enhanced. A vision where a majority of the identified design problems have been solved and all the experience problem no longer exist; what would that world look like?
With a much clearer articulation of the vision for the user’s experience, the next step is to prioritize which part of this vision is going to be productized based on the other business dynamics such as investment, technology capabilities, skills, and timelines, to name a few. Ideally this is a collaborative process where the intention remains to achieve the larger experience vision, although in pragmatically scoped phases.
Finally, based on the prioritized plan and scope, the project moves into the critical phase of structured, detailed design.
At the end of the detailed design phase, additional user research will be conducted to answer two fundamental questions:
If the answer to both is yes—awesome! We can now move on to other experience problems in the system and apply the same design process to them. However, if the answer is no, we need to retrace our steps one at a time, all the way back to the user research phase if needed, and identify the step that needs to be adjusted until the answer turns to yes. It’s all about the power of iteration.
Inevitably the first action that every organization that understands the business value in being user experience–centric takes is to hire a designer or two and hope this will be the Holy Grail in their transformation. This unfortunately always turns out to be filled with angst both for the organization (wanting to see a transformation in the business) and the designer (wanting to be the change agent involved in strategic work), as they both end up not getting what they expected, at a huge opportunity cost of wasted time.
To understand what it takes, businesses need to understand two major people‐related variables that make user experience design function effectively. The first is all the people that make up the user experience design practice, and the second is all the collaborators that work with this team to ensure the intended outcome.
A good design practice should consist of competent people with the skills needed to deliver a great user experience, as well as leaders who can help orchestrate the business outcomes by leveraging the individual practitioners, methods, and tools.
First, recognize that UI design and UX design are two distinct disciplines, as we discussed in Chapter 5. To assemble an effective team of practitioners, you need to understand the various types of expertise needed across the team. Specifically, four skills are must‐haves for a mature design practice:
This practitioner is accountable for gathering, curating, and communicating user insights across the organization. This person is an expert in research methods and provides the user data behind organizational decisions. Most organizations don’t include this role; when they do, they only conduct validation user research (commonly called usability testing). This is the fastest way to nullify the power of user research because it concentrates on what you’ve decided to build rather than showing you what you could be building for your user.
This practitioner is accountable for designing all interaction touchpoints for the system. They understand the various digital modalities (mobile, web, OTT, IoT, etc.) and their related technological flexibilities. This practitioner is an expert in system thinking and design tools. Most organizations do not create the environment to allow this practitioner to think end‐to‐end while designing the user’s experience, thereby diluting the power they bring to the table.
This practitioner is accountable for all creative aspects of the digital interface. They’re experts in color theory, typography, visual composition and hierarchy, and design tools. They’re also known for extreme attention to detail that they leverage to bring the soul to any experience that is being designed. Given the visceral nature of the artifacts created by this practitioner, most organizations mistake this role and skillset to completely represent the user experience practice, thereby expecting every aspect of the practice (including research and interaction) to be handled by this “full‐stack” designer.
This practitioner is accountable for the content and its voice and tone throughout the system being designed, including labels, instructions, errors, emails, notifications, and so forth. This person is an expert in written communication and understands how to use copy to communicate with the user in their expected language, voice, and tone. This role is sometimes also titled as UX writer. Most organizations have “documentation specialists” or technical writers, but they are never included as part of the larger user experience practice.
As the adage goes, in any organization “the attitude reflects leadership.” A major challenge for many organizations that are looking to tap into the potential of user experience design is that they don’t have effective leaders accountable for this transformation.
Two types of leaders help ensure the practice stays healthy and delivers the intended business outcomes: the chief experience officer (CXO) and the experience strategist.
The typical business is a fragmented and siloed world, where multiple chiefs lead their individual domains—marketing, finance, revenue, HR, information technology, product, and so forth. Most organizations, however, do not have a CXO, a chief experience officer whose focus is on users and their experiences across all facets of the business regardless of internal structures or functions, a leader whose responsibility is to consistently think about the users, their journey, and their needs, and monitor whether the organization is going above and beyond expectations to wow users and win their loyalty.
In the absence of a CXO, this role usually falls to the overworked chief executive officer, who, on top of carrying out their regular responsibilities, is trying to ensure that every department consistently delivers on user experience. This is even more difficult because of the siloed structure of typical organizations. Ultimately, users feel the effects of not having a CXO when they deal with disjointed processes, systems, and tools created by siloed stakeholders as they interact with the organization through their offerings. In a business world catalyzed by experiences, the need for a chief experience officer is loud and clear.
Some organizations have a role called the chief customer officer (CCO), but traditionally the CCO focuses more on customer service, customer contact, and customer success. The scope needs to expand significantly to unlock the full potential of user experience design.
Some organizations hire design leaders and assume they will automagically evolve to play the role of CXO. While this can happen, it’s uncommon. To transition to an executive role, the practitioner needs to master additional mindsets and skills beyond the craft of design, including business vision and change management. (Read more about the design leader’s game plan in Chapter 46: “A Design Leader’s Game Plan.”)
What Does a Chief Experience Officer Do?
As a strategic leader, the chief experience officer is in charge of a broad scope of user‐experience related activities:
- Experience design strategy;
- Experience vision;
- Experience design;
- User research;
- Experience analytics and metrics;
- Interviewing, recruiting, and supervising experience practitioners and teams;
- Managing the people, processes, mindsets, and culture in the organization that directly affect the user’s experience;
- Influence organizational innovation;
- Influence mergers and acquisitions related to users, journey;
- Drive and manage the organization’s empathy scale (Chapter 17: “Shared Empathy Play”), a measure of how much empathy the whole organization has for users;
- Collaborate with other C‐suite leaders such as the chief technology officer (CTO) and the chief product officer (CPO) to ensure a high level of alignment.
In other words, the CXO is in charge of initiatives across the entire business life cycle, from business strategy to user empathy and innovation to design and delivery.
This person is someone who has direct access to the CEO and has good functional relationships with the rest of the organizational leaders. They should have enough influence in the organization that can be leveraged for driving the synchronization of work and future strategy and be able to navigate the dynamics of a matrix organization.
How Is This Role Different from the CPO’s?
The role of the chief experience officer is different from the emerging role of chief product officer (CPO). While they share the same intended business outcome, their accountabilities differ.
The CPO is accountable for products in the business. CPO has a product roadmap.
The CXO is responsible for the users and their experience in the business ecosystem. The CXO has an experience roadmap. (For more, see Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play.”)
Where Should This Person Be Hired From?
The CXO doesn’t need to come from a traditional design background. It surely should be somebody who practices the experience mindset and believes that users care about experiences first and that experience design is the new currency of success.
In the absence of a CXO, organizations become inefficient, teams fail to collaborate, and the user is collateral damage. In these cases, the experience strategist can step into the role of micro‐CXO leading initiatives on the ground.
The strategist is a grassroots leader accountable for orchestrating business outcomes while leading the various facets of experience DESIGN (yes, BIG DESIGN) for the scope of a project or product.
This person works with the CXO (when in place) and leads the day‐to‐day planning and execution of user experience design on the ground level. They are experts in catalyzing collaboration across the organization. They understand all aspects of the experience practice and can effectively collaborate with peers (product managers, engineering managers) in the organization to ensure the best experience is being put forward for the project or product they are accountable for.
“When there is no common organizational goal, the result is politics; when there is a common goal, the result is collaboration.
Where Should This Person Be Hired From?
The strategist is typically someone who has built strong competency and collaborative skills as a practitioner and has been further groomed (in business thinking and outcomes) to be the orchestrator assigned to and accountable for designing and delivering the best experiences. (Read about the practitioner’s game plan to evolve to a strategist in Chapter 47.)
Given that the experience practice is part of a larger organizational ecosystem, understanding and engaging with collaborating partners is critical to its success. When there is no common organizational goal, the result is politics; when there is a common goal, the result is collaboration. A highly effective organizational system is one that is constantly collaborating and supporting a hyper‐focus on user experience.
The collaborators are divided into two types, internal and external:
Internal Collaborators
Internal collaborators are colleagues, supporters, and influencers that are within the organization that the CXO and experience practitioners need to build strong working relationships with:
Peer Practitioners: These are peer practitioners from departments such as product, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, professional services, and support. They are focused on day‐to‐day execution to achieve the larger organizational vision. Experience practitioners should actively involve these stakeholders in all aspects of experience design, which include design reviews, shared empathy activities, and ideation sessions, to name a few. On the other hand, peer practitioners should always reach out to the experience practitioners any time they see or identify a potential design problem or opportunity (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”).
Leaders: The experience practitioners also need actively engage and collaborate with the following leadership.
In organizations that are working on digitally transforming their users’ experience, at the minimum, it is imperative for three internal partners to collaborate with each other. These three working collaboratively can effectively solve any business problem given to them using the bv.d process:
[Thought for Practitioners] What impact have you created (in an attributable manner) for your users that you can share with internal leadership?
One big mistake is thinking that any one is greater than the others. The best collaboration model is when each one of them is pushing the other two: one as the advocate for the business, one as the advocate for the user, and one as the advocate for feasibility. Organizations should focus on aligning these three stakeholders to focus on the problems at hand for the user and the business. This will ensure deep collaboration, less churn, more problem‐solving—and, more important, a fun working relationship.
These three also become the bridge to the rest of the organization by including peers from other groups or departments in times of collaborative decision‐making. (For more on collaboration refer to (Chapter 36: “Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play”).
Most organizations also need to consider external partners who deliver parts of the organization’s user experience, including:
Most successful organizations spend a lot of time researching, designing, and engineering the best experience for their customers. One such company came to UXReactor and wanted us to investigate why their net promoter scores (NPS) were so low with users complaining about the quality of their experience.
On further research, we discovered that more than 50% of the final client implementations were handled by system integrators (SI), where the SI’s objective was to deploy a system that functionally did what the end client wanted. This meant that in 50% of the cases, the end client’s users were getting an experience designed by functional consultants (not experience designers) at the SI, who were not prioritizing solving the experience problem highlighted in Chapter 3. The experience practice in this organization was blindsided by the fact that they did not engage and include the system integrators as part of their larger partnership where they could better train/enable the SI consultants to deliver a superior client experience.
I get often asked, “How do you structure an organization around a team of practitioners and collaborators?” While there are several variables to consider, it really hinges on the size and amount of investment an organization is willing to make to build the experience design practice. With that, I would recommend two models.
For an enterprise organization that is large and can invest in building a robust experience design function, the organization should invest in a chief experience officer (CXO) who ideally reports to the CEO.
Multiple experience strategists then report to the CXO, with each strategist owning a specific user and/or product line. Their sole responsibility is to eat, sleep, and drink their designated user’s design problems and opportunities. The strategist then leads a team of practitioners with all four relevant skills present.
Some organizations have also realized value by investing in a design operations (DesignOps) team that the CXO oversees. DesignOps’s responsibility is to focus and optimize on all program level activities, such as mindsets, people, processes, and environment, within the practice. I will elaborate more later in the book (Chapter 23: “Experience Transformation Program Play”).
For a smaller organization that does not have the same capacity for investment, I would recommend building a team of practitioners whom an experience strategist oversees.
One common pitfall I see and would strongly advise against is to hire an incomplete team with the hope that a very senior practitioner, such as the strategist, would perform all of the responsibilities required. This practice is akin to hiring a senior surgeon and expecting a person to be a substitute for the entire surgical team (e.g. anesthesiologist, nurse anesthetist, operating room nurse, surgical technician, and assistants).
As far as specific titles, do what is appropriate for your organization. We’ll talk a bit more about this in Part 2 (Chapter 22: “Career Ladder Play”).
Transforming an organization into being user experience–led isn’t about creating technology that looks pretty and doesn’t break. Those attributes are the cost of entry. Instead, it’s about building products, systems, and tools that effortlessly meet users’ needs—enveloped in a whole ecosystem that’s dedicated to supporting them—so they work smarter and live better.
When the organization is able to bring this level of transformation by focusing on the right mindset, people, process and environment, everything changes for the better.
But the most important aspect of any organizational transformation depends on the critical actor who can help catalyze it.
This catalyst can be a business leader who is looking to enable their organization to become user‐first. This can be the chief experience officer who aims to develop a practice around this charter. Or a practitioner who is looking to solve user problems and consistently add business value. It could also be a partner who is actively collaborating in the process of experience design. Or, in an enlightened organization, it can be all of them.
The intent of this Playbook is to equip and enable these catalysts of change to successfully help their organizations grow their business in a practical manner. In Part 2, you’ll find a specific list of plays from UXReactor’s PragmaticUX™ Playbook that will help set the stage for these catalysts. They are written with you in mind—and the transformation journey you plan to undertake.
Remember that if it were easy, everyone would have already done it. Transformation of this nature may take 18–24 months to get all aspects in a sustainable rhythm. It will entail changing beliefs, processes, people, measurements, incentives, culture—and above all, mindsets. So run it like a marathon, where every mile is a win, and every play is a path to the finish line.
“Challenge yourself, it’s the only path that leads to growth.
– Morgan Freeman
“AMATEURS PRACTICE UNTIL THEY CAN GET IT RIGHT; PROFESSIONALS PRACTICE UNTIL THEY CAN’T GET IT WRONG.”
–HAROLD CRAXTON
“THE EYE SEES ONLY WHAT THE MIND IS PREPARED TO COMPREHEND.”
–ROBERTSON DAVIES
The most important part of this book is the Playbook, which is designed to help you drive business value. To navigate this part, understand its two components:
The first is the four pillars and the second are the plays that focus on different problems within each pillar.
Each play is created to help you mindfully navigate the solution to the problem of focus (framed as a “How do I …” statement), by understanding all the key variables that you will need.
The playbook is structured around four pillars:
Each pillar ends with the program play aimed at leadership personas so your team can effectively build, structure, and govern that program for long‐term sustainability.
This playbook is for everyone in the experience design ecosystem: the apprentice, the practitioner, the design leader, the business leader, and the collaborator. You’ll recognize yourself in one or more of them.
The first play you’ll read in the Playbook starts with the user empathy play in Chapter 14. This play sits outside of the four pillars because building user empathy is a foundational mindset and attitude one has to master before thinking about experience strategy, user research, product thinking, and design doing. Furthermore, it’s everyone’s job to develop and deepen empathy, whether you are a business leader, collaborator, or a designer. It’s a core building block for all other plays. Once you have empathized with the user, you are ready to dive in.
looking to drive business value through design
| How do I develop understanding to truly empathize with my user? | * Chapter 14: User Empathy Play |
| How do I build a robust program around experience design? | * Chapter 23: Experience Transformation Program Play |
on the path to become a chief experience officer
| How do I develop understanding to truly empathize with my user? | * Chapter 14: User Empathy Play |
| How do I foster a user‐first culture? | * Chapter 16: Culture Design Play |
| How do I grow the collective empathy of my organization? | * Chapter 17: Shared Empathy Play |
| How do I enable experience practitioners to grow professionally in their careers? | * Chapter 22: Career Ladder Play |
| How do I hire experience practitioners? | * Chapter 21: Hiring Play |
| How do I build a robust program around experience design? | * Chapter 23: Experience Transformation Program Play |
| How do I run a research program? | * Chapter 30: User Research Program Play |
on the path to become a strategist…
| How do I develop understanding to truly empathize with my user? | * Chapter 14: User Empathy Play |
| How do I build a seamless experience for the user across the entire ecosystem? | * Chapter 18: Experience Ecosystem Play |
| How do I create a roadmap around the experience of a user? | * Chapter 19: Experience Roadmap Play |
| How do I convey an experience vision that activates my organization? | * Chapter 20: Experience Vision Play |
| How do I ensure rigor in my research? | * Chapter 27: Research Quality Play |
| How do I measure the success and quality of my user experience? | * Chapter 28: Experience Metrics Play |
| How do I consolidate and leverage research insights organizationally? | * Chapter 29: Insights Curation Play |
| How do I define “baseline” and “best‐in‐class” product experiences? | * Chapter 32: Experience Benchmarking Play |
| How do I align for success at the beginning of the design phase? | * Chapter 33: Experience Design Brief Play |
| How do I decide what the right problems to solve are? | * Chapter 34: Design Problems and Opportunities Play |
| How do I ensure the delivery of a great product experience? | * Chapter 35: Product Experience Planning Play |
| How do I collaborate across the organization to drive seamless and informed product experience design? | * Chapter 36: Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play |
| How do I catalyze great product experiences? | * Chapter 37: Product Thinking Program Play |
| How do I run an effective Experience Design Doing Program? | * Chapter 44: Experience Design Doing Program Play |
If you would like to see how these plays come together, you can directly go to part 3 and pick the user’s scenario you relate the most with
on the path to become a practitioner
| How do I develop understanding to truly empathize with my user? | * Chapter 14: User Empathy Play |
| How do I know which method to use to gather insights? | * Chapter 25: Picking a Research Method Play |
| How do I recruit the right participants for user research? | * Chapter 26: Research Recruitment Play |
| How do I ensure rigor in my research? | * Chapter 27: Research Quality Play |
| How do I decide what the right problems to solve are? | * Chapter 34: Design Problems and Opportunities Play |
| How do I systematically optimize and build experiences? | * Chapter 39: Workflow Design Play |
| How do I hone in on effective and quality design? | * Chapter 40: Detailed Design Play |
| How should an experience design review be run? | * Chapter 41: Experience Design Review Play |
| How do I build and scale experience designs with high consistency and quality? | * Chapter 42: Design System Play |
| How do I test the quality of delivered vs. engineered experience designs? | * Chapter 43: Design QA Play |
and are looking to work more effectively with your design peers
| How do I develop understanding to truly empathize with my user? | * Chapter 14: User Empathy Play |
| How do I collaborate across the organization to drive seamless and informed product experience design? | * Chapter 36: Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play |
| How should an experience design review be run? | * Chapter 33: Experience Design Brief Play |
| How do I build and scale experience design with high consistency and quality? | * Chapter 42: Design System Play |
Each play has some common elements. The “How Do I …” and “Why Do You Need the … Play” sections help you understand if you’re in the right spot to learn about what you’re looking for. The mindful canvas is an effective guide for being mindful of various variables to successfully solve the problem. The rest of the play describes the variables to keep in mind in order to achieve your desired outcomes; it’s sprinkled with examples, tips, and real‐world stories.
One artifact that is consistent for each play is the mindful canvas.
Every practitioner and every organization has different contexts, goals, and resources; therefore, it would be foolhardy to write a one‐size‐fits‐all playbook for implementing the philosophy of user experience. Our solution is to approach it in a more mindful manner, helping you understand the system and its key variables so you can make the most effective decisions and plans for your own specific context.
For example, say you want to make a pizza. This book will not give you a follow‐these‐steps recipe; there are plenty of books that do that. Instead, it will give you a mindful canvas for making a good pizza, breaking down the process into the key variables you need to think through:
Now, you have some grassroots decisions to make about these variables. Do you want a base made out of traditional dough, gluten‐free dough, vegetables, or even no base? Do you want vegetable toppings, meat toppings, a combo, or no toppings? The objective is to deliberate on each variable before making a decision.
As you can see, the goal of the mindful canvas is not to solve each discrete problem for you. Instead, it’s to create a deliberate process of decision‐making so you can identify, understand, and experiment with the key variables that are at play. Once you’ve done that, you can make highly effective decisions that fit both you and your organization.
Creating a user‐centric experience requires more than simply understanding your users’ domain and what tasks they need to perform—it requires deep empathy. Empathy helps you avoid making erroneous assumptions about your users and instead uncover new opportunities based on what they actually want and need. This play is foundational to all subsequent plays because it will help you develop that deep understanding of who your users are, what their needs are, and which problems to solve for them. These insights will guide the decisions you make about your design and your product strategy in a way that puts the user first.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the User Empathy play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | Experience strategist | * Oversee research * Identify the best empathy‐building method * Collect data through research * Synthesize data * Create and document artifacts * Drive greater empathy across organization |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | User researcher; peer practitioner (e.g. product manager, engineering manager, other internal stakeholders) | * Conduct or contribute to research * Provide business or product insights |
“Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.”
– Daniel Lubetzky
To run an effective user empathy play, you need to be mindful of:
Your organization exists to add value to those who you serve. More likely than not, your organization or system contains a number of users, both internal (e.g. employees, partners, vendors) and external (e.g. customers, sales partners, consultants). Identify the specific user(s) you want to develop empathy for.
Ideally you should work on building empathy for each and every user in the context of your system. However, always try to prioritize the top users based on a business goal (e.g. exploring an untapped market), a product goal (e.g. enhancing the user experience), or a user goal (e.g. understanding user motivations and pain points). Knowing why you are looking to understand your users will anchor your research and ensure your original intent is met.
Building user empathy begins with suspending your own assumptions and instead striving to understand your user by stepping into their shoes or conducting research (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”). Here are some techniques you can use to start the process:
Speak to a minimum of 10 users to collect enough insights to correlate and cross‐reference. The smaller your sample size, the less reliable the data.
Ford engineers wear suits that simulate the different types of body problems (e.g. backaches, joint problems) their customers might have in order to better understand how to design with end users in mind.
Trying things yourself elicits more visceral reactions, allowing you to resonate with the user and gain a deeper understanding of the people you are designing for. Keep in mind that this method should not replace or be classified as “user research,” because you are not engaging with an actual user.
As you immerse yourself in the user’s context, extract and collect valuable insights to deepen your empathy for the user. Dig deeper by trying to understand their role, responsibility, goal (intent), journey, larger ecosystem, success criteria, joys, and pain points to name a few areas to be mindful of.
In the ecosystem of a school, here are some roles and their purpose as perceived by a key user: elementary school teacher Ms. Smith:
| ROLE | PERCEIVED ROLE | PERCEIVED PURPOSE |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher (Ms.Smith) | I deliver classroom instruction that helps students learn. | I nurture my students’ interests in education and help groom the next generation. |
Your Users’ Responsibilities: “Responsibilities” describe what users do and the outcome they are aiming for. When building user empathy/running the user empathy play, look for details such as how your users break down their day, what tasks or activities they perform, and how they achieve their outcomes. Some illuminating questions to ask include:
What does a typical day look like for you? If it helps, let’s take a look at what your day was like yesterday.
What goes into getting an outcome done?
What tasks do you perform regularly? Weekly? Monthly?
What do you spend the most time doing? Why?
After answering these questions, Ms. Smith might let you know that her responsibilities include:
Your User’s Journeys: Users rarely have just one touchpoint with your organization, product, or service. Rather, their experience is shaped by a multitude of interactions along a journey. A user journey illustrates this flow, providing a comprehensive, chronological recording of all the interactions, along with accompanying emotional states, that your users experience.
Insights from your user’s journey are invaluable as you run the user empathy play. To gather these insights, inquire about:
Visually map out all the relationships within the system, using artifacts such as an ecosystem (Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”). As you learn more about your users, this ecosystem map will serve as a living document showing how all of these roles interact with and depend on each other.
Your User’s Larger Ecosystems: In order to understand your user’s place in the larger ecosystem, find out what other people, tools, and resources they interact with. Not only will this help build your knowledge of and empathy for these particular users, but it may also help you discover other relevant users and objects.
Inquire about:
Your user’s end‐to‐end experience is the summation of all their journeys and the interactions they’ve had with different people, tools, and technologies. Therefore, you have to take into consideration the ecosystem—the complex network of interconnected systems that your user inhabits—to get a fuller picture of why they may react or behave a certain way.
Within the ecosystem of a school, Ms. Smith’s system might look like:
Your User’s Success Qualities: Insights into how your users measure success and what they need to be successful will also help you understand how to design experiences in a way that drives value to your users.
Some helpful questions to understand include:
Your User’s Joys: Understanding what your users like—what brings them joy—will help you get a sense of what their motivations are, uncover opportunities for delight, and discover unmet needs in their current experiences. These can be joys that users state or joys that you observe during research.
Some helpful questions to inquire include:
What are your top three favorite things about your job?
What was your best experience with getting [outcome] done?
If you had more free time, what would you want to spend that time doing?
What was your most memorable day at work? What set that day apart?
Some joys Ms. Smith might have are:
Your User’s Pain Points : Knowing and empathizing with your users’ pain points sets a baseline for which problems to solve. These can be pain points that your users bring up themselves or pain points that you observe during research.
Some helpful questions to understand include:
Some pain points Ms. Smith might have are:
Build on the aha moments you’ve gathered to identify user problems, design problems, and opportunities (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”).
Your User Segments: Are you looking to gain empathy for one particular population in a large and diverse group? Separate the group out into user segments—users with similar roles as the whole, but who operate in a specific context—and identify the segments you are looking to understand. What broad attributes do they share?
Identify notable groupings of users based on demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic attributes, or even levels of experience. Knowing these segments will provide guidance for follow‐on user research recruitment, data synthesis, and even business decisions such as what kinds of offerings to provide for a particular segment.
Data is only as valuable as the insights it informs and knowledge it builds in others. That’s where artifacts and socialization kick in.
”Empathy makes you a better innovator,” declared Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft—and he promptly launched the Xbox Adaptive Controller in 2018, giving gamers with a wide range of physical disabilities the ability to play. The controller’s design was a perfect real‐world application of user empathy. Every little decision, ranging from the placement of the buttons, the shape of the controller, the packaging, and even the product price, was designed based on user insights. For example:
Three threaded inserts: After discovering that some gamers place their gaming setup on a lap board and secure them with Velcro tape, the design team added inserts to give the gamers the freedom to mount their controllers onto their wheelchairs, lap boards, or desks.
Packaging: Designers learned that users with disabilities were forced to “use their teeth to open everything from cereal boxes to beer bottles” and that they had one deliberate design principle for packaging design: “No teeth.” The developers took this request to heart and designed a controller package that was delightfully easy to unbox.
Price: The controller is priced at $99.99, which puts it in reach of gamers who might not be able to afford other pricey adaptive technologies. Microsoft made this decision after hearing from their users that the price point was important to them and they needed something affordable.
The Xbox Adaptive Controller embodied deep user empathy in action. Up until its introduction, gamers with disabilities were “[cobbling] together all sorts of things to get a similar effect.” For them—and for Microsoft!—this controller literally has been a game‐changer. And it all began with a deliberate culture of user empathy.
Knowing your users on a surface level is not sufficient if you want to deliver great experiences. To solve your user’s problems in a powerful way, you need to know what it is like to be them; you need a deep understanding of who they are, how they think, and what their surrounding system is like; and you need to feel the pain points they experience. Only with this level of deep empathy can you deliver experiences users will love. Therefore, the user empathy play is foundational for fueling business growth through user experience design.
“STRATEGY WITHOUT TACTICS IS THE SLOWEST ROUTE TO VICTORY. TACTICS WITHOUT STRATEGY IS THE NOISE BEFORE DEFEAT.”
–SUN TZU
The word “strategy” can mean different things to different people. So we turn to Michael E. Porter, the founder of modern business strategy and one of the world’s most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness, to define the word.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Porter defines strategy as:
For example, Vanguard Group aligns all of its activities with a low‐cost strategy; it distributes funds directly to consumers and minimizes portfolio turnover.
Strategy requires identifying and articulating a differentiated positioning. However, it also encompasses the choice and fit of the day‐to‐day activities that reinforce the strategy. That is the approach we take in this experience strategy section.
As discussed in Part 1, the world we live in today is vastly different from the early 2000s and 2010s. People expect products, tools, and processes to be digitized—and that’s the bare minimum. With a dizzying array of choices, customers will time and time again select the product or service featuring an experience that delights them and exceeds their expectations.
Organizations need to adopt a user‐first and experience‐centric strategy, because a better user experience is the new and valuable edge organizations need to compete and lead. If it comes with a well‐executed experience strategy, users will not only choose your product, they’ll be happy to pay more for it.
“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
–Michael LeBoeuf
Here are a few key terms and concepts to understand before diving into the experience strategy plays:
The experience strategy plays will allow you to answer the following questions:
The plays in this section allow you to start differentiating your business from the lens of a superior user experience and sustain it through the creation of the people, process, and environment systems. They allow you to start building your experience strategy and give you the necessary tools to create a sustainable system.
A user‐first culture drives innovation by placing an emphasis on delivering great experiences for users. Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” No matter how groundbreaking your strategy is, it will be held back if it is misaligned with your organizational culture, values, and mental attitudes. This play helps you create a culture that is aligned with your user‐centric strategy.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Culture Design play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | Chief experience officer | * Articulate what an experience culture entails; * Identify incremental activities for the * organization to participate in; * Serve as the conduit for leadership and grassroots change efforts; * Obtain leadership support. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | Experience design team, individual teams across the organization | * Adopt new practices and activities; * Reinforce adherence to culture‐building activities. |
To run an effective culture design play, you need to be mindful of:
When you’re hiring experience practitioners, craft interview questions that will reveal their orientation toward the five mindsets.
A user‐first culture, first and foremost requires its individual practitioners, whether they engage in design or any other specialty, to possess the five mindsets described in Chapter 8: an experience mindset, a design mindset, a systems mindset, a business mindset, and an outcome mindset.
These are the mindsets that will activate your organization’s focus for its users, as well as kickstart an insatiable drive to continuously improve and develop a questioning spirit that challenges the status quo.
Cultivating and mastering these mindsets is a lifelong process. Find ways to incorporate them into all of your interactions, activities, and core processes, such as hiring (Chapter 21: “Hiring Play”), onboarding, cross‐functional collaboration (Chapter 36: “Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play”), and ideation.
Furthermore, they are the foundations for establishing the four cultural pillars all user‐first organizations must exhibit:
Use the word “collaborate” instead of “help” when interacting with one another and external vendors. This removes hierarchical mindsets, rhetorically placing everyone on an equal footing to solve problems together.
Empathy is the ability to adopt another person’s worldview and feel their pains and joys as if you were experiencing them yourself. Only when you deeply empathize with your user and understand their problems can you create solutions that drive real value. (Chapter 14: “User Empathy Play”).
This is why empathy is a critical cultural pillar for everyone in your organization—regardless of role or seniority—to adopt. Organizations need a high level of shared‐empathy maturity (Chapter 17: “Shared Empathy Play”) in order to successfully solve their users’ experience problems. Furthermore, it’s important to build empathy not only for your paying users but also for the other users in your organizational ecosystem. This will allow teams to collaborate more effectively and overcome challenges with minimal angst.
Empathy must be promoted on an individual and an organizational level. In your day‐to‐day practices, encourage teammates to suspend their own assumptions and listen deeply to what their users and coworkers are experiencing. Spread empathy by telling stories. Stories resonate and inspire people to take action.
Building great user experiences is a team effort. Every person in the organization must embrace collaboration and work together toward the company’s vision.
With the cultural pillar of collaboration, there’s no “us” vs. “them.” Departments are not siloed; instead, teams across the organization work together, exchange data, and meet on a regular basis to share knowledge about their users.
You should promote collaboration by bringing different departments together whenever possible, and encouraging participation in activities such as strategic planning, project kick‐offs, design reviews, ideation workshops, design handoffs, user research readouts, and retrospectives. Create a space where everyone’s multi‐disciplinary perspectives are welcome, and leverage these perspectives to find novel ways to solve the user’s problems.
“Experimentation is the engine that drives innovation.”
– Stefan Thomke, Harvard Business School professor and author
You can share your user research findings with other departments, such as support, sales, or marketing. Learn from the data they have collected, as well, because their data might reveal a different perspective. As you continue to collaborate, you will have a substantial body of shared insights (Chapter 29: “Insights Curation Play”) with which your organization can make business and product‐related decisions.
As Adam Grant found in his research on originality, “Being prolific actually increases originality because sheer volume improves your chances of finding novel solutions.”
A user‐first culture is constantly ideating.
The most important thing to remember about this third cultural pillar is that ideation is not exclusively reserved for designers. A company with high empathy and collaborative spirit means everyone in the organization deeply feels the user’s problems and is given the agency to contribute solutions to solve these problems.
Create channels beyond ideation sessions through which anyone can share their ideas. Broadcast these ideas, and provide opportunities for others to weigh in on them. Some ideas to consider include:
You can crowdsource ideas by holding organization‐wide hackathons or by creating an innovation lab where individuals can contribute and experiment on their ideas.
Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts—or, as we call them today, iterations—before he finally invented the working light bulb. Each unsuccessful attempt (or “failure”) gave him input to inform his design for the next iteration.
Edison’s approach offers an important takeaway many companies should internalize: failure needs to be a welcomed part of the journey to success. This is why the cultural pillar of experimentation and iteration is critical to building a user‐first culture that delivers great experiences. Breakthroughs come from continuous experimentation and iteration.
Celebrate your volume of experiments across the organization. Institute awards such as most audacious experiment, most prolific experimenter, biggest “ROE” (return on experiment).
The cost of not running experiments is huge. It’s better to fail fast and learn from those failures early on than it is to fail after you’ve invested significant design and development resources into a product. Build cheap and fast prototypes, run experiments, get feedback from users, and embrace and learn from failures so you can improve on the final product.
To make a user‐first culture a reality, you need the right activation agents—the teams, individuals, or groups that can serve as catalysts for change.
In “How to Make a Cultural Transformation,” Simon Sinek recommends first eliciting the support of innovators and early adopters. Find the ones who are most passionate about the topic by making the selection process “slightly difficult.” Specifically, ask people to volunteer; provide no extra compensation or incentives for the extra time they will invest in spearheading and leading the transformation.
An organization cannot sustain its culture without constant nurturing. This means the mindsets and cultural pillars must be incorporated and practiced in all aspects of your organization, consistently and over time.
Leverage your activation agents to propagate the culture and put it into practice through all of your organization’s activities. The culture should be reflected in how you hire and fire, how you ideate and develop, how you incentivize and reward teammates, and in how you make strategic decisions.
Use measurement methods such as the empathy scale (Chapter 17: “Shared Empathy Play”) to assess the pervasiveness of the mindsets and cultural pillars on an ongoing basis. Use these measures to celebrate individuals and teams when they strongly exhibit the user‐first culture, and provide more support and guidance to those who do not meet the mark.
Airbnb is a living example of a user‐first culture, one that prioritizes user empathy, celebrates ideation and experimentation, and encourages collaboration through cross‐organizational information‐sharing.
Having the right user‐centered strategy is only half of the equation. Even the strongest strategy cannot be executed inside a misaligned culture. Your user‐centered strategy requires a user‐first culture. Build and foster this culture by prioritizing the five mindsets and enabling activation agents to support the four cultural pillars.
User empathy is an organization‐wide responsibility. The best user‐centered innovation happens when every individual within an organization—across all departments, from the junior hires to the most senior staff—rallies around a common purpose and desire to make an impact for their users. UXReactor’s “Shared Empathy” play allows you to measure, increase, and sustain your organization’s place on the empathy scale, increasing user satisfaction while decreasing internal product churn.
This play will allow your business to:
who are the key players in the shared empathy play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | Experience strategist | * Implement methods to measure empathy; * Orchestrate activities for increasing empathy; * Establish systems for sustaining empathy. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | Experience design practitioners, cross‐functional teams | * Support and participate in activities. |
To run an effective shared empathy play, you need to be mindful of:
The empathy scale measures the degree to which your team is able to understand and relate to your users. It shows where empathy is strong or weak in your organization and informs your rollout strategy for the shared empathy play.
This assessment should be distributed to a representative sample in your organization, spanning all levels and positions. The final score will show you:
Based on the resulting scores, your organization will fall into one of the following five levels of empathy maturity:
Level 1:Task‐Driven—Most members in non‐sales or support roles of your organization have never interacted with a user. They perform tasks as they are assigned. Users are seldom or never brought into the innovation process, and teams experience significant churn. User insights and product decisions come from one or two groups in the organization.
Level 2:SME‐Driven—A select few members of your organization understand your users and act as the subject‐matter experts (SMEs) for the rest of the organization. The majority of the organization who are not in sales or support roles have never interacted with a user; they learn about users through these SMEs. User insights and product decisions come from a few groups in the organization.
Level 3:Functionality‐Driven—As an organization, there is sufficient understanding of what users do day‐to‐day, and products and services are produced to meet these known needs. Users are brought into the innovation process to validate decisions. Innovation happens from a feature and functionality perspective, allowing users to do the jobs they need to perform. Along with sales and support, the product and UX teams interact with users to gather insights and help make product decisions.
Level 4:Value‐Driven—The organization supports a regular cadence of research to identify opportunities for innovation. There is an understanding of the users in the context of the wider systems, and innovation is done collaboratively to drive value for the user through better and more efficient technologies. Users are brought in at multiple points of the innovation process, and many groups within the organization interact with users.
Level 5:Purpose‐Driven—The user is front and center at all times. There is high compassion for the user across the whole organization; everyone is driven by the desire to solve problems and make a meaningful impact for them. Innovation is an organization‐wide collaborative effort. Users are brought in not just for research but to interact and share their experiences with everyone in the organization.
Track your organization’s score over time and re‐assess on an ongoing basis. This will become one of the organizational KPIs you track when measuring experience impact. (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”)
Institutionalize activities that will increase your organization’s empathy for your users. These activities should:
These activities should be present at multiple touchpoints within your organization. Increasing empathy is an ongoing process, so all employees in your organization, regardless of position, should take part in these activities on an ongoing basis.
Zappos.com is particularly known for promoting a highly customer‐centric culture, and they have incorporated ways for all of their employees to interact with customers at various parts of their employee journey. Their four‐week onboarding process is the same for everyone: In addition to learning about the company culture and participating in team activities, they are also required to take customer calls. Additionally, during the busy holiday season, every Zappos employee spends a mandatory two hours in the call center to observe the customer service team interact with customers.
Here are some empathy‐increasing activities you can try with your organization:
Instilling empathy is not a set‐it‐and‐forget‐it endeavor; it is an ongoing effort. To ensure sustained and growing user empathy in your organization, institute processes around:
In many organizations, even if multiple groups are conducting research, the findings often stay in silos. An effectively run shared empathy play coordinates multiple activities at once, but just as importantly, it also puts systems in place to ensure collaboration and conversation are happening.
Coursera is a highly purpose‐driven company whose mission is “providing universal access to world‐class learning.” Coursera puts this mission at the center of their culture by sharing learner stories on a regular basis, hosting annual “Make‐a‐thons,” and encouraging employees to use the platform to provide feedback.
Facilitating shared empathy in your organization will require collaboration between many teams and a primary driver to take ownership of the final outcomes. To be successful in this role, the driver will need a strong understanding of the importance of empathy, how to establish measures of success, and how to orchestrate cross‐functional efforts. Typically this should be led by the CXO or another designated driver for an organization.
In 2005, Jennifer Liebermann became the founding director of the Garfield Innovation Center, a think tank for Kaiser Permanente team members to “explore care solutions through hands‐on simulations, quick prototyping, and technology testing.” The culture of design thinking and experimentation at the Garfield Center has led to hundreds of innovation projects produced each year; successful initiatives are then piloted at Kaiser Permanente facilities around the United States and the world.
Dedicate resources to this initiative to enable its launch and continued success. Based on the activities and processes you put into place, assess your need for:
A mid‐sized startup was working on a medical billing product for the American market. Most of their design and engineering teams were in Asia while the rest of the organization and all their end users were in North America, and the company was experiencing significant issues in the developed build of their product. Their customers were beginning to complain about the quality of the product experience.
The company brought in UXReactor to review their product and related complaints. In the review process, we discovered that while the company had very smart and hard‐working engineers, they had no idea of how the American health care and insurance systems functioned. Living and working halfway around the world, they did not share the same context as their users.
We addressed this problem by implementing the shared empathy play. We curated all the research insights in a consumable manner, so anyone globally could attend research sessions and virtually walk in their customers’ shoes. We created posters of where the biggest pain points were in the user’s journey and displayed them in different parts of their office space. And we created walkthrough videos of customers explaining their process.
This play became a mandated part of new teammate onboarding. With this deliberate shift in place, everyone in the company became much more empathetic to the user they were working so hard to serve, and the quality of both collaboration and of the product noticeably improved.
Empathy for your users must exist in every member of your organization, not just the product team. This requires deliberateness around what to measure, what to do to gain empathy, and how to sustain the system company‐wide. Ultimately, user empathy empowers better decision‐making that increases value for users, and happier users equal better business.
Many companies make the mistake of focusing too much on one user or one product. They overlook the ecosystem—the complex network of interconnected systems that their product and company inhabits. The experience ecosystem play enables you to see the forest before focusing on the individual trees. Building an experience ecosystem is a powerful tool for unleashing tremendous business value. It allows you to identify M&A acquisition targets, reveals the new complementary services your users want, and streamlines the workflow and processes that will bring delight to your customers.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Ecosystem Play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | Experience strategist | * Uncover how users see and use the system; * Visualize the greater ecosystem; * Share insights with other stakeholders that improve different aspects of the business, team, and processes. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners * Peer practitioners | * Provide perspective and gain alignment. |
To build an effective experience ecosystem, you need to be mindful of the following:
As you go through the exercise of extracting information from users, be mindful of how multiple systems may interconnect and intersect.
| PRODUCT | PLATFORM | BUSINESS OR ORGANIZATION | BUSINESS UNIT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tesla Model X | Facebook Marketplace | Airbnb, local hospital | Intel customer Support division |
Users: Who are the most important users in the system? Each system will likely have more than one user, and they will likely come from one of the following categories: revenue‐generating customers, company employees, external vendors, or partners. List and then prioritize all the users who play a role in your ecosystem.
The users in a hospital ecosystem include: doctors, nurses, technicians, health care administrators, patients, patients’ caretakers, pharmacists, government regulators.
A hospital looking to improve its patient care delivery experience would prioritize patients, doctors, and nurses.
Intent: Each of these users has a goal they want to accomplish in the system you have created. What is this goal? Identify your users’ intent; this will serve as an anchor in creating the experience ecosystem.
If your user is a patient who was just invoiced for services provided by their physician, their intent could be avoiding a penalty by paying the bill on time.
If your user is an administrator who oversees five large hospitals in Maine, their intent could be ensuring the long‐term profitability of the hospital system.
Guided by your understanding of the system, users, and their intents, plan and conduct user research to extract the information necessary to visualize the ecosystem.
Research planning: There are multiple ways to extract information out of the ecosystem. You can either conduct user research (Chapter 30: “User Research Program Play”) and/or speak with internal employees who interact with users on a regular basis.
Through these activities, try to understand the user and their journey navigating across the system to achieve an intended goal. Capture the following details:
Objects: Objects are artifacts that users encounter across the system while accomplishing certain tasks. Track the list of objects and organize them by user.
An object could be a report, an email, a receipt, a statement, an article, a video.
Devices and Channels: How are your users receiving those objects? What devices (e.g. phone, desktop), channels (e.g. social media, phone, mail), and modalities (e.g. web, mobile) serve as the intermediary to transfer the objects? Make sure you group the devices and channels in conjunction with the corresponding object for easier mapping later on.
Relationship: Identify the relationships that exist between users, objects, and users and objects. Picture them as connected lines on a workflow or process map. Map the relationship between the elements, and denote flow by using arrowheads.
A doctor [user] reads and updates [relationship] the patient’s medical chart [object] through the patient portal [object].
Users’ Mental Model: What users believe about the system at hand strongly influences how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that are new or unfamiliar. That is why it’s important to gather firsthand insights about the user’s mental model. How does the user talk about the system in their own words? Don’t assume—ask them to describe it. Anywhere there’s a significant discrepancy, make a note; this may be an area where you should make the system conform to the user’s mental models.
Synthesize and rationalize all of the data that you’ve extracted (e.g. objects, relationships, terminologies) across users. Individual users each have their own mental models, influenced by factors such as location, cultural background, technical knowledge, and functional silos. This may lead to different people using different terminologies to refer to the same objects or processes within the system. Thus, it’s important to find commonalities, align, and standardize, employing further user research when necessary to bridge the gap.
What a billing specialist sees as distinct billing, sales, and support departments, a customer may just see as “customer support.”
What one user calls a testing procedure specification (TPS) report, another calls a QA report.
Use consistent symbol and color coding for each category of information to avoid confusion and easy readability.
Visualizing the full experience ecosystem, especially from a user’s perspective, is a powerful tool: It presents an immense amount of data in an intuitive and easily digestible manner. Visualize the eco‐system by putting your user in the center. The other people or roles your user interacts with are denoted in circles, and the objects they receive or exchange are denoted in squares. The relationships and sequence of actions are illustrated using labeled arrows.
Share the ecosystem with the stakeholders who play a role in shaping your users’ experience. Show them how their individual touchpoints with the customer contribute to the greater ecosystem. Establish a common understanding of the user and seek alignment across stakeholders.
Leverage the experience ecosystem’s value for your team, business, or product experience as you:
Apple has built a wildly successful user‐centered ecosystem of devices (e.g. iPhone, iPad, Macintosh computers) and services (e.g. Apple Music, Apple Pay) that work seamlessly together. Users wear different “hats” on a daily and weekly basis (e.g. mom and spouse in the morning, manager during the day, friend on the weekend), and have different needs (e.g. on‐the‐go communication, mobile entertainment) corresponding to those roles. Along with designing products for these needs, Apple also has ensured that its users remain in the ecosystem “bubble” even while switching between devices (e.g. iPhone to desktop) and services (e.g. Apple News to Apple Music).
It’s critical to think of the forest before the trees. The experience ecosystem play allows you to see the bigger picture and locate the deeply interwoven relationships that affect your user’s experience. Use this play to keep your organization thinking, influencing, and collaborating at a higher system level and as a launch pad for follow‐on business improvements or innovation.
A clunky and frustrating end‐user experience is the product of a siloed or inefficient organization. To mitigate that, an entire organization has to come together and collaborate cross‐functionally by placing the user at the center of their world. An experience roadmap facilitates a clear and deliberate path that unites the entire organization. Grounded in insights, the experience roadmap play is a critical guide telling you what to focus on, when you should focus on it, and why.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Roadmap play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Define experiences, scenarios; * Provide user insights. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Product lead * Engineering lead | * Support identification of scenarios; * Provide business insights; * Look for product aims. |
To build an effective experience roadmap, you need to be mindful of:
A great user experience doesn’t begin or end when customers buy your product.
Who are the users that matter most to the success of your business? Your users include your customers, of course, but they also include others involved in the entire experience ecosystem: suppliers, employees, and partners (see Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”).
In Amazon books’ ecosystem, the users include readers, authors, publishers, copyeditors, and KPF formatters.
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is focusing solely on paying customers and neglecting the employees who help troubleshoot, onboard, and interact with those customers and each other. A great user experience neither begins nor ends when customers buy your product. Instead, it is made up of the myriad interactions and touchpoints that customers experience with your larger organization—from the moment they first discover your product to the moment they are no longer a customer. These moments are made possible by your employees, partners, and suppliers. That’s why it’s critical to include these stakeholders as you define the users that matter most to your business.
Prioritize the users that your organization wants to understand and for whom you want to orchestrate experiences. Once you’ve prioritized them, identify all the experiences and scenarios that matter.
The vast majority of the scenarios should be identified and recorded.
Experiences: An experience is an event or occurrence that leaves an impression throughout the user’s life cycle with your organization. Experiences matter to your user or business, and when designed well, a great experience can have a magnified effect on your organization’s success.
For example, the experiences for a product that focuses on cryptocurrency trading could include:
If you have trouble identifying whether something is an experience, apply the test below. If it meets all three criteria, treat it as an experience.
Scenarios: Users move through many different individual scenarios in their overall experience of achieving (or not) their intended goal. Identify and record all of the possible scenarios in the experience you are evaluating.
For example, the scenarios for a product awareness experience could include:
Scenarios can be multi‐medium, ranging from no‐tech (e.g. friends, magazines) to higher‐tech (e.g. computers, iPads, voice). To design a holistic and consistently superior user experience, all scenarios and accompanying modality need to be accounted for and designed.
Extract and map key business and user insights for each of the experiences defined above.
Key business insights across the customer life cycle typically fall into the following categories:
Key user insights are the actions, soundbites, observations, and research gathered directly from the user. These insights can include things that your user likes, dislikes, needs, feels, wants, clicks on, or does (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”).
For example, here are some insights gained after conducting research on multiple users as they set up a new program on their computers:
In order to prioritize, consider your larger business goals. These could include:
Identify prioritized experiences across multiple time horizons: 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months. It’s always good to have short‐ and long‐term roadmaps so you are always delivering against a superior user experience.
Triangulate your business and user insights you extracted with your business goals and objectives. This will help you surface the most user‐ and business‐critical experiences to tackle in a defined time frame. Then, prioritize the experiences based on time frame, impact, and feasibility. The top experience(s) are the one all teams need to tackle together in a given time frame.
For example, if your business recently acquired an influx of new users and you’ve received numerous complaints about the cumbersome setup process, then onboarding is your top experience, and your teams should prioritize it.
Identify your minimum viable experiences (MVEs) and prioritized scenarios for each experience. An MVE takes into consideration the user’s experiences across the entire journey and ensures that at least one deliberate scenario has been designed across all experiences in the users’ journey.
Sensitize the entire organization and build a culture of collaboration so it becomes second nature.
Design for the “digital web ads” scenario for the awareness experience, the “guided tour” for onboarding, gamification for engagement, and “referral bonus” for advocacy.
The levels above MVE are more enhanced experience (MEE) and most transformed experience (MTE). Review Chapter 32: “Experience Benchmarking Play,” which describes these levels in more detail.
Bring the whole organization together when you are designing for the MVE and MTE. If you are working on perfecting your onboarding experience, involve the sales, implementation, and customer success teams to ideate, gather insights, seek feedback, and collaborate. A great user experience doesn’t stop at one particular point. Your job is to orchestrate and bring together the needed parties to deliver a transformed product experience.
A multinational software company spent 18 months building and designing a product. When it finally launched, customers didn’t want to buy it. They told the company that they had finally gotten the last deployment up and running, and they had no intention of ripping and replacing. “After all,” they said, “who is going to help us migrate the data from that old system into this one?”
In this organization, migration was not the product team’s responsibility; it was usually carried out by their professional services team or through a system integrator such us IBM or Deloitte. The company’s professional service team wasn’t ready or available to help migrate the data. It took 18 months to finally get everything up and running.
The company didn’t think about the entire user journey and how it consists of interactions with many different parts of the organization (e.g. sales, product, professional services). If they had used an experience roadmap, it would have saved over a year’s worth of time, resources, and lost revenue.
Superior user experience doesn’t happen by accident. It takes deliberate planning, strategy, and an experience‐first mindset, and it requires the whole organization to come together to build a unifying experience for the user.
Most of the organizations we interact with do not have a clear vision for their users’ experience. An experience vision is the aspirational world‐class experience you want your users to have and it’s a north star for your team to understand, rally around, and align with on a consistent basis. The experience vision play will help you understand how to create and activate an effective vision in your organization.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Vision play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist * Chief experience officer | * Identify and communicate the vision with their partners; * Govern the tracking of talent performance against the ladder. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | Peer practitioners, design collaborators (e.g. product manager, engineering manager) | * Collaborate closely with the driver to define and articulate the vision, using user insights; * Advocate for the vision, and share the vision with their respective organizations; * Operate on a day‐to‐day basis that aligns to the true intent of the vision. |
To run an effective experience vision play, you need to be mindful of :
Refrain from thinking about what your organization can and cannot do today. Free your mind to think about what the best experience can be for the users identified.
To define a experience vision, identify all of the users who exist in the context of your system (Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”). These could be external or internal users: a paying customer, a partner who helps deliver great customer experiences, an employee who orchestrates the behind‐the‐scenes.
For the key users that matter to the business, build the experience roadmap and prioritize the most critical experiences and the related needs and problems for the user (Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play”).
For the identified top experiences and problems through a market baselining play (Chapter 32: “Experience Benchmarking Play”) further identify the most transformed experiences (MTE) by looking for inspirations and market analysis.
With the above understanding of the MTE’s, answer this question:
What is the aspirational “new world” experience you want to create for your user as they navigate through your system?
Try to describe your answer in your words. Ideally you should be able to complete statements such as:
Statements such as these will help you articulate your experience vision.
Collaboratively, ideate, and brainstorm the best experience that you would like to give the users of your system. An experience where all their identified pain points, inefficiencies as well as needs have been taken care of.
Convert your vision from words into a format that allows others in your organization to see, hear, and feel the vision. Clickable screens are a classic “prototyping” option, but there are many other methods that can achieve the outcome in a more efficient and effective way. Storyboarding, enacting, and drawing a series of sketches are engaging and stimulating ways to communicate your vision. Or you can think even further out of the box and do a skit or make a short film. The goal is to show others the vision rather than telling them the vision. It’ll be more effective and powerful when others can visualize the world that you see.
Now it’s time to start bringing your experience vision to life.
Share your vision‐type with new hires as a part of the onboarding process. The more you share the vision, the more likely it will happen.
The vision‐type articulates the north star, while the experience roadmap (Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play”) provides you a roadmap to navigate toward the vision. Use the roadmap to obtain a holistic picture of the experience and what opportunities the team should prioritize.
Remember to mobilize every person and consider every artifact your organization produces, both internally and externally. They all play a role in creating a holistic and magical experience for the user.
Then, run micro‐experiments that will help you refine and perfect the experience. Measure, iterate, and measure again.
This play doesn’t stop once you’ve created your vision. Keep going back to the vision. Has it evolved as a result of new technology or capabilities introduced in the market?
Use the experience and business metrics to benchmark how successful you are as you move closer to your vision.
Don’t discard elements of the vision that were not prioritized early. Continue to curate your vision plan, as what may not be viable now may be viable in a few years’ time.
In 1987, Apple Computer’s design team embarked on an ambitious project to envision what Apple’s products and the user experience might look like in 2010, 23 years into the future. They vision‐typed a few stories using short videos, one of which was called “The Knowledge Navigator.” In the video, a UC Berkeley professor speaks to a digital assistant who helps him relocate and update his lecture notes, conduct a video call with a colleague (even Skype hadn’t been invented yet), and pull an array of information from a large networked database (six years before the invention of the Internet).
In a time where people performed all computer actions with a keyboard and mouse, it was eye‐opening to see sophisticated actions being performed using only voice and touch. It’s also no coincidence that the iPads that shipped in 2010 had many of the capabilities and experience outlined in the 1987 video.
Apple built an experience vision, and it is clear that the organization used “The Knowledge Navigator” as the aspirational vision for “new world” for the next 23 years.
Most organizations don’t have a vision of what their user experience should be. If you want to compete meaningfully in the marketplace, you need a vision of experiences for each user you care about. Invest time in articulating one and mobilizing a plan around it; this will exponentially shift your company and product trajectory.
Hiring experience practitioners is a critical step in transforming your organization. However, many companies focus too much on tools and technical proficiency rather than on the mindsets and problem‐solving skills of their prospective employees. This play serves as a guide to help you hire the experience practitioners that you need to fuel business growth.
This play will allow your business to:
Who are the key players in the hiring play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Chief experience officer | * Define the hiring criteria; * Facilitate the selection process; * Solicit and consolidate feedback from interviewer(s). |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners (e.g. strategist, user researcher) * Peer practitioners (e.g. product manager, engineering lead) * Executive leadership (e.g. CPO) | * Conduct interviews; * Collaborate to define the hiring criteria; * Provide interview feedback; * Debrief on candidates with the hiring panel. |
To run an effective hiring play, you need to be mindful of:
The ideal experience practitioners‐to‐engineer ratio for Enterprise B2B organizations is 1:15; for B2C companies, the ratio should be 1:5.
In addition to chief experience officer, there are five roles that make up the experience practice: experience strategist, user experience researcher, interaction experience designer, visual experience designer, and content experience designer.
Prioritize the roles based on the maturity of your organization, with the eventual goal of building the full practice with individuals who possess specialized skills.
| ORGANIZATIONAL MATURITY | HIGHEST PRIORITY ROLE | TYPICAL PRACTICE SIZE | TYPICAL TENURE RANGE FOR EXPERIENCE PRACTITIONERS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early‐stage company | Interaction designer | 1–3 practitioners | Between 3 and 5 years |
| Mid‐sized company | Experience strategist | 4–8 practitioners | Between 1 and 6 years |
| Large enterprise | CXO | 9+ practitioners | Between 0 and 15 years |
Be mindful of how you write the qualifications on your job description. Many organizations only specify design‐doing skills (e.g. wireframing, command of Figma), when in fact they need experience practitioners who are strong problem solvers and exhibit the necessary mindsets and knowledge (Chapter 8: “Mindsets of a User‐Centric Organization”)
Remember that hiring good experience practitioners is not an easy job. As the organization matures, be more flexible with hiring on both extremes of the experience range to ensure sustainability.
Once you have defined the role, go to the places where great talent is most likely to reside. For junior practitioners, go to colleges with design and innovation programs or clubs. Get referrals from company employees, or look for individuals who are at or have worked for organizations known for experience‐centricity.
Given that the whole UX design practice is highly collaborative, involve the relevant internal collaborators to help you make the right hiring decisions. It’s best to have a diverse group of interviewers across seniority, backgrounds, and expertise to be able to come to the decision table with different insights, observations, and perspectives. At a minimum, involve stakeholders from the products and engineering team because these are teams who will most closely collaborate with the experience designer (Chapter 10: “Getting the Right People Right”).
Define the list of criteria that would make you want to extend an offer of employment. Depending on the specifics of the role, you may want to add a few more categories or choose to overweight certain categories over others. However, your standard list of hiring criteria for all experience practitioners and leaders should include the following:
| MEDIOCRE PRACTITIONER | AWESOME PRACTITIONER |
|---|---|
| Describes the UI and screens by showing before and after designs. | Describes the user, their journey, and how they have solved the problems effectively. |
| Can only answer questions related to their skills and artifacts. | Can answer questions related to other areas such as product, business, and engineering. For example: Why did you build this feature? Why not build it for another user? |
| Only knows about the requirements given to them. For example: “I did this because the PM identified this on their backlog.” | Has an opinion on what the top experience problems are for the system they are designing. |
| Is oblivious to the larger product and user ecosystem. For example, they would struggle answering: “If a design decision was made in one part of the flow, where would be the impact across the larger ecosystem?” | They can clearly describe the experience ecosystem, and how all the dots connect for the product and the user. |
| They “talk” about experience and participate in brainstorming. | They evangelize the experience mindset. They are also comfortable with rapid ideations, “own” the whiteboard, and can think on the go with the pen/pencil/marker. |
Now that you know the criteria, develop a hiring process that is customized for experience practitioners, using the following components:
Resume Review: Resume review is an internal step designed to find technical fit by examining candidates’ prior background and experiences. The key question to answer is: How likely will this candidate succeed in this role?
Phone Interview: The phone interview is your first real‐time interaction with the candidate. The goal at this stage is to assess cultural fit and their level of motivation for joining your team. Treat the phone interview as a conversation you are having with the candidate. A good cultural fit is also one that adds diversity of thoughts, background, and perspective to enrich the team. Provide opportunities to learn more about the person beyond their professional background.
At UXReactor, this is the time we “scare” candidates by being candid about all the potential challenges they may face if they were to join the firm. Be upfront and make sure it’s a mutual fit early on.
Portfolio Review: A portfolio review gives the candidate an opportunity to present their best work and an opportunity for the organization to evaluate the breadth and depth of the candidate’s design experience. Though every portfolio is different, the portfolio review gives the organization insights into the candidate’s design philosophy, their previous impact, and their communication skills. Assess their ability to articulate the following:
What was the problem? (Provide context.)
Why was it important? (Explain the relevance of this problem.)
How did they go about solving it? (Discuss process.)
How do they know they solved it? (Share results.)
Ask “What is your metric of success?” to gauge how they frame the problem, the people they collaborate with, and their mindset alignment.
Design Exercise: A design exercise allows the interviewer to assess the quality of the candidate’s work, the soundness of their thought process, and how well they speak about and rationalize their design. Typically, a design exercise is provided after the portfolio review and is centered on a design problem. The design problems themselves can run the gamut from the fantastic (“How would you design a time machine?”) to the very specific (“How would you design the checkout flow for ABC company?”). Furthermore, a few defined constraints, such as time and scope, typically accompany the design problem. The key qualities to assess are how well they understood the problem, stated their assumptions, navigated ambiguity, structured their thought process, communicated their design, and engaged the interviewers.
Data Gathering and Decision
The hiring process can span weeks and involves a number of different stakeholders across the organization. It’s critical to have a process in place to collect and consolidate all of the inputs throughout the stages of the interview process in a timely manner. Furthermore, data should be collected on an individual basis and in confidence to avoid biasing other interviews and the hiring decision.
We were tasked with building a design team from scratch for a Fortune 100 company. The team on the ground had never interviewed or hired a designer, so no processes had been built. The recruiter didn’t know how to screen portfolios and could no longer filter candidates with keyword searches, which is what they were accustomed to when hiring for other roles.
We built a hiring process similar to the one described in this play. It took us a couple of months to develop the roles, design an interview process, coach the team, and define the scoring criteria used to evaluate the candidate. Once the entire system was established, the company successfully grew its team from 0 to 12 members in less than three months. Each teammate was able to immediately operate at a much higher level given their success and alignment throughout the rigorous hiring process.
You are only as strong as your team. Invest in the necessary time upfront to develop a rigorous process. You’ll get quality talent, and rigor today will minimize potential headaches tomorrow that result from poor performance and a bad cultural fit.
A great experience practice starts with hiring the right talent. Adapt your hiring processes by revisiting how you define and source the role, what the right evaluative steps (e.g. design exercise, portfolio review) and hiring criteria are, and which cross‐functional decision makers should be involved. Your talent is your greatest asset. Therefore, invest in developing the best hiring process today to reap the benefits later.
The experience practice is not a collection of skills; it is an emerging profession. This play will help your organization define a professional career ladder for experience practitioners that grooms them to be future strategic business leaders, all the way to the CXO.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Career Ladder play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Chief experience officer | * Facilitate the development of the career ladder; * Govern the tracking of talent performance against the ladder. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners (e.g. user research, visual experience designer) * Peer practitioners (e.g. design operations, human resource manager) | * Influence the development of the career ladder. |
To build an effective hiring play, you need to be mindful of:
| LEVEL | ROLE | CURRENT INDUSTRY DESIGNATIONS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apprentice | Entry‐level designer |
| 2 | Practitioner | Designer (operating at an individual contributor level) |
| 4 | Strategist | Director / sr. manager / manager |
| 6 | Chief experience officer (CXO) | Executive, VP, general manager |
| MINDSET | APPRENTICE | PRACTITIONER | STRATEGIST | CXO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design | M | M | H | H |
| System | L | M | H | H |
| Experience | L | M | H | H |
| Business | L | L | M | H Profit and loss (P&L) responsibility |
| Outcome | L | M | H | H |
(Key: L‐Low; M‐Medium; H‐High)
Do not mix career laddering with performance.
| APPRENTICE | PRACTITIONER | STRATEGIST | CXO | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Impact | Deliverables | Project | User(s) experience | Organization + P&L |
| CATEGORY | APPRENTICE | PRACTITIONER | STRATEGIST | CXO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mentorship | Mentors new hires | Grooms lower rung | Educates cross‐functional teams | Educates the market |
| Team management | N/A | Individual(s) | Product suite/business unit | Organization |
| LEVEL | CHARACTERISTICS |
|---|---|
| Doer | They influence others to complete tasks or deliverables, following a predefined way of doing things. |
| Manager (Influencer) | They influence teams to experiment and go beyond the known knowns in achieving a certain goal. They are creative in managing teams to achieve outcomes. |
| Experience transformed | They are passionate and hold differentiated thoughts that inspire others to view the world through a new lens. They inspire behavior change and create movements. |
Practitioners need a nurturing organizational environment to grow, lead, and thrive. A nurturing environment is one where individuals are not afraid of making mistakes because they feel supported by their team, leaders, and organization. Such an environment provides ample opportunities to continuously challenge individuals to keep learning and growing. Below are some common behaviors of a nurturing environment:
The career ladder is not only a living document that can be adapted, it also is a talent management system that needs to be managed and governed on an ongoing basis. Develop processes for ongoing talent training, review, and grooming practices. In addition, plan for an annual salary and compensation review session to ensure your talent is properly compensated and incentivized.
After spending eight years as the only designer at a medium‐sized technology company, Jake told his manager it was time. He wasn’t growing professionally anymore. So he left the company to pursue new opportunities. Jake is not alone. Organizations are losing talent faster than they can groom and retain them.
There are three main reasons designers leave. First, they feel like they are stagnating. Second, they don’t see a viable career path defined for them where they are continuously challenged and nurtured. Third, they don’t have the necessary support of a full and specialized team to meet the growing requests from the organization. Most organizations treat design as a means to an end—design a couple of screens for the product launch, or improve the look and feel to have the visuals be on par with those of their closest competitors. They don’t view design as a business‐critical function where designers are strategic leaders who can have a powerful influence on the business.
Unfortunately, these underlying issues ultimately lead to employee turnover. Turnover is expensive and can cost up to 1.5 to 2 times an employee’s annual salary, especially when you consider the resources spent recruiting, hiring, and training. To prevent this massive resource drain, invest in building a full team and a robust career ladder for the individuals on the team like Jake.
Experience design is an emerging profession, not a collection of skills. And if you don’t treat it as a profession, you’ll keep leaking talents. It’s imperative to build a career ladder that allows you to manage, groom, and develop your design talent, so your organization can fuel its business growth through user experience design.
Many leaders believe that the secret to becoming a user‐first company like Airbnb and Apple is investing in a team of designers. In reality, it takes much more—it requires an organizational system that supports a user‐first strategy. A system that is geared to nurture and support the bv.d system that was discussed in Chapter 7.
The experience transformation program play deconstructs all the critical components to enable you to define, operationalize, and govern an organizational system around this strategy.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Transformation Program play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Chief experience officer (CXO) | * Owns the vision and defines the strategy; * Builds the program; * Measures impact and results; * Drives organizational shifts. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners, internal partners, and stakeholders | * Support the vision through daily actions; * Collaborate with teams across the organization; * Report metrics and data. |
To run an effective experience transformation program, you need to be mindful of:
Distill a broad user‐first strategy into tangible and measurable outcomes for your user and business. Compose well‐defined outcome statements to provide a full, clear visualization of your desired end state. It should be both:
High‐level approach + direction of improvement (i.e. increase, decrease) + unit of improvement (i.e. time) + measurement of improvement where possible (i.e. 5%)
Drawing on your knowledge about the user, articulate experience visions for each key user that details an aspirational, world‐class experience you want to deliver (Chapter 20: “Experience Vision Play”).
An experience vision should consist of both a user vision and a product vision; it should reinforce the user‐first strategy and outcomes you’ve articulated.
To put your vision into action, have a user‐first strategic roadmap where decisions are made based on user journey, needs, and opportunities (Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play”) and an execution plan so that cross‐functional teams are aligned and working toward the vision. (Chapter 35: “Product Experience Planning Play”).
Build an organizational system to operationalize the strategy and the vision. An organizational system has four main components: mindsets, people, process, and environment. Start by investing the right talent and cultivating the critical mindsets.
If you were to remodel your home, you’d recruit people with highly specialized skills (e.g. architect, carpenter, electrician, plumber) to make sure the project will be a success and that your money will not be wasted. In the same way, your organization needs the right people with the necessary skills and experience to bring the experience visions and the experience to life. Consider the following “must‐haves” as you bring on people for your experience design program:
| ORGANIZATIONAL MATURITY | HIGHEST PRIORITY ROLE | TYPICAL PRACTICE SIZE | TYPICAL TENURE RANGE FOR EXPERIENCE PRACTITIONERS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early‐stage company | Interaction designer | 1–3 practitioners | Range between 3 and 5 years |
| Mid‐sized company | Experience strategist | 1–3 practitioners | Range between 1 and 6 years |
| Large enterprise | CXO | 9+ practitioners | Range between 0 and 15 years |
| MINDSET | APPRENTICE | PRACTITIONER | STRATEGIST | CXO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design | M | M | H | H |
| Experience | L | M | H | H |
| Systems | L | M | H | H |
| Business | L | L | M | H Profit and loss (P&L) responsibility |
| Outcome | L | M | H | H |
(Key: H ‐ High; M ‐ Medium; L ‐ Low)
Too many high‐potential organizations lack the robust and comprehensive processes needed to consistently deliver value to the business and its users at scale. To operationalize your user‐first strategy and vision, invest in building a robust set of processes supporting these four pillars:
A well‐defined process sets the foundation for creativity and innovation. These cornerstone processes give you the ability to scale your effort and teams quickly without compromising on the quality and consistency of the result.
A great organizational environment enables people to do their best work. A highly effective environment has a clear strategic vision and is empathetic, collaborative, diverse, and trusting. A number of factors make up the environment:
Tools for specific purposes:
| image | image | image | image | image | image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Research UserTesting, UserZoom, Optimizely | Design Figma, UXPin, Mural | Communication Slack, Teams | Project management Trello, Asana | Curation Dovetail, UserTesting, AirTable | Document sharing Google Suite, Dropbox |
In order to thrive and consistently achieve business and user impact, the experience transformation program needs to be regularly reviewed, curated, tracked, and measured. Govern these four categories:
Business and User Metrics: Quantifying how each element of your experience transformation program is affecting your business and user will enable you to gauge what’s working and how to improve the program.
Metrics to assess business impact include:
Metrics to assess user impact include (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”):
Organizational Maturity: Continue to assess your organization’s level of experience maturity—since that is closely correlated with the type of user experience and outcome your organization can deliver. Proactively identify ways to increase your organization’s experience maturity.
| ORGANIZATION’S MATURITY LEVEL | CHARACTERISTICS |
|---|---|
| Experience apprentice | This is the lowest level of experience maturity. Roles in the experience practices are still undefined and undifferentiated (e.g. jack‐of‐all‐trades). A great deal of focus is given to visual design, and research is used to validate existing designs. Organizations that have an experience‐apprentice level of maturity delivers MVE experiences (Chapter 32: “Experience Benchmarking Play”). |
| Experience enlightened | The organization is beginning to understand how user experience can help achieve market differentiation and is investing resources to help make itself more experience‐aware and mature. These organizations deliver enhanced experiences. |
| Experience transformed | User‐centered design is seen as an engine that drives innovation. Experience practitioners have specialized roles, and a dedicated research team extracts user insights using a portfolio of methodologies. Users and their needs are fully ingrained across all departments and serve as a North Star for decision‐making. These organizations deliver transformed experiences. |
Curation: Curation calls for unprioritized ideas and insights to be visited regularly and even repurposed. An idea or insight you may not use today may be the holy grail three years from now (Chapter 29: “Insights Curation Play”). A design problem or opportunity you did not prioritize to resolve yesterday may be the highest‐severity user problem today (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”). Maintain a library system that allows you to revisit and repurpose.
Experience Debt: Like financial debt, experience debt are problems that have not yet been fully addressed. Govern the amount of experience debt your organization is accumulating to ensure the balance does not become so massive that it significantly detracts from the user experience.
Serendipity is not a strategy. A multifaceted experience transformation program is your gateway to achieving an insurmountable market advantage for your organization, product, or services. It requires building, operationalizing, and governing a holistic system. Be deliberate in the details to maximize your ROI.
“SUPPOSING IS GOOD BUT FINDING OUT IS BETTER”.
–MARK TWAIN
User research is the discipline of gathering, curating, and tracking user insights. It allows you to develop a deep empathy for the user and guides all subsequent experience design activities. The discipline of user research requires a high degree of rigor, and when done correctly, it has far‐reaching effects, not only on the experiences you create for your users but also on your capacity for finding opportunity and mitigating risk.
No matter the field, intelligence is the basis behind every significant decision. Different types of organizations—military, financial, consumer goods—all depend on their intelligence analysts to collect data to derive meaningful insights. Where might product companies find such insights? User research.
Not investing in user research (due to its nature of delayed gratification) is a mistake because competitors can easily replicate small design attributes (visual, interaction) but can’t easily copy the research’s insights and organizational focus.
User research lays the critical foundation for all aspects of experience design by generating intelligence on who, what, how, and why to build. When user insights inform business decisions, effective outcomes follow. In fact, user research can be the most significant value‐driving investment a company makes.
People with a research mindset constantly seek to discover and have an objective curiosity about the “why” behind the “what.” Those with a research mindset:
“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
– Maya Angelou
The research mindset is not reserved just for user research practitioners. On an organization‐wide level, it drives a culture of empathy, discovery, and experimentation—the foundation for all user‐centered innovation. It manifests in people pursuing user insights to drive their decisions, collaborating and knowledge‐sharing with cross‐functional departments, experimenting frequently, and being willing to take the more difficult route to deliver the most value to the end user.
Here are the critical concepts and key terms to understand before diving into the user research plays:
A portfolio of insights is a framework that helps an organization pursue the right mix of research activities. It allows business leaders and product teams to gather user insights that help them see how they are doing now and where they could be in the future. Three types of research make up the portfolio of insights: formative, summative, sensorial.
Formative research provides foundational insights that inform where businesses should focus its priorities. Formative research includes methods such as ethnographic studies.
When to use it? At the beginning stages of product development.
What does it tell you? What user problems to focus on.
Summative research provides insights that validate the PX or UI of a product or service. Summative research includes methods such as usability studies.
When to use it? During the design or development stage, when you have design stimuli—sketches, wireframes, visuals, a first build, etc.—that users can react to.
What does it tell you? If and how well your design solves the problem.
Sensorial research provides insights that give an indication, or a “sense,” of how a product is doing over time. Sensorial research includes methods such as NPS (net promoter score), click analysis, and recurring baseline studies.
When to use it? After a product launch, as it will give you data on how users are using and feeling about the product.
What does it tell you? If the product is working the right way and how it is performing over time. What to Expect in This Section
We’ve curated a list of plays that will enable you to create a sustainable and powerful user research practice within your organization. The user research plays will help you answer these critical questions:
These handpicked plays will allow you to leverage research as a strategic value driver.
There are many different research methods to choose from. This play will help you identify the best method(s) for gathering the insights that you need and ensuring the salience of the insights you collect.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Picking a Research Method play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * User researcher | * Define study timeline; * Define the method; * Conduct research. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners, cross‐functional teams | * Contribute research questions and domain‐specific insights; * Provide existing knowledge on users; * Provide stimuli for any studies; * Define budget. |
To effectively pick a method, you will need to be mindful of:
Identify your user experience design phase to determine what types of insights (formative, summative, or sensorial) you need and the best research method to use to find them.
| PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PHASE | TYPE OF INSIGHT NEEDED |
|---|---|
| Strategy and planning: early stages with no stimuli | Formative or sensorial |
| Design: prototyped stimuli | Summative |
| Development: prototyped and coded stimuli | Summative |
| Launched: live product as stimuli | Sensorial |
Different methods will produce different types of data and insights. Therefore, in addition to identifying the type of insights you need, it is also important to define your purpose—how you will be using these insights. Will you be using the research to define product requirements? To make improvements on an existing product? To decide which ideas and user problems to strategically invest in?
According to Chrisian Rohrer, user research methods can be placed along two spectrums: attitudinal vs. behavioral and quantitative vs. qualitative.
| PURPOSE | TYPE OF DATA/INSIGHTS |
|---|---|
| Roadmap planning | * Qualitative insights on unmet needs and opportunities in the market; * Quantitative insights on how pervasive the needs are; * Behavioral insights on what is most commonly used; * Attitudinal insights on what users want. |
| Requirements gathering | * Behavioral insights on how users perform their tasks; * Qualitative insights on what pain points and needs exist. |
| Measuring and tracking product performance | * Quantitative data on where issues are trending; * Attitudinal data on what users like and dislike. |
The types of questions you want to ask will also affect which method you use to gather the insights. Take inventory of the research questions that you have gathered throughout the design phases, and see if they call for attitudinal, behavioral, quantitative, or qualitative data.
Two types of logistics have to be factored in during the selection of the method: timelines and budget.
Different research methods require different timelines, depending on elements such as:
Work with your peer practitioners to determine when they will need the insights. This will determine which methods are possible within that time frame.
Methods such as surveys or unmoderated usability studies are more suitable if you need results quickly; other methods, such as in‐depth interviews or ethnographic studies, require more time to complete.
Narrow down the ideal method(s) based on the parameters you’ve identified in the previous points. In the case where there is no exact fit, rank the parameters in order of impact and feasibility to loosen the criteria and find the next best option.
COPYRIGHT © 2014 CHRISTIAN ROHER
Make sure you evaluate your research method before conducting any study. Picking the right method(s) will improve the quality of your insights and increase the ROI of your research time and effort.
Identifying and recruiting the right participant for your study is the foundation for research success. Recruiting the wrong participant or selecting only a partial match will diminish the quality and breadth of insights that you gather. The research recruitment play will help you define participant screening criteria, plan recruitment logistics, and mitigate potential liabilities.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Research Recruitment play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * User researcher | * Establish recruitment criteria; * Execute recruitment efforts. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Research operations, design, cross‐functional teams | * Support recruitment activities; * Contribute research questions and domain‐specific insights; * Provide existing knowledge of users. |
Ask one or two screener questions that require a written response to gather context on a respondent and help you determine if they can speak intelligently about the topic.
Include realistic “trick” answers in multiple‐choice questions to weed out individuals who are trying to cheat on the screener. Only participants who actually meet your criteria should be able to spot and avoid the “trick” answers.
Keep screeners as concise as possible. Completion rates decrease as the number of questions and the time required to complete the screener increase.
To run an effective research recruitment play, you need to be mindful of:
Work with your peer practitioners to identify your research goals to determine the type of user you need to speak to and the qualities they need to have. Think through what the ideal user should know, be able to do, and what their context or environment should be like in order to answer your research questions.
Create a list of qualifying criteria to ensure that the right set of participants can be screened from a larger pool of candidates.
Typical criteria could include items such as (but not limited to):
Note that the more criteria you have, the more difficult it will be to recruit, however, it would result in more accurate insight..
Research question: How do customer service representatives manage tickets when serving multiple channels?
Qualifying Criteria: Screen for customer service agents, who use more than one channel, are involved in the intake and execution of tickets/cases, interact directly with customers
Unlike qualifying criteria, which either select or eliminate participants from the study, segmentation categories are nice‐to‐knows that can give you more context on your participants and help you eliminate selection bias.
One way to identify segmentation categories is to determine the different types of use cases your product supports. For example knowing the industry your participants represent can help produce a more distributed sample that represents more of these use cases.
Segmentation categories are also useful for identifying category‐specific trends during synthesis, further down the research process. You may find that certain segments have needs or pains that are not present in other segments.
Use the participant criteria and segmentation categories you identified as a foundation for creating your screener survey. Screener surveys will contain questions that are designed to help you find participants who meet your criteria and sufficiently determine whether their responses are honest.
Your screening questions should be specific enough for you to confidently define a match but also vague enough to prevent respondents from easily guessing exactly what you’re looking for.
The screener should not be used as a way to answer your research questions. All insight gathering should take place during the actual research session.
Once you know what research method you are recruiting for (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”) and have the participant screener prepared, start planning the logistics of screener distribution and internal and external communication.
The incentive should be enticing enough for the participant to feel it’s worth their time. Increase the amount as needed.
Depending on the number and type of participants you need, it may be necessary to choose more than one channel for recruitment.
Channels you can consider include:
Keep budgeting and operational constraints in mind, because the channel(s) you choose may affect:
If you are reaching out to participants through community groups or forums, always make sure you are aware of their policies on recruiting before posting your screener.
If you are recruiting from multiple channels, track your respondents in a central place to avoid overlooking qualified participants and to identify duplicate respondents.
Once you know what research method you are recruiting for (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”) and have the participant screener prepared, start planning the logistics of screener distribution and internal and external communication.
Before launching your recruitment, define your blacklist criteria: the types of participants you should not recruit. While this may seem counterintuitive, creating a blacklist can mitigate liability for your company.
Employees or partners of direct competitors—they could gain access to your company’s IP, and asking them for insights may be construed as unethical competitive intelligence.
Illegal lottery—this can affect how you communicate and distribute incentives.
Anti‐bribery and corruption—this can affect the types of participants you recruit, as you can incentivize them to take part or pay more than a certain amount.
Unethical competitive intelligence—this can affect the types of participants you recruit.
Regional privacy regulations such as GDPR and LGPD—these will affect how you collect participant PII, among other things.
When in doubt consult with a legal team or cross‐check your company policies to find out whether there are any other possible liabilities.
Once you’ve finished these steps, distribute your screeners and check your pipelines frequently.
A few years ago, UXReactor worked with a client who was partnering with a large technology company to launch an integrated product on a very tight timeline. We were helping them design an experience for their partner company’s users. However, they did not actually have access to these users, nor had they factored in ways to identify or talk to them.
In the interest of time, our client suggested that we speak with their product and sales teams to gather the insights we needed to help design the experience. When we explored this approach, two things became very apparent very quickly:
Our client’s product team did not know enough about their end users, and neither did we.
No one at our client’s organization knew how to recruit the right users in an effective manner.
Once we realized our situation, we brainstormed and put together a screener (3 hours), created a banner ad (4 hours), and launched a paid media campaign (48 hours) on LinkedIn and Facebook (48 hours). We identified 6 users who we brought in to review the design concepts. We got loads of effective feedback that we prioritized into two categories: must‐have‐for‐launch and to‐be‐fixed‐immediately‐after‐launch. All it took was an investment of two days and $2,000 to set up our client for a very successful launch.
Identify and eliminate potentially unmotivated participants.
Motivated participants are individuals who understand the use cases of the study, are eager and willing to share their insights, and are not driven by pressure from their superiors or by monetary compensation.
Motivated participants feel that it is in their best interest to share their insights.
Unmotivated participants are individuals who may have been forced by another peer to participate, or who simply want the incentive. They are not driven to give you the best help they can.
Over‐recruit so you have backups. It’s good practice to recruit more qualified participants than you need. This provides a buffer if some respondents do not accept your invitation, or if others provide poor insights.
Invest in a panel of participants. Manage a ready‐made panel of users who have given explicit consent to have their contact information stored to receive research opportunities. The panel should represent a wide range of users, and researchers can invite participants who meet each study’s qualification criteria.
Start recruitment early: We recommend starting recruitment at least two weeks before you begin the study.
Getting the right research outcomes begins with finding the right user. This requires you to define the type of participants you need and then find, vet, and coordinate with them.
User research can significantly mitigate an organization’s risk—but only when the studies are run correctly and insights are accurate. Unfortunately, user research is prone to error. Organizations need an effective system of governance to ensure research quality. This play lays out six attributes that will help you gain reliable insights and drive real value for your users and business.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Research Quality Play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * User researcher | * Design experiments; * Produce relevant, reliable, and unbiased insights. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners | * Provide research questions; * Create research stimuli; * Share accountability for relevant, reliable, and unbiased insights. |
To run an effective research quality play, you need to be mindful of:
Insights must always come directly from the right users. These users can never be replaced by a proxy (an SME, support rep, sales rep, PM, or CEO), regardless of how well they may know them.
Give yourself a minimum of two weeks lead time to recruit good quality users and possibly more if you are designing for niche users.
Recruit users (Chapter 26: “Research Recruitment Play”) who most accurately represent the group of people for whom you are solving a problem. More specifically:
While there’s no such thing as “too much data” in user research, there are such things as relevant and irrelevant data. Think about the desired outcomes of your research, and define what insights you need in order to make decisions that will lead you to this outcome. In other words, identify which research questions (RQs) are most relevant. Be mindful of what phase of product development you are in when you identify your RQs.
If your desired outcome is to understand how to improve the next iteration of your network security product, some relevant research questions might be:
Don’t overlook collaboration activities. It’s just as important to get alignment, sign‐off, and feedback as it is to do research and design.
While some irrelevant research questions (in context of network security) might be:
While there are many right methods you can use to get to the specific insight, you need to mitigate the risk of picking the wrong methods. Different research methods are best suited for answering certain types of questions or gathering certain types of data, so using the wrong research method can result in misleading insights and increased churn. For example if you are looking to understand what journey and problems a physician faces while using a surgical product, the right method could be leveraging the contextual inquiry or fly‐on‐the‐wall methods, but a survey would not give you similar quality of insights. Choose the method that best fits the needs of your study by evaluating key variables such as the current phase of the project, what you want to do with the insights, and the types of questions you want to ask (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”). This will help achieve your research goals in the best way possible.
Research is a rigorous craft. Any variance in the execution of your study can potentially skew your data and lead to false conclusions.
When you conduct your studies, maintain consistency and avoid making any last‐minute changes.
Conduct a pilot study at least two days prior to your first participant session to iron out any issues in the script or stimuli, and build in at least one hour between each session so you can have enough time to debrief and prepare for the next session.
Be mindful of how you frame your questions to your participants. How you ask your questions can affect what your participant says in response. In order to generate the most real and accurate responses, avoid asking:
Leading questions, which may influence users to answer in a way that confirms a preexisting assumption, opinion, or desired response.
Dead‐end questions, which expose the what, but not the so what or why. Try asking questions that start with “What,” “Why,” “How,” or “Can you show me/tell me about a time…”
Dead‐end questions that are not grounded in historical or behavioral data.
Data interpreted correctly will lead to valuable, actionable insights. Misinterpreted data will lead to incorrect insights, which can lead to significant risk for your business.
Research findings can be misinterpreted in many ways:
Prepare a contingency plan for your study in case you encounter difficulties with your original plan. For instance, if you are using online moderating tools, have a slide deck of your tasks and questions saved locally, as well as a backup video conferencing link.
The purpose of conducting research is to empower everyone in the organization to act on the findings. To do this effectively, insights must be presented in a way that is registered with different audiences; otherwise, all prior steps in the quality checklist will be in vain.
Most researchers will compile all the findings from a study in a comprehensive report, but the reality is that most stakeholders will not read the report. And if no one ever reads the report, does the research even drive any value?
What can you do to make sure your research insights are heard?
| STAKEHOLDER | RESEARCH ARTIFACT |
|---|---|
| Leadership | Experience metrics scorecards or video highlight reels |
| Development | Trackable list of prioritized “to fix” issues |
| Product management | User journey maps or quick “cheat sheets” of insights |
| Designers | Screenshots with annotations of usability issues or detailed task flow diagrams |
A user researcher was conducting a formative study to understand the needs of a certain niche‐user segment. After weeks of active recruiting, she ensured that the right users were enrolled, and she crafted a detailed study protocol to extract all the necessary insights. On the study day, she asked the product owner to join the session as an observer to hear the user’s perspective firsthand.
As the user researcher started the study, the product owner, with complete disregard to the planned protocol, jumped into the conversation and started sharing why the product he had in development would solve the users’ needs. He asked leading questions, such as, “Wouldn’t you say that solves the problem you just mentioned?” This went on for the first two interviews—and the researcher had to delay the synthesis and recruit additional users to reconduct the tainted study. Although all planning elements were conducted properly, the poor execution caused a 10‐day project delay.
Now, she (the user researcher) makes sure to prepare for every execution eventuality, including setting expectations with observing collaborators.
These are the six things (i.e., right user, question, method, execution, synthesis, and presentation) everyone MUST be mindful of when conducting research. Failure at any one of these points can compromise the entire research study.
Many businesses measure their success using financial or operational metrics, such as revenue or the number of sign‐ups. However, when it comes to how valuable your product experience is to your user, these are indirect metrics. Businesses wanting to fuel their growth with a user‐first philosophy should be measuring their success using experience metrics: metrics that quantify the quality of the experience, its value to the user, and its level of desirability.
The experience metrics play helps you identify and measure these metrics for each of your users. Consistently keeping them in sight will foster a user‐first culture within your organization and will have a visible impact on your business metrics as a whole.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Metrics?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Design experiments according to research goals; * Define experience metrics; * Conduct research; * Deliver insights; * Govern adherence to insights. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners, cross‐functional teams | * Contribute research questions; * Provide existing user, product, and business insights; * Provide stimuli; * Convert research insights into deliverable outcomes; * Propagate awareness of insights. |
To run an effective experience metrics play, you need to be mindful of:
Experience metrics are subjective to each user’s unique needs, so they must be measured for each key user within your system. Clearly define the criteria for each user you want to focus on. Criteria to pick the key user could include how large this user segment is, the influence they have in their organization/context, and criticality to your business strategy.
For this play to be effective, you will need to recruit real users to help you measure experience metrics. Once you’ve identified your key users, create screeners and recruit people (we recommend between 10 and 15) to take part in this evaluation (Chapter 26: “Research Recruitment Play”).
Identify the experiences that are most important to your user or most common in their line of work. List the relevant scenarios that help users achieve each of these experiences.
If your product is a point‐of‐sale (POS) system and your user is a cashier at a coffee shop, the key experiences (and the scenarios making them up) that you should test may include:
As you define which experiences and scenarios to measure, keep in mind that this play is intended to be repeated over time. This means that every time you use this play, you will need to use the same experiences and scenarios so you can accurately compare the resulting metrics. This will eventually help you identify a clear trend for the direction in which the metrics are moving.
Experience metrics focus specifically on aspects of the experience that are most important to the user—both rational and emotional. Many B2B products in the market today are built to serve the needs of the businesses (increasing productivity, reducing costs, streamlining processes), which is why products can have high sales yet have low user satisfaction scores—the person buying the product is not the person who ends up using the product. To truly be user‐centric, we need to focus on who actually “experiences” the product and the things they care about most in an experience.
All experience metrics must trace back to user insights. Leverage the key insights you know about your user (Chapter 14: “User Empathy Play”) to identify what matters most to them.
User pains are the things that negatively affect users’ experiences. Take note of what the users are struggling with and also what they wish for. These could surface hidden pain points or provide additional insight into what your users value.
User joys are the things that elevate a user’s experience. Take note of details such as their stated delight factors, what they love most about their jobs, or their ideal experience.
User needs are the things that a user requires in an experience. Take note of what your users do and how they must be supported for them to reach their outcomes.
User successes reveal the goals and outcomes they want and need to achieve.
Identify all of the possible factors, aka variables, that contribute to each insight. For every insight, there can be any number of variables that make an experience a source of a pain, joy, need, or success to the user. By finding the variables, we can start to identify the root causes behind these insights and understand the user’s mental model of a good or bad experience.
For each insight, ask, “What are all the things that make this a pain/joy/need/success to the user?
It is important to know both how well the product is helping users get their jobs done (rational) and how delighted and satisfied they feel while using the product (emotional).
Balance your tasks: Over the course of the evaluation, participants can become acclimated to your product, gradually improving their metrics and skewing the data to be more positive for later tasks. You can prevent this by balancing tasks—changing the order of the tasks for each participant—to generate a more accurate average.
Applying a Likert scale (on a scale of 1–7) to the variable. Standard scores such as NPS or CSAT are great examples of how emotional variables are quantified in the market today.
Further variablizing the emotional variables to see if any rational metrics contribute to the emotion.
| RATIONAL | EMOTIONAL |
|---|---|
| * Time to completion; * Number of clicks; * Load time; * Number of errors made; * Time it takes to find help; * Number of times help is needed; | * Satisfaction; * Confidence; * Empowerment; * Fun to use; * Helpfulness. |
There are many methods you can choose from (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”), but whatever method you choose should provide the ability for:
You do not need to strictly adhere to only one method; instead use a combination of methods as you see fit. For example, you can combine elements of interviews (where user researchers can ask qualitative questions), usability tests (where users can interact with the product to test each experience and researchers can measure metrics such as “time to completion”), and surveys (where users can answer sets of standardized quantitative questions for research to later analyze).
As you plan your method, be meticulous about the STIMULUS and PROTOCOL.
The STIMULUS is the prototype participants will use during the evaluation. Stimuli can come in varying fidelities, but as a rule of thumb, the higher the fidelity of your stimuli, the more accurate your findings will be. Note that the fidelity of your prototype must be the same every time you run this study if you want to compare metrics over time.
The PROTOCOL is the script you will use to effectively capture all the data and insights you need. The protocol contains:
The tasks you will give to your participants: What are realistic scenarios your users might encounter during your selected experiences? When you write your tasks, include the context and the action you would like for them to perform. However, try not to be too prescriptive in your tasks; otherwise, the participants will spend more time remembering the task and less time showing you how they would go about it.
Do: “Your company just started using a new communication tool, and they shared the following email with you to help you get started. Create your account and set up your profile.”
Don’t: “Click on the link in the email. Select the ‘create new account’ option, then setup screen to add yourself as an employee, and when you are done, fill in your information and photo in the profile. Click ‘Save’ when you are done”.
Balance your tasks: Over the course of the evaluation, participants can become acclimated to your product, gradually improving their metrics and skewing the data to be more positive for later tasks. You can prevent this by balancing tasks—changing the order of the tasks for each participant—to generate a more accurate average.
The success criteria for these tasks: The more specific your success criteria is, the more consistent your synthesis will be.
Success criteria: the participants must complete 80% of the following”
The questions you want to ask: Are there any qualitative or quantitative insights you want to know? As a best practice, try to standardize the questions you ask to make sure you are collecting the same information for each task from all of your participants. This is a great opportunity to gather more subjective and emotional metrics.
Questions to ask after each task:
Experience metrics are meant to help all teams within your organization take action. So once you’ve measured and collated the results for each experience metric, socialize the results with the appropriate cross‐functional team so you can collaboratively prioritize which design problems to solve for the user to improve the experience.
Ideate on the best solutions to solve these design problems, implement the solutions, and run the evaluation again. The results must be compared over regular time intervals—every quarter, every six months, or every year—in order to signal areas of improvement or continued opportunities for refinement.
Delivering great experiences has a ripple effect across all aspects of the business. As you measure your users’ experience metrics, map the downstream impact of these metrics to the business metrics you measure. You will see that all business goals can be traced back to the quality of your users’ experiences:
The types of metrics a company focuses on can speak volumes about what’s important to them. Do they prioritize increasing profits and lowering costs? Or do they make their users’ goals their own, and truly exhibit an empathetic, user‐first culture?
A leading tech company CEO often spoke about the importance of user experience. However, none of his company’s tracked metrics focused on experience quality. Instead, they measured the output volume, evaluating practitioners on the number and frequency of the features they designed.
This was challenging for the design team. The company would release high‐tech capabilities that users didn’t want to use, launch entire products that were so complicated that they required user training, and added feature after feature that made navigation confusing. Output was extremely high, but the team had no idea whether they were improving or worsening their users’ experience.
Eventually, the team began identifying basic experience metrics (such as time on task, completion rate, and satisfaction score), measured them release over release, and presented them to the receptive leadership. These metrics gave concrete answers to questions such as, “How do we know we’re doing good work?” and “How well are we solving our users’ problems?”
Soon, experience metrics became a clear gating factor for each release, allowing the organization to compare the quality of our experiences to other competitors’ and plan product roadmaps more effectively. This was a pivotal moment: By introducing user‐centric metrics to the larger organization, the focus shifted from quantity to quality and from feature to user.
Every user‐first business should be measuring the quality of their users’ experience just as much as they measure their financial and operational metrics. Once you are able to identify the metrics that are most important to your user, you will be able to properly assess the entire experience and create solutions your users value—and you will nurture a user‐first culture within your organization.
Even when organizations conduct and prioritize user research, the insights and learnings are not always used to their full potential. The findings are not shared with a wide enough audience, stored in an accessible place, or presented in a meaningful manner—so other teams aren’t aware that the resources even exist. This UXReactor play shows you how to centralize your resources, develop meaningful analysis, and use the data to find patterns and make predictions.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Insights Curation play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * User researcher | * Inventory resources and artifacts; * Establish indexing process; * Index resources; * Maintain repository. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners, cross‐functional teams | * Provide supporting artifacts; * Reference curated resources. |
To effectively establish insights curation, you need to be mindful of:
User insights live in all departments of an organization, not just in user research. Departments such as marketing, support, sales, and even finance all generate and collect valuable user and business data; however, this data often remains siloed in those departments.
Key user insights are the actions, soundbites, and observations gathered about the user in the department. These insights can include things that the user likes, dislikes, needs, feels, wants, and does in the context of the ecosystem or the product.
Break the silos and create a collective repository of all of your organization’s insights by:
The insights repository will need a designated digital storage space that is easily accessible for all parties in your organization but also secure enough for proprietary information. This allows for more transparency and collaboration across departments and ensures that data is not lost over time.
When building a robust repository, collect data of all shapes and sizes:
An insights repository is only helpful if its users can find the information they need. Once all of the data from across your organization is in a single place, structure the data to make it meaningful and easy to use.
Think about who will be leveraging the repository and what they will be leveraging it for.
Use this information to:
A new employee might leverage the repository to learn everything there is to know about a specific product. An experience practitioner might leverage the repository to find all of the pain points for a specific user.
With your data structured, you can now begin getting value out of your insights repository. At the very minimum, an insights repository should help the user find what they were looking for. Further enhancements to the insights repository could include helping the user discover additional related resources or even predicting what information they will need.
There are two levels of analysis your organization should be conducting as your repository grows. They represent different levels of value you can generate with your repository.
A POV is a curation of data for a specific perspective. For example, if someone wants to analyze/study/research insights from the POV of a specific user, they should be able to access not only those user insights but all the related insights about products, teams, and experiences that pertain to that user.
Think about the different POVs that typically matter to your organization:
Anyone in the organization should be able to pick any of the POVs above and get immediate value from the insights. Value comes in the form of increased knowledge, time saved, more informed decisions, and increased empathy.
This level of analysis should also provide enough information for you to extract design problems and opportunities for the user, product, and business.
The next level of data analysis maturity is connecting the dots between the insights to find correlations, identify trends, and eventually make predictions.
Look for trends between data points such as experience metrics user sentiment, different releases, or product performance. Understanding trends and correlations in your data can drive immense value to your business. It can shed light on the areas where your users’ experience is doing well or not well, and it can highlight what kind of impact that might have on your business.
You may see an inverse correlation between user satisfaction and the amount of time it takes for them to complete a workflow. This tells you where opportunity lies. Or you may see that all users who have two or less years of experience complain the most about the intuitiveness of the product. This tells you that you need to make the experience friendlier to novice users.
As your repository grows, the volume of data you have access to also will grow. Eventually, your computation power will increase to the point where you can create models to predict future impact. This means you should be able to look at a set of insights around a certain topic and predict how it will affect something about the product later down the line.
Having this deeper level of knowledge will help your teams make more informed decisions, improving your users’ experience and driving more short‐ and long‐term value to your business.
When leveraged well, an insights repository can grow the tribal knowledge of your organization, increase overall empathy, and mitigate product churn. Everyone in the organization needs to be aware of and regularly leverage the repository.
Just as a library needs a librarian to manage the curation of books, an insights repository needs an owner to manage and maintain it.
Assign an owner to maintain the data to ensure it can be easily accessed and findable. This owner will use standardized processes and guidelines to make the repository user‐friendly, establish the cleanliness of metadata, and prevent churn for future owner(s) as the repository grows. They are responsible for keeping the repository up to date and relevant so that it will always drive value to your organization.
A consultant was tasked with an initiative with a hefty goal: break the silos between products and think about health care horizontally across his client company’s product suite. Over the previous five years, valuable data had been collected by several different teams: user research, sales, and marketing. But no one knew where this data existed—or even that it existed at all. It had never been cross‐shared, and many of the individuals who had conducted the studies had since left. Finding and synthesizing the insights was nearly impossible. The consultant team spent over six months re‐creating the data, which resulted in significant opportunity cost, frustration from the internal team, and a complete overhaul of the original project plan—problems that could have been avoided had there existed a strong system of insight curation.
User research—or any form of data collection, for that matter—can only build user‐centric mindsets across the organization if everyone is aware of and familiar with its findings. Having a strong insights repository will make these findings accessible organization‐wide, promote insight‐driven product decisions, and increase the value of research activities.
Information is power, and the more specific the information, the lower the risk. The user research program play provides a framework for ensuring that the right mix of user insights is being collected to drive innovation, help your organization avoid risk, and deliver valuable products that consistently resonate with your users.
This play allows your business to:
Who are the key players in the User Research Program play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Catalyze a research mindset; * Orchestrate and govern research efforts; * Ensure insights are communicated across the organization. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * User experience researcher | * Design experiments according to goals; * Conduct research; * Deliver insights; * Govern adherence to insights in company activities; * Ensure mix of insights are gathered. |
“The insights are out there; you just need to go find them.”
To run an effective user research program, you need to be mindful of:
A portfolio of insights is a collection of three different types of research insights: formative, summative, and sensorial (Chapter 24: “User Research Insights: Introduction”). These insights should be collected from various sources and methods (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”) on an ongoing basis to sustain a current and relevant portfolio that your teams can leverage.
A portfolio of insights is the cornerstone between user‐centricity and business value for many reasons:
The proportions of investment you make across the portfolio of insights will change depending on what phase of maturity your organization or product is in—build, grow, or maintain.
Formative research will help you gain a foundational understanding of your users, their needs, and the problems that need to be solved. Formative research informs requirements and business priorities and is performed before any designing takes place. It uses methods such as ethnographic studies and contextual inquiry.
Usability testing is a popular summative method used by many companies to quickly validate their designs and identify any issues prior to launch. Usability testing can be done at any level of design fidelity, from sketches to coded UI, as long as the participants have a stimulus they can interact with. However, the quality of the resulting data will increase with the fidelity of your design.
Sensorial research can be used to inform upcoming roadmap for products you already have in the market. By collecting data on an ongoing basis—either through instrumentation or regular measurement (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”)—you can easily identify where the experience has gone up or down over time and what to focus on next.
Make sure you have the right mix of people needed to run an effective user research program:
Your sources of data will make or break the validity of your research. Sources can be categorized in two main ways:
Primary sources are the users themselves. Nothing can replace talking to real users! Be mindful of where and how you’re recruiting to ensure you’re engaging with people you can trust and fit the participant criteria (Chapter 26: “Research Recruitment Play”).
Secondary sources may be subject matter experts from internal departments at your organization and sources from sales.
Engineering, customer support, marketing, and the CTO office can offer insights on how users engage with a product/organization. Tap into these individuals for technical knowledge and primers before talking to real users. Talking to SMEs should supplement, not replace, talking to real users.
Understanding the market context of a particular product and/or experience is often secondary research, unless your organization is conducting the research themselves. Be wary of sourcing information from opinions in blog posts. Instead, look toward research done from reputable market research organizations: annual reports, earnings calls, collective app store reviews, and other industry reports.
User researchers need the right tools to make research operational and to collect the insights they need.
From an operational perspective, user research requires tools for:
From a data collection perspective, user research requires tools for:
Tools can help you with documentation, accuracy, and efficiency. Prioritize the ones that help you become more accurate and efficient.
Make research visible to the rest of the organization by placing visual artifacts such as posters, infographics, or user quotes in high‐traffic areas of your office (or virtual workspaces!). Share highlights in cross‐functional and all‐hands meetings.
Frequently communicate insights and outcomes to the rest of the organization to sensitize everyone to research developments and to increase shared empathy (Chapter 17: “Shared Empathy Play”). To make user research meaningful and actionable, aggregate, track, and make insights accessible (Chapter 29: “Insights Curation Play”).
Having proper systems of curation in place will allow insights to be shared and tribal knowledge to grow, making cross‐functional collaboration more efficient and effective. In addition, the UX, product, and engineering roadmaps will operate in sync with one another, reducing product churn.
Work with your leadership and cross‐functional teams to implement proper systems of governance that help your organization prioritize a research mindset, keep teams accountable for producing honest and accurate insights, and increase the overall value and sustainability of your user research program.
In the 2000s, while everyone else was doing research to validate the usability of their screens and keyboards, Apple was investing in formative research to discover consumer needs. This led to the development of the iPhone. Today, Apple consistently invests in a robust portfolio of insights. This generates their regular releases of novel products such as the iPad, their frequent updates and improvements to existing products, and even the deprecation of older product lines such as iTunes.
Good intelligence is the key to competitive advantage. This is why user research has the potential to be the most value‐driving investment a company can make. To maximize the ROI of research, you need to invest in the right systems to manage and govern these investments.
“IF I WERE GIVEN ONE HOUR TO SAVE THE PLANET, I WOULD SPEND 59 MINUTES DEFINING THE PROBLEM AND ONE MINUTE RESOLVING IT.”
–ALBERT EINSTEIN
Product thinking is the discipline of understanding, curating, prioritizing, and coordinating the myriad experience and design problems within an organization. In simple terms it helps identify the right problems to solve in order to create the maximum value for both the user and the business.
According to recent research published in Harvard Business Review, 75 to 95% of product launches fail every year. This is because most of these organizations do not focus on solving the real problems that matter. Product thinking will help you holistically understand and ensure delivery of the best product experience and the interdependencies across experiences by:
Here are a few key terms and concepts to understand before diving into the product thinking plays:
These plays will help you think about a broader product experience before the finer details. The product thinking plays will help you answer these questions:
Users care more about experiences than features. These plays allow you to start differentiating designing experiences from the craft of detailed design.
Competitive analysis is commonly used to discover what competitors are doing and if any of their practices should be followed. However, in most cases, analysis is only conducted on direct competitors who may not actually be creating the best experiences. You can generate significant value by borrowing learnings from different domains and businesses. The experience benchmarking play will help you find these learnings to create a clear set of benchmarks for your product experience.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Benchmarking play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * User researcher | * Conduct analysis; * Document findings. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners | * Provide insights on users and their mindsets; * Prioritize design scope based on findings. |
To run an effective experience benchmarking play, you need to be mindful of:
Because the intent of this play is to clarify what makes a table‐stakes vs. best‐in‐class experience, you should identify only one user and one experience from the experience roadmap to analyze in detail (Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play”). This will help you gather in‐depth data from the experience while mitigating against scope creep.
Choose the experience that you think you have the most opportunity to disrupt, or the experience that you feel lacks sufficient insight.
Research questions act as guardrails for analysis. They provide a clear starting point, showing you what to look for and allowing you to assess the experience more efficiently. Ask questions like:
What do you want to learn about this experience?
What attributes define a good or bad trial experience?
What are the different ways users are educated in a trial experience?
What makes content easy to consume in a trial experience?
As an experience practitioner, be firm on the issues that will positively affect the users’ experiences.
Is there anything in particular you want to compare?
Assessing your direct competitors is a given, so start by documenting which of them you will include in the assessment. Keep in mind that the trends within your own domain may not necessarily be best‐in‐class. Of course, this does not mean you cannot find examples of best‐in‐class experiences, but the main intent of assessing direct competitors is to establish a baseline industry standard and general user expectations.
Next, think about companies from other industries and domains that are well known for delivering the same experience. Evaluating the same experience across multiple domains will uncover disruptive ideas and approaches that you can incorporate into your own product experience.
Using your research questions and list of competitors as a starting point, begin assessment by going through each experience as a user would and documenting your learnings. Pay close attention to what these companies are doing, and try to reverse‐engineer why they are doing it. In other words, what outcomes are being achieved in the experience, and what are the different ways these outcomes are achieved on a UI, PX, and XT level? (Chapter 4: “Experience Value Chain”)
Once all of the data points have been collected, synthesize the data and categorize your findings in the following buckets:
Now that you know where the world is going and what the benchmarks are for minimum viable, enhanced, and transformed experiences, run the same assessment on your own product to baseline how many of the attributes your product’s current experience meets. This will show you where your product is doing well where it needs improvement.
Once you have conducted your assessment, prioritize which findings to take action on. Give each unmet criteria a 1–5 ranking (1 being least relevant/feasible and 5 being most relevant/feasible) based on:
Add the two rankings together to get a final score for each criteria.
Criteria that score high on user impact and business feasibility (8–10) should be put into the roadmap for the next product release and socialized to the rest of the product team. Other lower‐scoring (1–7) criteria may need to be placed further down the mid‐ and long‐term roadmaps to give the business enough time to plan and prepare.
Include other departments in the prioritization process. They will advise on how well equipped their teams are to take on the work (business feasibility) and share their professional perspective on user impact. Getting cross‐functional buy‐in early on will help mitigate risk down the road.
With the insights of the assessment and audit in hand, mobilize your peer practitioners by communicating the results of the assessment and audit, and collaborate with them to create outcomes that will move you closer to your company’s experience vision (Chapter 36: “Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play,” Chapter 20: “Experience Vision Play”).
You and your peer practitioners can use the experience benchmarks to:
One of our partners came to us with a hefty goal: increase product adoption and create a best‐in‐class trial experience for their data warehouse solution. Before running this play, we asked ourselves: Who delivers the best trial experiences in the world? We did not limit our research to industry peers but looked across products and industries. Here are a few trial experiences we included in our assessment:
The learnings we gathered from other industries gave us clear benchmarks on what our client’s MVE, MEE, and MTE should look like. For example, we learned that a most transformed trial experience should “create a relationship with the user,” which was not something we could have extrapolated from direct competitors. This attribute later became one of the key principles that guided future design decisions.
In order to deliver experiences that will disrupt the industry, organizations must avoid blindly following what their direct competitors are doing. Instead, they must borrow learnings from organizations that have disrupted other industries. This play will give you clear direction as to where your starting point should be (the MVE benchmark) and where you need to go (the transformed experience).
A design brief is an internal “contract” between key stakeholders that clearly states the agreed‐upon terms (e.g. timeline, scope, artifacts) an upcoming project will follow. Create a design brief at the very beginning of every project and as a first step in the product experience plan. It’ll anchor all the stakeholders and minimize points of confusion that may derail the project later on.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Design Brief play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Define the brief; * Secure approval from the stakeholders; * Monitor adherence with the brief at all times. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners * Peer practitioners | * Provide perspective and gain alignment; * Check for timeline feasibility. |
To build an effective design brief play, you need to be mindful of:
Ensure each stakeholder, especially new hires/team members, has all the contextual information about the business, customer segment, or product necessary to be successful in the design phase. At the highest level, key elements to gather include the business, its product lines, unique selling propositions, product history, and target customer profiles.
If you realize that your team is not in agreement, bring in the key stakeholders and have a discussion to clarify and align before proceeding further. The earlier you resolve this, the better.
Identify and align on the problem you need to solve. Three sources of insights guide the definition of the problem space, the users, the business, and the product, so start by answering these questions:
What is the (user/business/product) pain point? + What is the root cause of the pain? + What is the impact?
It takes five extra minutes (impact) for patients to stand in the queue to find the appropriate doctor (pain point) to treat their health problem at this hospital because there is no other way (root cause).
It’s crucial to involve all of the key cross‐functional stakeholders to align and agree on the problem space. If not everyone is in agreement, then the team will be solving different problems—and time and resources will be wasted.
Once you have identified the insights and honed in on the problem space, leverage the design problem and opportunities play to correctly frame the questions before starting to design.
For the identified problems identify and align on: What are the user, business, and/or product outcomes you are looking to achieve? Compose a well‐defined outcome statement providing a full, clear visualization of your desired end state. It should be both:
When documenting the outcome use the following syntax to add specificity and decrease ambiguity.
High‐level approach + direction of improvement (i.e. increase, decrease) + unit of improvement (i.e. time) + measurement of improvement where possible (i.e. 5%)
With real‐time services and doctors’ information provided in the digital platform (high‐level approach), the time (unit) to find doctors is reduced (direction) by approximately 70% (measurement).
Make sure you get alignment across all key stakeholders. At the end of the project, revisit the outcome you’ve defined and ask yourself, “Have we achieved our goal?”
Identify the relevant stakeholders you’ll involve throughout the process. Otherwise, there’ll be confusion around “Who is owning what,” “Who is the final approver,” “Whose feedback should I prioritize,” and so forth. Applying the DACI model, assign roles based on expertise and expected level of project involvement.
Coming to an agreement on scope with all of the stakeholders is key to setting expectations and smooth execution. Scope comes from prioritization and alignment conversations between the key stakeholders, conversations that are typically held during initial project kickoff meetings.
Consider the following to help you define the scope against which your team will deliver:
Try to be as specific as possible when writing the scope. Make sure to clarify what is out of scope, as well; it’s a proactive way to mitigate potential scope creep.
Product experience plans contain detailed dates and deliverables. In contrast, design brief timelines only include major milestones, such as:
Right from the beginning, set clear expectations about what deliverables will be handed off during the course of the project. The following major artifacts should be delivered:
UXReactor uses two frameworks for our own reflections. One is “Start” doing, “Stop” doing, and “Continue” doing. Another is “I like,” “I wish,” and “What if.”
At the end of the project, revisit the design brief to reflect on and document any learnings. Bring back your original group of stakeholders, and discuss what worked, what didn’t work, and how to better work together so you can apply the learnings next time. This is an important step because it fuels constant growth and improvement.
Our firm was brought in to redesign a device‐monitoring experience over a five‐week sprint. The project manager was our primary contact, and he gave us a number of insights that drove our design for the first 3.5 weeks. Then, it was time for us to meet with the VP of product to present our design. Ten minutes into the meeting, the VP of product stopped us and said, “This is not what I was thinking …” It was a classic “oh‐crap” moment. We didn’t know who the final approver was, and we didn’t have the right set of insights. The VP had a drastically different set of business insights that she thought we were using for our work, and consequently, over the previous 3.5 weeks, we had been solving the wrong problem.
The project went downhill from there. We had to sprint hard toward the finish line, effectively condensing a 5‐week design into 1.5 weeks. We worked nights and weekends to catch up for lost time. It was miserable. The team’s motivation dropped and angst built up, and the business wasted a ton of time and resources.
This could have been prevented by having an upfront design brief that identified all of the necessary stakeholders and that clearly aligned with the scope upfront and before doing any design.
Do not underestimate the value of a design brief. It is a critical decision document that will maximize your team’s success by setting clear expectations, removing ambiguities, and aligning with key stakeholders upfront. One hour invested here will save 10 hours of headache and frustration down the road.
Too often, practitioners dive straight into solution‐ing before clearly defining the problem and determining whether it’s important to solve. Rooted in a deep understanding of user and business needs, design problems (DPs) and design opportunities (DOs) are reframed questions that catalyze breakthrough ideas and design. The DP and DO play will instill focus, propel teams and organizations from paralyzed inertia to excitement and progress, and ultimately lead to user delight and high business impact.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key Players in the Design Problems and Opportunities Play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Own the insights gathering from multiple sources; * Deconstruct and correctly frame the problem; * Prioritize the design problems and opportunities. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Design practitioners * Peer practitioners. | * Contribute to the problem identification; * Trace the design solutions back to the original insight and identified problem; * Collaborate with partners. |
To build an effective design problem and opportunities play, you need to be mindful of:
All DPs and DOs can typically be sourced from three primary types of insights:
User insights are collected from interviews and observations conducted by the user research team. They are a record of the pain points and/or joys that your users experience.
Users enjoy collaborating with their peers to ideate on project plans.
Business insights are unique to one organization and come from intelligence gathered on the industry, business, or competitors (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”).
Subscription renewals have decreased by 15% in the last quarter.
Product insights are centered around a product or platform. They originate from product metrics and usage details or direct user feedback on the product.
It took users 20% longer to complete the task compared to the previous product releases.
When you arrive at a user, business, or product insight, further break down the identified challenges into sub‐components (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”). The goal is to understand all of the different variables that, when considered together, help answer the question of why the problem occurred in the first place. Break the larger problem down to its unit‐level problems, and focus on the ones you or your team are equipped to solve.
Now that you have a clear idea of what problem variables you will solve, it’s important to shape the problem statement. This will serve as your anchor moving forward. How you frame the problem will determine whether you are going after the right problem and consequently, how well the solution will solve the user, business, or product problem.
There are two ways to frame the problem:
“People don’t want to buy a quarter‐inch drill. They want a quarter‐inch hole!”
– Professor Theodore Levitt
Design problems start with “How might we” (HMW) questions. A well‐framed “HMW” question turns your problem and insights into questions that beg ideation and participation from others. One mistake we often see is a tendency to include solutions in the framing of design problems. Good design problems don’t mention specific ways in which the problem will be solved, but rather ask how to achieve an end goal.
Wrong: Solution oriented: HMW create a purchasing experience for young mothers using voice command?
Right: Goal oriented: HMW create a purchasing experience for young mothers that eases the chaos of shopping with children?
In the first example, “voice command” prescribes a solution rather than opening up a space to brainstorm all of the different ways the problem can be solved. The second DP avoids including any solutions in the problem statement and focuses instead on stating the goal—i.e. easing the chaos of shopping with children.
Observation: While you’re conducting research on a sign‐up experience, multiple users give you feedback that the process feels cumbersome and has too many steps.
DO Framing: What if we could magically avoid the sign‐up process altogether?
In this example, customers don’t expect the company to provide a sign‐up experience through a single interaction, because they are used to the industry norm of a long sign‐up process. However, the company is fully equipped to deliver that experience by bringing multiple departments together. A well‐framed design opportunity truly delights the user.
DPs and DOs can sit across multiple levels: UI, PX, and XT (Chapter 4: Experience Value Chain).
UI DP: How might we make the call to action (CTA) more evident on the screen?
PX, XT, DP: How might we increase the engagement of the migration experience?
Typically for 10 design problems that you identify, try to identify one design opportunity to focus on.
Design problems and design opportunities both respond to the same problem and challenge identified in the user, business, or product. However, design problems prompt solutions that answer “What the experience should be”; users expect them—they are table stakes. Design opportunities go beyond to build solutions that answer, “What the experience could be”; even though users don’t expect them, the solutions are within the team or organization’s current capabilities and will oftentime push their capabilities further.
A large volume of ideas spurs originality. Brainstorm and ideate as many DPs and DOs as possible.
Prioritize your wealth of DPs and DOs. This way, you can surface the problems you should start solving and designing solutions for them. There are many ways to do so, including using a 2x2 prioritization matrix with an impact x‐axis and a frequency y‐axis, or an impact x‐axis and a feasibility y‐axis.
After prioritization, you’ll have a focused and ranked‐order list of DPs and DOs to tackle that will ultimately solve the user, business, or product problem.
The next step for DPs and DOs will vary depending on the level (i.e. UI, PX, XT), scope (e.g. how big is the problem or opportunity), intent or overarching objective, and existing organizational capabilities.
Achieve traceability for each DP and DO (Chapter 40: “Detailed Design Play”); this helps govern and hold the team accountable for solving them. Document the source of the solution, the variation of solutions, the final solution, and the efficacy of the solution.
Typically, the prioritized DPs and DOs are given to the design team, which triggers the design doing process and collaboration with the product and engineering teams.
When practitioners eat, sleep, and drink the DPs and DOs, they have a heightened sense of awareness of the problem at hand. This is the best time to trigger mindful ideation, as inspiration can emerge from anywhere. Specifically, incorporate these three levels of inspiration‐gathering so you can build an effective solution:
Level 1: Direct Inspirations
Ideas inspired by solutions developed in similar situations from industry peers. An e‐commerce product team asking, “How might we establish trust with our user?” can look to industry leaders, such as Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify, for level 1 inspirations.
Level 2: Cross‐Industry Inspirations
Ideas inspired by solutions employed by similar teams in organizations that are outside your domain or industry.
The e‐commerce product team can research how fintech and health tech systems build trust with their users.
Level 3: Conceptual Inspirations
These are ideas that surface from unlikely or non‐traditional sources. Conceptual‐level inspirations can come from anywhere—pictures, actions, human behaviors, and nature. It’s critical to maintain the highest level of awareness of the problem at hand, but conceptual inspirations can lead to disruption and yield transformative outcomes.
The e‐commerce product team can contemplate how doctors establish trust with their patients or how hostage negotiators establish trust with hostage‐takers.
It was the early 2000s. Research In Motion (RIM) was focusing on improving its QWERTY keyboard, asking, “How might we make the keyboard more efficient to type on?” Sony was focusing on improving the lens of their cameras while maintaining competitive pricing, asking, “How might we help our customer capture stunning photos?” Both RIM and Sony were prioritizing design problems that focused on refining technologies that had already been released.
However, Steve Jobs, at Apple, looked at a new set of emerging trends and discovered a whole new design opportunity. He witnessed the iPod’s tremendous success; people loved taking music on the go. He also noticed that people were looking to do more with their mobile devices beyond merely making phone calls—browsing the web, checking emails, exchanging instant messages, and taking photos; however, they were juggling multiple devices to do so.
In contrast with his CEO peers, who were trying to tweak their existing technology, Jobs focused on solving the user problem. Asking, “What if the user can do everything on one device?” opened up a groundbreaking design opportunity for Apple. In 2007, the iPhone launched the mobile revolution. It all began with user insights and a reframed question that challenged the status quo.
Breakthrough innovation and design start with asking the right question. These come from insights and correctly framed DPs and DOs that spur collaboration, out‐of‐the‐box thinking, and collective action. Don’t underestimate the power of asking the right question and correctly framing the problem—these are more important than the solution itself.
Product experience planning is an essential navigational tool that guides experience practitioners from a robust understanding of the product, business, and user intent, to a finished design that is ready to be handed off to the engineering team.
Time invested developing and aligning with stakeholders on the plan will pay off handsomely down the road. The resulting product experience plan is a powerful risk mitigation tool for your business, ensuring your product will launch on time and on budget.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key Players in the Product Experience Planning Play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Uncover the product experiences and UX activities across research and design teams; * Ensure alignment on the plan across the organization; * Take up the ownership for delivery of experiences. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioners * Experience partners | * Provide individual plans and experiments; * Provide perspective and gain alignment. |
To build an effective product experience plan, you need to be mindful of:
A product experience plan is a project management play that the experience strategist develops, manages, and governs during the product thinking phase and before any design activities start. Before spending any time building the plan, it’s critical to have a crystal clear picture of your destination and answer the following questions:
Visualize the end outcome. More often than not, the goal is to achieve a vision, solve a pain point the user is currently experiencing, or deliver an enhanced experience through your product. Clearly articulate and align on what it is you are looking to achieve.
User research activities need to be effectively factored into the plan, both to ensure that the relevant user problems are being addressed, and to mitigate the risk of designing ineffective solutions for those problems. There are a number of different research methodologies (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”); pick the methods that are most appropriate for the outcome you are looking to achieve. Based on the chosen method include the related research activities into your product experience plan:
Study plan: a summary of the research plan, logistical requirements, timeline, and team members involved;
User recruitment: identifying suitable research participants and creating screener questions;
Research study: the actual user research designed to achieve your research objective;
Synthesis: an analysis of all types of user data consolidated into actionable insights;
Presentation: a summary that highlights research insights and recommendations.
Don’t overlook collaboration activities. It’s just as important to get alignment, sign‐off, and feedback as it is to do research and design.
In a highly efficient research organization, user research typically takes three to five weeks of active research activities. However, there are two unique scenarios that you may want to plan for by budgeting in additional time:
Design activities typically consist of problem identification and framing, concept generation, ideation, prototyping, validation, hand‐off, and QA.
Consider the following sample of design activities for inclusion in your product experience plan:
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
– Steve Jobs
Your timeline will vary based on the scope of the project and your team’s resource availability. So plan your roadmap accordingly.
Generally, the end‐to‐end design cycle takes 18 weeks (22 weeks if you plan to conduct summative testing).
Below is a breakdown of how long each activity typically takes for:
Finally, collaboration is key to experience design. Planning collaborative activities is often overlooked, causing significant churn in the planned process. The following collaboration activities bring together different sets of stakeholders from business, design, product, and engineering teams across different types of activities.
Holding a kick‐off meeting that brings all the key collaborators into the same room is one of the best investments you can make to ensure shared alignment.
Collaboration activities typically take about two weeks to complete. However, you need to make sure that they are interspersed across the product experience plan.
After identifying the different activities that need to be considered for the product experience plan, build a three‐month forward‐looking plan, adapted if necessary for agile software development or another approach.
Do plan for surprises that may come underway. Always have a plan B, and preemptively know how to adjust the plan if unexpected delays occur.
Include these key elements:
Governance provides the necessary oversight to ensure activities are being executed according to plan. The experience strategist owns the responsibility of maintaining a healthy plan and conducts regular syncs with key stakeholders through activities like weekly stand‐ups and monthly planning. This ensures that everyone has clear visibility into the progress of the plan and proactively communicates potential roadblocks so there’s ample time for risk mitigation.
A CEO of one of our clients shared a bold new vision with her leadership team: “We will invest in being a customer‐obsessed organization.” Everyone in the company was energized by this vision, including the product team that started working on redesigning the incumbent product in earnest.
Unfortunately, no one truly defined the roadmap or proactively populated it with all of the research, design, and collaboration activities. So when user research began, they ran into unplanned four‐week delays caused by difficulties in recruiting relevant participants.
Furthermore, no one proactively brought product or engineering into the initial problem definition and alignment conversations. So when design started, the product and engineering leads were surprised—they had different views about which prioritized problems ought to be solved.
These surprises snowballed and led to unnecessary churn. Ultimately, they resulted in a six‐month delay to the original product release date and cost approximately $250,000 in design and development loss. Having an effective product experience plan that factored in the various steps would have prevented this churn.
The product experience plan is a project management play that grounds you in the big picture while helping you account for all the minute details that go into achieving your intended goal. Operating without a plan is like throwing darts in the dark and crossing your fingers that they’ll somehow hit the target.
As management guru Ken Blanchard notes, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Unfortunately, many teams operate in silos, where multidisciplinary collaboration and problem solving do not inform experience design. The cross‐functional collaboration play helps you dismantle these silos and ensure that the right internal partners share the right knowledge, processes, deliverables, and visibility at the right time. Breaking down these silos will reduce churn and increase productivity and ultimately ensure that sound decisions are made to achieve experience design goals.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Cross‐Functional Collaboration play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Orchestrate collaboration across the organization |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Product manager, experience practitioners, engineering lead, and peer practitioners from other parts of the business (sales, marketing, customer support, etc.) | * Provide necessary inputs, expertise, and perspectives for problem‐solving; * Participate in cross‐functional discussions and workshops; * Bring the necessary artifacts to the table. |
Try to include collaborators who are part of the UX journey but who may be external to the organization, such as channel partners and system integrators, for greater alignment where possible.
To run an effective cross‐functional collaboration play, you need to be mindful of:
The experience vision is always the north star for experience design. It encompasses an understanding of who your users are, knowledge of your business goals, and an understanding of your competition (Chapter 20: “Experience Vision Play”).
Recent research has demonstrated that horizontal relationships actually are more important. This is why user experience design encompasses more than just product touchpoints: peer practitioners parallel to the design team need to be involved.
Identify peers from various departments who need to be aligned on the product and user goals, and who will have inputs into the processes and activities to achieve those goals.
At minimum, the collaboration trifecta of product manager, engineering lead, and experience practitioners must partner with one another. This core team should have a regular cadence to share knowledge and feedback.
However, true value will be driven when more representation is included from a wider team: other collaborators, influencers, and supporters such as peer practitioners (sales, marketing, customer support), CEO, executive leadership, and the board of directors. Establish a regular cadence with this wider team, as well.
To achieve product innovation that is rooted in driving value for both your users and your business, ensure that your collaborators have a shared understanding of the following:
Read the “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto” to be a better collaborator.
In a user‐first approach, organizations curate and disseminate a deep understanding of and empathy for their users and their experiences—before authorizing internal groups to make any product decisions. For example, shift the line of thinking from “I’m in finance; how does the user affect me?” to “I’m in finance; what can be done on my side that is part of creating a meaningful experience for the user?” Partners should be able to answer this question, as well as propagate information on the user, the vision, goals, and metrics within their own teams.
To design and develop great end‐to‐end product experiences, identify the processes that partners need to be part of to ensure visibility and accuracy of information.
These processes include:
In the design and development process, define and plan the activities where it is vital to have multidisciplinary representation and inputs at the table. The intent of this is to break through information silos and get expertise input at the right time. These activities can include:
Track all shared activities in a deliberate manner by having an identified driver. This should be done with the help of a product experience plan (Chapter 35: “Product Experience Planning Play”).
True collaboration happens when relevant teams are given a stake in the product experience design process. Core team members should be involved, not just informed, and should hold each other accountable. Information should be registered, not just read. True collaboration becomes evident when:
Print out artifacts such as user personas, experience visions, and roadmaps and poster them around the office. Make the artifacts highly visible, to prevent them from falling out of sight—and therefore out of mind.
Pick a tool that allows for collaboration within the repository, i.e. one that has commenting functions.
Finally, it is imperative that all partners have access to shared artifacts, whether they be research insights, requirements, roadmaps, design artifacts, meeting minutes, or documentation of processes.
Establish a repository of this information and communicate how it can be accessed. Set aside a few minutes each week to ensure it is updated.
We worked with a historically engineering‐first firm to map their engineering activities and agile development process onto their wider design process. Sensitizing to the various collaboration activities listed in this play helped provide product management and engineering visibility into when and how much of their inputs were needed from the design perspective, something which had been lacking. In simple terms this allowed everyone to play in the game of created world class experiences.
A noteworthy outcome of this exercise was that different disciplines collaborated on creating an experience vision. It wasn’t just experience practitioners who recommended ideas; engineering and sales team members also started pitched in. This created a deeply collaborative environment where everyone felt invested in the design process, regardless of their job title.
In addition, every quarter, we hosted a meeting with internal partners and any new staff to refresh the collaboration model and discuss any improvements.
Cross‐functional collaboration means more than having once‐in‐a while meetings to inform multidisciplinary yet passive stakeholders in a room. It means having teams actively engage with one another—rallying around common goals; sharing knowledge, artifacts, and ideas; eliciting feedback; fine‐tuning processes across teams; and maintaining a level of visibility into the moving parts of the product experience design process. Cross‐functional collaboration is not just a nice‐to‐have; it is vital to reducing churn and frustration and ultimately, to ensuring that an experience is designed effectively with informed decisions throughout the way. As the saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.”
The product thinking program play provides a framework for creating transformative experiences by identifying, prioritizing, and catalyzing all the moving parts of the organization together. It helps the organization work toward a larger experience vision while being mindful of the details, adjacent experiences, constraints, and tangible measures of success.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Product Thinking Program play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Catalyze an experience mindset; * Orchestrate and govern products vision and experience; * Ensure problems and opportunities are resolved across the product experience; * Ensure alignment across the organization. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Experience practitioner * Experience design partners | * Support the vision; * Collaborate with teams across the organization; * Report metrics and data. |
To build an effective product thinking program, you need to be mindful of:
To be a catalyst for great experiences that drive value to your users and to your business, you need to solve a broad spectrum of design problems (DPs) to achieve the short‐, mid‐, and long‐term goals for your experience vision (Chapter 20: “Experience Vision Play”). Along with this you would also need to focus on identifying a set of key design opportunities (DOs) to achieve the intended vision.
This mix of DPs and DOs prioritized across various time horizons is called the portfolio of problems. Like any healthy portfolio, the proportions of investment you make across the portfolio of problems should constantly be monitored and tracked on an ongoing basis.
How you frame your problems will affect how you solve the problem (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”).
Consider the following must‐haves as you bring on people for your product thinking program:
Be mindful of the larger system in which the product experience is built. Never lose focus on the various elements that can directly or indirectly affect the product experience.
These could include influencers such as:
Think about how they might all come together in a single experience.
Make sure that experience roadmaps (Chapter 19: “Experience Roadmap Play”), experience ecosystem (Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”), and experience benchmarks (Chapter 32: “Experience Benchmarking Play”) are actively curated and tracked across the product organization so you can help broaden the understanding of the system that is needed to connect all of the dots that enable a great product experience to work.
Ensure that clear and effective plans are put in place that constantly identify the key priorities and activities around the product experience and always have up‐to‐date plans.
Use this documentation to anchor yourself and your team to the big picture as well as the smaller details. Cross‐reference them frequently to check that the two remain in sync to work toward the same vision.
Make sure all documentation and resources are accessible to other contributing teams for effective cross‐functional collaboration (Chapter 36: “Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play”). Work with your counterparts in the other contributing teams to establish the frequency and method of sharing work and giving feedback to ensure all efforts stay aligned to the vision.
Host monthly “demo” events where each contributing team can showcase what they have been working on, and use this as an opportunity for others to ask questions and provide feedback.
To ensure the continued success of the product thinking program there are several key aspects of the program that need to be tracked on an ongoing basis:
We keep frequently coming across organizations that have invested in a lone designer to help them in the pursuit of making better product experiences. In one such company the designer was very unhappy as he felt he was in a “monotonous job” (his words) of creating designs for incremental feature enhancements. He was starting to lose motivation in continuing his journey at the organization.
As part of our engagement with this organization, we introduced the larger team to the product thinking program that included plays related to the portfolio of problems and product experience planning. This shift was profound for this designer as he now had a view of the variety of design problems to go after, and subsequently he volunteered to go after a specific long‐term problem (onboarding experience) in addition to his existing workload. Having an agreed‐upon product experience plan also allowed him to plan his discovery activities and collaboration activities around the short‐term problems.
In a matter of a few months his time invested to understand and solve the design problem of reducing friction in the onboarding experience paid huge dividends. Not only did this enable a better experience for the user and he decreased the churn of new users by 30 %, but it also helped him make the business leadership more aware of the impact design can make, and over the next 18 months helped grow the team to over five practitioners with him being promoted into the experience strategist role.
Product thinking means you are always thinking of ways to solve problems for the user, and this can only be done through a deep understanding of the breadth of problems the user has and effective orchestration of many moving parts.
“MAKE IT SIMPLE, BUT SIGNIFICANT.”
– DON DRAPER
Experience design doing is the discipline that allows experience designers to consistently create effective solutions for relevant design problems. In this section, you’ll learn how to leverage people and processes to create powerful experience design solutions as an organization.
Good design is good for business. The most evident outcomes are tangible design solutions that your users can engage with. This is where the user‐first strategy manifests into actual experience design.
When done well, design doing goes beyond just designing a specific solution; rather, it results in creating a new “solutioning” rhythm within the business. Your team will become a well‐oiled machine whose members routinely think through problems systematically, ideate broadly, collaborate strategically, and execute effectively.
Here are a few key terms and concepts to understand before diving into the experience design doing plays:
We’ve curated a collection of plays that give practical methods for designing powerful, user‐centered experiences.
The experience design doing plays will help you answer these questions:
The experience design doing plays will enable you and your team to utilize your process as a way to solve design problems and drive value. Use this section to make the design process effective, pragmatic, and easy to govern.
“The best kind of design isn’t necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it’s a process—dynamic and adaptable.”
– Don Norman
When it comes to designing a user’s experience, most practitioners and businesses overlook the value of workflows. They dive right into the design, only to run into problems with the overall systemic connections, interdependencies, and redundancies. The workflow design play will help you think through, optimize, and build experiences systematically, and establish scope by documenting the entire system of steps (touchpoints).
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key Players in the Workflow Design Play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Interaction experience designer (experience practitioner) | * Systematically think, optimize, and build the experiences; * Identify experiences, problems, and outcomes and defines scenarios; * Identify activities, challenges, systemic relationships, and dependencies; * Frame goals, design problems, design opportunities; * Think through optimization, come up with flow variations to reach the outcome; * Illustrate the flows and add goals and descriptions for each screen. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Product manager | * State intent; * Review scenarios, outcomes; * Review design problems and design opportunities; * Review the activities, goals flow, and descriptions; * Sign off. |
| * Engineering team | * Look for intent; * Look for development effort and integrations needed. |
To build an effective workflow design play, you need to be mindful of:
Before starting the workflow design, you need to deeply understand the context. This includes the experience vision, user journey, and design problems, as well as the larger interconnected ecosystem.
With the context in mind, identify the experiences that solve the problems and effect the desired outcomes. Then pinpoint which experiences and scenarios the design team should address out of all those identified during the discovery phase.
While designing a student portal for a university, the first key experience that was identified is payment experience: where students can pay their tuition. A couple of scenarios as part of this experience: Sam wants to pay his third‐trimester tuition fee through the university portal before the deadline. John wants to set up a monthly payment plan using his credit card, instead of a lump‐sum payment.
Once you identify all the scenarios, define their outcomes. Ask yourself, “As an experience practitioner, what do I want the user and business to achieve from this scenario?”
User outcome: Sam and John are able to pay the tuition fee seamlessly and with no more than three steps.
Business outcome: The university is able to better collect tuition fees on schedule.
Once you have identified the activities, list all the challenges that users might face while trying to complete the tasks. For example, Sam might not remember his student ID number. Or he might not know where to find the required student loan information.
For example, Sam must:
Next, identify the user‐, system‐, and data‐level systemic relationships that need to be established and maintained.
Once Sam provides his information, it should be validated in the university records. A systemic relationship exists between university records and information provided by the student.
After you define the systemic relationships, visualize the workflows by defining the scenario’s start and end points. These are the points where your user begins their digital experience and where they end their experience after successfully achieving the scenario. Map the activities in the linear order that the user needs to complete to achieve the outcomes. Every step will act as a screen when you are designing the workflow for the digital experience.
“Working hard and working smart sometimes can be two different things.”
– Byron Dorgan
Now that you have workflows, brainstorm with your peer practitioners about where you can optimize. Identify those areas where technologies can reduce the number of steps, time, and effort, and make the magic happen. Remove activities and steps that cause friction in the user’s journey, and update the workflow accordingly. Benchmarking with competitors’ products and understanding your users’ behavior also can help you think through optimization.
Brainstorm activities that can be automated, such as generating email notifications after the tuition fee has been submitted, or pre‐populating the loan information by interacting with the internal financial aid system.
Now that you have created an optimized workflow, establish and frame the goals that need to be achieved, design problems (DPs) that need to be solved, and design opportunities (DOs) that you need to pursue (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”) at every step in the workflow. This will help you achieve the outcomes of the overall scenario.
For a screen capturing payment information:
Once individual workflows are completed for all scenarios, juxtapose all the workflows together to create a consolidated workflow from the POV of the user and/or the product.
While you consolidate the workflows, also consolidate the goals, design problems, and design opportunities. Finally, tally the number of unique screens. Note the total number of screens, and break the number down by types (i.e. screens, pop‐ups, error states, etc.).
This clarifies the product’s big picture and reveals the interdependencies and connectivity of all the pieces of the workflow. It also helps to scope the effort.
Share both individual and consolidated workflows with your collaborators, and ensure alignment.
Workflow level agreement typically marks the start of the detailed design process (Chapter 40: “Detailed Design Play”).
A client recently launched a payment product into the market. After their end users started complaining that they didn’t understand the value of certain screens or how to use them to complete their tasks, UXReactor was brought in to collaborate.
When we evaluated the design, we noticed that the user interface quality was very good but there was no clear cohesion between the various screens and how they connected to each other. For example, the product dashboard screen displayed a negative account balance, but the user could not immediately navigate from the balance to the transaction that caused it to go negative or dispute the transaction. In other words, there were no comprehensive interconnected workflows.
We re‐architected the whole product experience based on the user’s need for ease and simplicity of navigation. While this work was valued and necessary, it also represented an opportunity cost for our client. If they had spent the time thinking through the system design by leveraging workflows before designing the various product screens, they would not have lost the past year.
Always think of the system before the screens. Creating workflows will help you systematically think through, optimize, and build rich and seamless experiences for your users. It will also help you determine the scope and effort required of your design and engineering teams before they do the detailed design. Investing in creating thorough workflows ultimately saves a lot of time and effort over the entire product cycle.
Most marathon runners say that the last mile is the hardest. This insight also applies to design practitioners, where the last mile of detailed design makes or breaks the user experience.
Detailed design play outlines the phases you need to go through to produce designs that are ready for engineering. This play will help you build effective and quality designs by iterating rapidly and testing the experiences before investing significant engineering effort and resources into engineering.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Detailed Design play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience practitioners (interaction experience designer, visual experience designer, content experience designer, user experience researcher) | * Identify and solve design problems; * Rapidly iterate on designs to reach the outcome; * Document behavior and interaction notes; * Design visual experiences and prototype. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Product manager | * Provide feedback on designs; * Help recruit users for testing; * Sign off on final designs; * Work with the engineering team on engineering scope. |
| * Engineering team | * Understand the functionality and behavior of the product; * Look for the scope and development effort. | |
| * Experience strategist | * Track whether all key design problems are solved and outcomes are met. |
To run an effective detailed design play, you need to be mindful of:
Before investing time into detailed design, take the time necessary to understand:
There are three important crafts involved to make the magic of great digital design experience stand out:
Each of these three crafts require the practice of consistent ideation and inspiration‐gathering. Maintain an environment in which practitioners have the freedom and psychological space to think widely. They should not be confined to a short‐term‐focus state of mind (“What do I put on the screen for tomorrow’s review?” vs. “What would be an excellent solution to the design problem?”). Fostering this creative environment will help practitioners develop quality ideas within each of the three crafts. Moreover, in order to give a great experiential product to the user, all three crafts and their practitioners should work hand in hand, not be relegated to design silos.
Start the visual design and content design processes in parallel with interaction design, in order to have shared common understanding.
Interaction Design: Is all about the functional behavior of the product experience. It focuses on creating engaging experiences that determine how your user interacts with your product in varying scenarios.
In interaction design, you need to think about and ideate on:
While doing interaction design, consider the design problems and design opportunities you want to solve (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play,” Chapter 39: “Workflow Design Play”). Collect inspirations for all the DPs. Then, begin creating low‐ and mid‐fidelity designs, and get sign‐off from stakeholders.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
– Steve Jobs
Visual Design: Once you establish the functional framework of the product, establish its form. Specifically, start the visual design process in parallel with interaction design: perform visual conceptualization while functionality is being built. Visual design establishes both desirability and personality for the product by focusing on aesthetics and ease of use. It also communicates your brand’s personality, creates delight, and sets your product apart from your competition. Visual design can’t be done in a silo as it affects the entire user experience. It should go hand in hand with interaction and content design.
In visual design, you need to think about and ideate on:
While doing visual design, consider your goals, your product’s functionality, and the design problems you want to solve. Collect inspirations for all the visual design problems. Then begin creating high‐fidelity designs, and get sign‐off from stakeholders.
Content Design: Is the process of crafting a clear, consistent, and relatable narrative within the product, a narrative that works seamlessly with the brand design. A great content design will guide the user through the product in an intuitive manner. In content design, you need to think about and ideate on:
To quickly generate a range of ideas, perform this timeboxed exercise: Take a sheet of paper and divide it into six squares. Identify the design problem you want to solve and then start a timer for six minutes. In these six minutes, sketch out a solution for the design problem in each of the squares.
Content design is utilized in areas such as labels, taxonomy, success and error messages, notifications, error pages, instructions, and descriptions. Begin designing by identifying the user and business outcomes, as well as the problems you want to solve. Collect inspirations for all the content design problems, and complete the content guidelines. Start writing the content in the last stage of mid‐fidelity design, incorporate it in your high‐fidelity designs, and get sign‐off from stakeholders.
Leverage the power of these three crafts and create the most effective fidelity of designs in accordance with the phase and need of the project. To do that you need to understand the various fidelity options.
| FIDELITY TYPE | WHAT THEY ARE | WHAT THEY DO | WHEN TO USE THEM | TOOLS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low‐fidelity designs | Rough sketches | Communicate the concepts and convey ideas | Early Iterations: during brainstorming and conceptualizing phase | Pen, pencil, and paper |
| Mid‐fidelity designs | Refined digital wireframes with details | Demonstrates functionality and layout, patterns, and content system | Once initial high‐level concepts are finalized and for early testing, communicate functionality to all stakeholders | Digital wireframing tools such as UXPin, Balsamiq |
| High‐fidelity designs | Visually enhanced designs | Showcase the static version of the final design with finalized look and feel | Once the functionality and the layouts are finalized and to communicate designs to the front end team | Visual design tools such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe |
| High‐fidelity prototypes | Interactive visual design; closest version to the final product | To provide the feel of the final product by adding interactivity before going into dev | To test with end users and while handing it over to engineering and QA teams | Prototyping tools such as UXPin, Figma, InVision |
Iterate…Iterate…Iterate… Good to Great is made possible by early and often iterating before the deadline.
Most designers don’t sketch; they directly jump into wireframing. Every iteration in later stages costs effort, time, and money. Iterate early to ensure perfection later.
“There’s a way to do it better—find it.
– Thomas A. Edison
Summative testing should be done at various fidelities. When you’re ready to test a design, whether it’s a sketch or a visually refined prototype, identify the key scenarios that you want to test. Recruit users and run a usability test. Based on the insights you get from the usability test, incorporate their feedback into the designs. Once the designs are finalized through testing and iterations, make sure all interactions are appropriately documented in a way that’s easy for others to understand. This documentation will be helpful when handing off or presenting to various stakeholders, including product managers and engineers (Chapter 42: “Design System Play”).
As the detailed design process is iterative and you will do numerous variations for numerous problems, you need to have a clear and strong rationale for every design decision you make. Not having a rationale for design is like building a high‐rise tower without a solid foundation: It will not stand. Once you have the rationale for all the variations, converge the variations for the right solution. Here are few important ways that you can converge and prioritize solutions:
Make sure that every design decision is attributed directly to why you did it, what problem it solves, what outcomes it achieves, what requirements it is addressing, and what variations were performed. You should be able to map from one variable to the next and back again. This way, you can always trace the entire design back and forth. For example, you can trace forward from the design problems to the final design and the final design back to the design problems. You can also trace back from design problems to user, business, and product problems to answer why the design problem is even there.
As an experience practitioner, you always need to communicate design rationales for making the design process objective and aligning all stakeholders.
A traceability map includes:
The experience strategist owns the responsibility of ensuring the intended outcome is achieved in a highly traceable manner.
We partnered with a client who had previously worked with another design consulting firm. They had terminated this engagement because the firm didn’t generate enough impact for the business. This time, they wanted to get it right, and their CEO and senior leadership team wanted to be involved closely to see how things were progressing.
In one of the design review meetings, they asked the design team a pointed question on why we solved a particular problem this way and not in the way that their competition had done. Since we had a clear process of traceability starting from insights to final solutions, we were able to rationalize our decision. Overall, across all of the reviews, we could go back and forth to address all their questions. In one case, however, we realized that we were solving the wrong design problem—a mistake traceable to a misunderstood business problem—so we went back and iterated on this new information. Together, we and our clients were able to rapidly close the information gaps rapidly and deliver the product on time. This helped them get another round of funding and increased the credibility of our experience design process.
Creating detailed designs will help you build effective, high‐quality experiences. Iterate rapidly and test the experiences that are going to be built before investing significant effort and resources into development. Detailed design requires all the crafts to come together to build a seamless and delightful experience for the user.
Poorly run experience design reviews cause unnecessary churn, missed deadlines, and the delivery of a subpar and ineffective solution. This play will empower practitioners and collaborators to get the most out of these reviews, thereby maximizing the effective usage of both time and resources.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Design Review Play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience practitioner | * Prepare and facilitate experience design reviews; * Frame the conversation to focus on user, experience, and design problems and opportunities. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Collaborators | * Provide relevant and constructive feedback on proposed design solutions. |
To run an effective experience design review, you need to be mindful of:
Prepare for the upcoming experience design review by thinking through the following:
| CATEGORY | SAMPLE OUTCOMES |
|---|---|
| Alignment | * I want the collaborators to review the user insights, so they can help prioritize the next steps; * I want the collaborators to empathize with how much time it takes to resolve a problem. |
| Feedback | * I want the sponsor of the project to provide timely feedback on the design phase we are in; * I want collaborators to help converge on specific design variations. |
Clearly define your outcome. It will serve as a target as you facilitate the meeting, bringing people back to your original intent if the discussion veers too far off course.
Try to limit the number of collaborators to seven to eight to avoid the inefficiencies that come with a large group. Assign a designated note‐taker so all feedback is clearly captured at the end of the meeting.
Typical stimuli include (but are not limited to):
The traditional (ineffective) way of presenting design is for practitioners to show a specific artifact or screens to their collaborators and make it a free‐for‐all, share‐any‐feedback session.
The feedback, unfortunately, tends to be haphazard and “small‐design” focused:
“Why did you left align?” “Can you add this field on the screen?” “I don’t like this color.” “XYZ company does it another way,” “Can you move this button to the top?”
The reviews often are subjective, unstructured, and ultimately ineffective because collaborators don’t know how to react to the presentation.
In order to run an effective experience design review, follow this structure:
First, set the context.
Address the reframed design problem (DP) or design opportunity (DO) that you have been solving (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”). Who is the user, and what outcomes are you looking to achieve? If you have already begun meeting, anchor on what was discussed in the previous session and provide an overview of what was agreed. Remember: If the collaborators themselves are not aligned on the user, their problems, and the outcomes, it actually creates unnecessary churn to hold a review. Foundational alignment must be addressed first.
Always review and align on the problem before sharing designs. Revisit the problem if stakeholders don’t agree.
Second, share your approach and proposed solution/design and stimuli.
Walk your collaborators through your design process by discussing the following:
How did we go about solving the problem?
How does our design solve the DP or DO?
Cite any relevant metrics that you gathered during user research or that you plan to collect to prove that the root user, business, or product problem has been solved. Answer the question: How did we know we solved it?
Where possible, conduct reviews in person and print out your artifacts onto a poster‐sized paper (invest in a plotter). It’s difficult for collaborators to see the bigger picture, connect the dots, and actively engage with the solution when they’re looking at it on a small computer screen. Hard‐copy artifacts and in‐person reviews will mitigate those risks.
At UXReactor, we frame the discussion by saying, “We prioritized this DP (i.e. HMW make it evident where the user should start their workflow?) to tackle first, addressing it in the following three ways, each with varying complexity …”
Third, start the dialogue.
An experience design review is not a one‐way presentation; it’s a two‐way dialogue between the designers and the collaborators. A back‐and‐forth can happen during any of the above steps for alignment, clarification, and feedback. Always ground your conversation in the user, the DPs and DOs, the metrics, and a solution to the problem, versus in a “pretty screen.” This will focus the dialogue on solving the experience problem at hand.
Let your collaborators know what feedback you’d like them to provide in today’s review. This helps ground everyone on the user and ensures the team delivers a great overall experience, even when the proposed design solution may just be a small piece of the larger experience puzzle.
If you are a participating collaborator, you have an important role in the review, pick one of the following questions or statements to kick‐start the dialogue:
What assumptions are we making about the user?
What if … How might we… Yes, and… What about …
“I want to make sure the visual brand has been consistently applied across all steps along the workflow” vs. “I don’t like this blue here.”
This structured approach serves three purposes. First, collaborators are realigned on the bigger picture. Second, stating the underlying problem allows collaborators to attack the solution to the problem versus providing unguided or subjective feedback to the design. Lastly, this approach propels the conversation forward by allowing everyone to work together and identify a magical solution for the problem.
The experience design review cannot be wholly effective without convergence. Convergence indicates reaching an agreement. It can take many forms, including:
Before the end of the review, verbally run down the key decisions made and ask for agreement from all stakeholders. Then, document your key decisions.
There are two helpful ways to facilitate convergence.
Examples of design principles include:
Before your next experience design review, think about how an HGTV home renovator walks their clients through a home they’re remodeling. They don’t point at the kitchen counter and start asking for feedback on its color or placement. Instead, they bring it back to the original insight or challenge their clients shared with them as they surveyed the house before the remodel. The renovator says something like, “You told me one of the biggest challenges you have in your house is not having enough space to prepare large meals for family gatherings and dinner parties. So we decided to …” And they go through this process for each new room design or addition to the house.
In other words, the renovator has extracted insights from the homeowner and from those insights, derived the design problems to tackle. In the end, they present a solution that is grounded in the user’s experience and the original problems as stated by the homeowner.
Try facilitating your next experience design review the way that HGTV home renovator does.
Leave behind the old way that you’ve been conducting experience design reviews. Shift away from reviewing screens or artifacts. Instead, treat the review as a two‐way dialogue where you, the experience practitioner, are a user‐experience steward. You are responsible for framing and guiding the conversation to focus on the larger experience and identifying a solution to the underlying user, business, or product problem.
A quality design system empowers design and engineering teams. But while most people understand the impact and value that design systems bring, they don’t know how to create them. Rookie practices write up a style guide and call it done. There is much more to a design system.
This play will help you understand and build an effective design system that enables all your stakeholders to build consistent and quality experience designs.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Design System play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience practitioners (interaction designer, visual designer) | * Document the design principles that will drive the design; * Document the templates at a screen level and describes their anatomy; * Document the visual foundations, components, and patterns with their behavior and interdependencies; * Specify the designs; * Create an inventory of all the deliverables and the final readout for hand‐off. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Product manager | * Scope the effort according to the roadmap; * Mutually define guidelines for updating the design system with experience practitioners; * Review and sign off on the design system. |
| * Engineering team | * Review and use the design system; * Comment on any changes or new requirements. |
To build an effective design system, you need to be mindful of:
Before starting to build and activate your design system, you need to deeply understand the user, the product, the organization, and its related context. This includes the experience vision, the larger interconnected ecosystem, and the skills and capabilities of the engineering and product teams.
The design system is an effective tool for the engineering team to help build the product experience. More importantly, it also acts as a centralized source of truth for the product and the experience design teams, providing context for overall design decisions (for example, why one typography was picked over another).
Specifications should be provided at both the framework and experience levels and be documented in the design system. Framework‐level specifications describe exactly what to build and how. Experience‐level specifications explain why things are built the way they are and how they connect to each other in the broader system.
Framework‐level Specifications: To specify at a framework level, understand the relationship between three elements in the design system: foundations, which make up components, which make up patterns.
“Efficiency is intelligent laziness.”
– David Dunham
Identify and document all of the components in your product. Include descriptions, redlining, rules, and usage. Document the component behaviors:
With the framework level specifications in place, building and improving any future experiences will become easier, faster, and more efficient, and consistency between experiences will increase.
Don’t overdo the design system and make it more complex than it needs to be. Only include the elements that will be used in the product.
Experience‐Level Specifications: Are the key for the engineering team to understand the intent behind the experiences you’ve designed. To make this seamless, provide the engineering team with the following:
Assign a primary owner to maintain the inventory so naming conventions and folder structure are kept consistent.
Proactively and clearly socialize the design system at regular intervals before handing off artifacts to the engineering team.
Before an experience is formally handed over to engineering to build, ensure there is agreement on:
Create an inventory for all the experience design deliverables, including the experience design brief, workflows, sketches, and prototypes. The inventory should be searchable, centralized, and organized and accessible from the design system.
Working with the peer practitioners determine versioning guidelines and update frequency for the design system. Versioning will give all stakeholders visibility into any changes and their impact on their work and the product. Ensure that those who need to be informed of design system updates are rightly informed in a timely manner, through the most appropriate communication channel.
UXReactor partnered with an organization on a few product suites. As we started working, we found many inconsistencies in their designs: multiple styles, iconography, interaction patterns, and navigation models were littered across all the suites. For example, we discovered 40 shades of the same color and more than 10 font families. One of our main jobs was to clean up the designs and create a comprehensive system. When we finished building the design system, inconsistencies and quality level issues had decreased by approximately 87%. In a few months, once all the teams got into a rhythm using the design systems, the inconsistency issues dropped to nearly zero, and a drastic increase in productivity was noticed.
Investing time in building a comprehensive design system with richer documentation exponentially increases efficiency and enables high productivity for your teams. It also gives stakeholders experience‐level visibility into why the designs are the way they are.
How do I test the quality of the designed vs. engineered experience designs?
Engineering a product experience that deviates from the designs that have been delivered always results in a subpar product. This play will help you incorporate more rigor by being mindful of a design QA process within your organization. It will ensure that the engineering team has implemented the actual experience designed, maintaining product quality and consistency.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Design QA play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience practitioners | * Compare the designs delivered and engineered product; * Identify the deltas; * Define the severity and prioritization of issues; * Review delta documentation report with product manager and engineering team; * Track the changes. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Product manager | * Review and approve delta documentation report; * Review the severity and prioritize the issues; * Assign to the engineering team; * Track the changes. |
| * Engineering team | * Review delta documentation; * Make sure issues are resolved. |
To run an effective design QA, you need to be mindful of:
To catalyze an effective design QA process, first recall the design problems you set out to solve. This will help you to keep an eye out for them while doing the QA. Then, identify the experiences and scenarios you want to perform the quality check on. Determine when the quality check takes place in the engineering process: for example, after the framework is built, after a particular flow is built, or after the entire end‐to‐end product is built. This will help you define your scope and allocate resources better. Investing time in a frequent and progressive design QA will save subsequent time and resources.
Socialize the process with the peer practitioners to ensure there is awareness of what will come, and to ensure you have access to the latest build.
Create a plan for the quality check that describes the objectives, schedule, milestones, deliverables, resources required, and so forth. Be sure to review the entire engineered product and use it once before the QA. This will give you a high‐level understanding of the issues that are present in the product. Keep the design system in hand as a source of truth for the intent and specifications of the design (Chapter 42: “Design System Play”).
Start doing the quality check on both a system and a design level.
The system‐level quality check includes reviewing experiences, journeys, workflows, and the steps that users should follow to achieve their intended goal.
Quality checks should be performed for different scenarios and contexts. You typically will see three types of issues:
The design‐level check includes reviewing colors, padding, asset sizes, error states, and data and content types used.
Quality checks should be performed on all of the different platforms and devices catering to your users. You typically will see two types of issues:
Ensure all the issues are appropriately documented in a way that is easy for stakeholders to understand and prioritize. Include a detailed description of the issue, an image, and any relevant links.
As you identify and document the issues, determine their severity. Severity defines the impact of the issue on the system and user. Severity can be at various levels. If you identify an issue that should be fixed before launch, such as uncompleted flows where users might get stuck and not know what to do next, mark it as high severity. If the issue causes irritation and users can find a workaround, or if the issue is cosmetic, mark it as medium severity.
Once you determine the severity, prioritize the issues using a 2x2 decision matrix, where frequency and severity are the two variables. This will allow the collaboration trinity to anticipate the scope of changes and make an implementation plan. Once prioritization is done, share your findings with all the stakeholders, highlighting which priorities must be fixed before the product goes live.
“When users might get stuck and not know what to do next, mark it as high severity.”
Coordinate a timeline for rectifying issues with the product manager and engineering team. Ensure the findings and agreements are recorded in a way that can be tracked.
There will likely be some technical challenges during implementation. Support the engineering team with alternate designs that achieve the same outcomes. At times, constraints such as release dates or competing product engineering plans may mean that every issue can’t be fixed immediately.
De‐prioritize issues that create less positive impact on the experiences for the user, but document them as experience debt (unresolved flow‐, pattern‐, and aesthetic‐level issues). Once the engineering team fixes the issues, do a second round of quality checks, testing the initial improvements while also keeping an eye out for any new issues that may have arisen.
In our practice at UXReactor, design QA is a non‐negotiable part of the process. As part of an engagement when we ran the design QA for one of our client partners, we identified more than 500 flow‐, pattern‐, and aesthetic‐level issues across the product. While most of the issues were not high on severity, that said 500 low severity issues was the surest way to a “death by thousand cuts,” as users would assume the product to be not ready for prime time.
Interestingly none of the issues came up as part of the engineering QA process, as the product worked as functionally intended.
Nonetheless we collaboratively prioritized the issues with the product manager and engineering lead, and nearly 300 issues were fixed before the launch. The remaining 200 remained on the experience debt to be solved on a later date.
Having a delta between the experience designed and engineered is very common. Many businesses have a QA team to do a quality check on code and functionality. However, incorporating an additional design QA process is a deliberate shift that allows you to check the build against design intent. Investing time in doing design QA will help your business build consistency and quality across your products, and avoid accruing experience debt.
Businesses that prioritize product experience or experience transformation cannot succeed without a well‐structured experience design doing program. This program helps build structure and rigor around all aspects of design doing so the practice can consistently design high‐quality experience solutions.
This play will allow your business to:
Who Are the Key players in the Experience Design Doing Program play?
| ROLE | WHO’S INVOLVED | RESPONSIBILITIES |
|---|---|---|
| image DRIVER | * Experience strategist | * Identify the right people and skills needed on their team; * Establish, govern, and improve the process; * Foster an environment with the right mindsets. |
| image CONTRIBUTOR | * Cross‐functional teams | * Provide input when needed. |
To build an effective experience design doing program, you need to be mindful of:
The people who make up your team are one of the cornerstones of how you structure your experience design doing program.
When building your team for a design doing program, be mindful about hiring:
Make sure that the program is working with and solving the most relevant design problems identified through the product thinking process. (Chapter 34: “Design Problems and Opportunities Play”)
If you’re thorough, you will end up with an incredibly large list of problems to solve. But unfortunately you can’t solve every problem. Once you’ve identified the pool of possible problems to solve, prioritize them and work toward a manageable scope for you and your team.
A rigorous design process is critical for designing high‐quality digital experiences. It needs a systemic, collaborative, and highly traceable approach for crafting solutions for a variety of design problems.
When establishing your experience design doing process, always start with an ecosystem system level perspective to ensure that you do not get blindsided by a myopic solution. Regardless of your focus, try not to cut corners from a process standpoint, you will always need to run the following structure:
As you are iterating and designing solutions for the various design problems, think through how you’ll validate the solutions to those experiences: What do you need to discover? What kind of tests will you run, and when? What stimuli will you need? By testing hypotheses through experiments you will mitigate business risk, and above all get data to further improve the designs.
Most effective experience design doing programs consistently experiment by leveraging some type of summative method (Chapter 25: “Picking a Research Method Play”), typically in the form of a usability study where a user’s actions are actively observed, or in the form of an A/B test.
Make sure the program has experimentation built out to ensure that the designs get from good to great through user feedback.
Due to the increasing impact of user experience design in business transformation, a ton of tools are being created and introduced in the market, and are fairly affordable.
Identify the tools that work in your organization and be consistent in leveraging them across your design process.
Some of the tools that you would need to be aware of in your design doing process would include (but are not limited to)
Make sure that all the tools are available and accessible for the practitioners involved in the process.
Ensure and govern that the rigor of the program is not diluted by focusing on the right people, problem, process, tools, and experimentation in your design doing program.
Remember that solving user and business problems through experience design is an ongoing process. Over time, your solutions may lose their effectiveness or new technologies or design standards may develop that will affect your experience design. Make sure that you are always tracking your existing and previous solutions for the DPs so you identify which ones are continuously driving value and which ones are not.
Finally, always be aware of the experience debt that is being accrued in the organization, a debt that comes by not solving the right user problems or not solving the problem to the fullest extent. Make sure you keep your experience debt below a level that is unnoticeable to the user.
At UXReactor, we take on design problems with a wide variety of focuses. Sometimes we are focused on design problems related to simplifying a UI hierarchy of a screen and to contrast it, sometimes we may also be focused on building a brand new platform where multiple products are being brought together in a seamless experience.
Every practitioner follows the same rigor of design regardless of the complexity of the problem in hand; this ensures that we deliver consistently high‐quality results.
Interestingly each and every time a practitioner or a client‐partner has tried to shortcut the process (for example: by directly getting into detailed visual design with the engineer), we have noticed that it has a direct impact on the final outcome generated, typically due to lack of a deliberate thought process from the system level to the screen level.
Our hard earned lesson is: Trust the process and the rest will ensue.
A successful experience design doing program is essential for ensuring high‐quality experience design solutions. Always make sure to have the right people, problems, process, experiments, and tools, in your program to enable the high‐quality value creation for your users and business.
“HE WILL WIN WHO KNOWS WHEN TO FIGHT AND WHEN NOT TO FIGHT.”
–SUN TZU
To illustrate the power of the UXD Playbook, let’s go through some scenarios inspired by real life that business leaders in two different contexts have to deal with and discuss how they both can leverage this Playbook to get to their intended outcome.
Chris leads AltEdukation, the small but highly effective organization that was introduced in Chapter 1. Kathy leads LivPharma, a large, publicly traded multinational organization.
AltEdukation is a well‐established company providing after‐school enrichment programs in multiple physical locations to K–12 students across the West Coast. Its story begins in 2017. Under CEO Chris, this successful brick‐and‐mortar education company had built a loyal customer base, and its brand was well known within the local community. The business was profitable with reasonable margins, and steady growth was coming as it launched new locations.
However, AltEdukation’s acceleration was limited by the capital they had available to reinvest in opening these new locations. Chris had been doing research on digital transformation and also had observed an influx of online training programs such as Coursera and Udemy. He knew that he needed a less capital‐intensive way to accelerate his business and a way to expand the brand nationwide. He also understood that although digital transformation was a huge opportunity, it would take an investment of a few million dollars.
Chris was concerned about risking his limited resources. While AltEdukation had a small design and development team, they were predominantly leveraged for marketing, instruction design, and IT needs.
How might Chris leverage the UXD Playbook? And crucially, how would his actions affect AltEdukation’s ability to navigate the 2020 pandemic that nobody saw coming?
It’s 2017. After studying the UXD Playbook, Chris adopts the user‐first approach and believes that he can leapfrog the competition by building the best digital learning experience. He further recognizes the need to assess and evolve the people, process, environment, and mindsets at AltEdukation. The best part is that Chris realizes that he can start experimenting without a lot of investment; he sees a way to crawl, walk, and then run. And while he himself has become highly attuned to user‐centricity, he wants to bring someone in to help catalyze this transformation across his organization.
He leverages the hiring play (Chapter 21: “Hiring Play”) and hires an experience strategist to drive the immediate next steps, giving them clear accountability to create customer‐centric experiments.
Chris then does the following:
By now, it’s 2018. Once the vision is defined and shared across the organization, Chris brings the leadership together to define the user and business metrics that he wants to observe and adopt over the next two years (Chapter 28: “Experience Metrics Play”). They commission a technology vendor to build the product as laid out in the experience vision. The experience strategist, in collaboration with the technology partner, creates a product experience plan so the design team can collaborate to design and build the digital transformation with the users’ experience in mind (Chapter 35: “Product Experience Planning Play”).
Chris leverages the hiring play and hires an experience strategist to drive the immediate next steps, giving them clear accountability to create customer‐centric experiments.
By the time 2020 comes around, Chris’s organization has evolved significantly. They have in place the relevant people, processes, and products to go fully digital. In fact, they have spent more than 12 months perfecting their users’ experience of their digital product, and AltEdukation sees 100 % growth of active users on a monthly basis—during the pandemic.
Kathy takes over as CEO of LivPharma, a 40‐year‐old pharmaceutical company. LivPharma has more than 3,000 employees globally, and their very successful antiviral drugs on the market give them significant cash revenues in the near term. Kathy is determined to lead LivPharma into its next act of growth. She has an engineering background and strongly believes that leveraging the latest technology is the way to make LivPharma lean and mean. Many of its systems and practices are decades old, adding inefficiency in operating in the new digital world.
An avid reader, Kathy comes across a Harvard Business Review book curating 10 must‐reads on design thinking. After going over the various case studies, Kathy decides she wants to leverage a user‐and‐technology‐first strategy for LivPharma.
She knows that her firm is making a significant impact on different patients and their families through the drugs that they have put on the market. Kathy wants to build a sustainable and healthy organization that can innovate, accelerate, and evolve aggressively in the next decade—but she isn’t sure how to operationalize the new culture in her organization.
In this context, how can Kathy leverage the UXD Playbook?
As Kathy reads the UXD Playbook, she realizes that becoming a user experience‐centric organization will be a slow and steady marathon. As a first step, Kathy decides to get her whole leadership team to read the Playbook and become sensitized to its concepts. Needing someone to take responsibility for this transformation, Kathy requests her head of strategy, Rohan, to lead the charge as an interim CXO.
Kathy’s immediate goals for Rohan are to increase LivPharma’s place on the empathy scale (Chapter 17: “Shared Empathy Play”), and curate all the user insights (Chapter 29: “Insights Curation Play”) in a single place. She realizes that her organization has very low awareness and understanding of the customers they serve, and although some insights are available, they are not easy to find.
Within six months, Rohan’s efforts are showing significant success. It has become evident as they begin to understand the users they serve, more people in the organization, from grassroots to the board room, have a renewed sense of purpose.
Kathy then realizes she needs a single accountable owner to drive this initiative. She promotes Rohan to fulltime CXO, formalizing the experience practice under him and increasing his budget and team allocation.
Rohan’s group does the following:
Kathy further decides to create a quarterly business review (QBR) to review activities and progress based on the tenets laid out in the experience transformation program (Chapter 23: “Experience Transformation Program Play”). This includes governing various aspects of people, processes, environments, and mindsets.
In the next few quarters, as the organization starts focusing on investments based on deep customer insights, LivPharma runs a lot of experiments. Some succeed; some fail. But through this process, more initiatives start seeing the light of day:
In 24 months, LivPharma is adding delight and efficiency for its customers as well as for its internal users. The shareholders love the buzz in the market, increasing the stock price by over 150%. And the best part for Kathy and Rohan is that this is just the beginning.
As Kathy reads the UXD playbook, she realizes that becoming a user experience‐centric organization will be a slow and steady marathon.
To continue illustrating the power of the UXD Playbook, let’s go through a couple of real‐life scenarios that design leaders in different contexts would have to deal with and how they should leverage this Playbook to get to their intended outcome.
Joe leads a small design team in a health care company. Isaac is part of a large organization and wants to make a larger impact on his business.
Joe is a design leader in a mid‐sized (500‐employee) health care payments company. His original training and background were in graphic design, and he has very strong creative and visual skills. He initially joined the company as a marketing visual designer; over time, as the company continues to grow, he has evolved to support product design. Last year, he got promoted to UX design manager, with responsibility for two full‐stack designers (individuals who are responsible for the full range of design skills). His team’s primary goal is to ensure that the engineering teams are being “fed” constant design specifications, in accordance with the product requirements prioritized by the product managers, so they can build the product without the loss of engineering cycles.
Recently, a new manager of product management was hired into the company. This person believes in leading the product roadmap with a user‐centric focus. In his first meeting with Joe, she mentions that she would like to move forward with a user‐first approach vs. the team’s existing inside‐first approach, and she wants Joe to be more involved and collaborative in bringing this shift. While Joe is excited about the possibility, he is struggling on how to go toe‐to‐toe with this new product leader without stumbling in the process.
The new manager gives Joe a copy of the UXD Playbook. Joe reads the book and realizes that although he has been doing a lot of UI design, he has a limited understanding of the business and user impact of his team’s work. Given that Joe has limited resources, his first order of action is to introduce his team to the five mindsets (Chapter 8: “Mindsets of a User‐Centric Organization”), along with a user‐first approach (Chapter 5: “Business Insanity”). This ensures that he and his team are aligned.
Next, he starts building a body of user insights (Chapter 29: “Insights Curation Play”) that can inform his team’s design and the product roadmaps. To kick‐start this, he hires an intern to help conduct a few summative research studies, the insights from which are distilled and communicated across the organization. From there, Joe does the following:
As the word spreads, Joe and the product management leader are asked to present this roadmap to the leadership team. It’s a grand success—the first time there’s been cohesion on multiteam activities and prioritization of the user and their experiences. The leadership team agrees to invest more in this user‐first approach and allows Joe to triple his team (Chapter 21: “Hiring Play”) and build a dedicated research program (Chapter 30: “User Research Program Play”).
With the insights from this program, which everyone from interns to the CEO leverage, the organization become attuned to its users and their needs, increasing shared empathy across the company.
Joe slowly and steadily builds the experience transformation program (Chapter 23: “Experience Transformation Program Play”). Within 30 months, his team achieves the following wins:
Joe reads the book and realizes that although he has been doing a lot of UI design, he actually has a limited understanding of the business and user impact of his team’s work.
Isaac is the design manager of a UX team at a publicly traded supply‐chain company whose backbone is a proprietary software technology. Isaac’s role reports under the CIO’s organization. His team, which consists of a user researcher, an interaction designer, and a visual designer, supports the engineering releases by providing designs and summative user testing. They are responsible for the design and research for maintaining the software, as new features are constantly being added to this powerful platform. Isaac’s team has built a collaborative rhythm within the software development organization.
One day, Isaac listens in on the quarterly earnings call presented by the CEO. He can sense a certain amount of defensiveness in the CEO when market analysts ask him why the competition’s technology is much easier to use and much more user experience–centric. The CEO doesn’t have much of a rebuttal, and the analysts are catching on to it.
Isaac wonders if there is something that he could do.
Isaac asks his researcher to conduct an experience benchmarking exercise (Chapter 32: “Experience Benchmarking Play”) for the existing product.
Once the exercise is complete:
Appreciating how the information is presented, the CIO asks Isaac (along with product and engineering) to come up with an experience vision (Chapter 20: “Experience Vision Play”) for each user. Over the next quarter, Isaac leads this initiative and his team creates experience roadmaps for all key users. After multiple rounds of iterating the experience vision with user feedback, Isaac is invited to the CEOs executive leadership team (ELT) to share the updated experience vision. Given a positive response to his presentation, he shares the root cause of incremental software innovation: The organization doesn’t deeply understand its users. Isaac advises the ELT to make a deliberate effort to shift the organization from the status quo. The ELT registers that this is a significant gap and empowers Isaac and the CIO to keep investing in a user experience–first philosophy
With the ELT’s support, Issac starts making bigger strides:
In just 24 months, Isaac’s team grows by a factor of five, and he is promoted to the new role of CXO, directly reporting to the CEO. More important, Isaac gets his first opportunity to be physically present in an earnings call to address any questions about the company’s user‐centric practices.
Isaac asked his researcher to conduct an experience benchmarking exercise for the existing product.
Over the past decade, the user experience design profession has been a melting pot of backgrounds and perspectives. Although this has helped strengthen the field, it also has created a large cohort of professionals who have three to five years of experience in designing digital products but don’t know how to become strategic players in their organizations.
Here is the scenario of one such practitioner. Ali is a member of a design practice and wants to leverage his skills to make a strategic impact on the business.
Ali is a senior interaction designer in a six‐person UX design team in a networking software technology company. In this role, he has been working in a highly structured software development process. Product managers provide the product requirements, and Ali collaborates with them to create and iterate on wireframes before handing them off to the visual designer. As the most senior practitioner on the team, he aspires to grow further in the organization. His manager has told him multiple times to think strategically to assert his influence, but Ali isn’t sure how or where to start.
As Ali reviews the UXD Playbook, he decides to put several plays into action.
Using his knowledge of the product, Ali creates an experience ecosystem map (Chapter 18: “Experience Ecosystem Play”) that enables him to understand and articulate the company’s different users, products, and services.
As next steps:
Ali brings this insight back to his design and product group. The team then brainstorms ways to solve this issue, especially given the business consequences of not having good migration. In less than a week, the team puts together a storyboard laying out a vision of how their user’s experience would evolve if the organization could work more seamlessly across units (Chapter 20: “Experience Vision Play”). The team researcher tests this vision‐type with users to gauge their response and gain additional feedback that could be factored into the next iteration.
Implementing the feedback from user research, Ali adjusts the experience vision and shares it with the larger leadership team. Needless to say, they love what they see—and they really love their users’ reactions.
The leadership team asks Ali to spearhead the design of the trial and onboarding experiences across all the company’s products and promote him to experience strategist. Within a year, Ali has identified the need for an improved migration experience, designed and iterated on it, and created a vision that is well received by customers.
This exercise reveals that the migration tools are a big problem for the user.
User experience practitioners have rewarding careers: They get to have a big impact on people’s lives, while enjoying a high level of intellectual and creative challenge. In addition, demand for UX practitioners has been growing globally: More than 100,000 are needed in the next few years. Needless to say, there is a huge opportunity for people with the right aptitude and mindset to make a shift into this new career path. Here are the scenarios of two newbie practitioners. Scott is an architect who wants to build a career in interaction experience design. Janet is a college intern at an e‐commerce business who wants to make an impact.
Janet is a recent graduate with a major in communication and sociology. She’s intrigued by how people communicate and interact in different contexts and appreciates ethnography as a method to build insights. In her junior year at college, Janet worked at a technology company as a marketing intern. She helped create a few different campaign messages and could see the direct impact of messaging and human behavior on a marketing site. This intrigued Janet. As she wrapped up her internship, she started to look into user research as a career option and discovered the UXD Playbook.
As she nears graduation, Janet approaches the head of product at the firm where she interned to see if she can help with user research. She shares some ideas she had jotted down as she read the UXD Playbook. Janet lands an internship to conduct user research for an in‐house product the organization wants to release as an SaaS application later in the year.
Since Janet is aware of the six attributes of conducting effective research (Chapter 27: “Research Quality Play”), she approaches the process deliberately.
She does the following:
In parallel:
At the end of her six‐month internship, Janet presents her insights to the product and engineering teams. The managers are impressed with the quality of insights and, unsurprisingly, want a similar rigor for their product lines.
To her delight, Janet is offered a full‐time role to join the team as a user research practitioner. While her peers are working in entry‐level jobs, she joins the company as someone who has created a deliberate strategy informed by quality user research.
Since Janet is aware of the six attributes of conducting effective research, she approaches the process deliberately.
Fascinated by architectural design and how it surrounds and affects people, Scott studied architecture in college and practiced for a few years after graduation. However, he became concerned by what he saw as a cookie‐cutter and top‐down approach to design in practice. He wanted to be in the profession of DESIGN, but he wanted a career where he could actively iterate based on real feedback from those experiencing his designs.
While searching online, Scott discovered the career of user experience design. He has come to believe that there are many parallels between the BIG DESIGN of architecture and the BIG DESIGN of digital systems. He just needs to build skills specific to the new field.
Scott reads the UXD Playbook to understand the experience design profession and its impact on users and businesses. He’s eager to try some plays out and approaches his friend, a software developer in the initial stages of founding a start‐up venture around college students. His friend eagerly accepts Scott’s offer to take on the design, as there is a lot to do.
Scott decides to create a quick discussion guide (Chapter 27: “Research Quality Play”) to interview college students so he can empathize with them and understand their pain points (Chapter 14: “User Empathy Play”). Research insights in hand:
Using his updated designs, Scott works with his friend to start developing the software. He verifies the experience design at regular intervals of the build to keep true to the intended experience (Chapter 43: “Design Quality Assurance (QA) Play”).
When Scott’s friend releases a beta version of the product on a select few college campuses, students love what they see, as it solves key problems: What initially took 10 steps now is optimized to two. Similarly, information that was hard to comprehend is now much easier to access and understand. The product soon has a wait list of potential users.
Given the buzz the product creates, venture funds reach out to Scott’s friend to fund the start‐up—with the caveat that the user experience continues to be the focus. Scott’s friend asks him to be his cofounder. Scott realizes that the simple but powerful plays that he employed transformed him into an innovator, and he is loving every moment of it.
Scott reads the UXD playbook to understand the experience design profession as a whole and its impact on users and businesses.
[End Sidebar]
It takes collaborators in multiple departments—product, engineering, sales, customer service, and others—working in alignment to deliver the best user experience.
Anita is a product manager and Tom is an engineering lead in the same organization. Let’s discuss how they can leverage the UXD Playbook to collaborate effectively with the experience practice.
Anita and Tom are coworkers at a small e‐commerce company with a successful track record selling perfumes online. Anita is the senior product manager, and Tom has been the senior engineer for the past couple of years. Recently, their company got a significant cash infusion from a private investor with a vision to create a global brand in personal care.
Along with the expansion came a big shift in the organization’s philosophy. The organization began building a high‐quality user experience design practice with specialized roles, including interaction designers, visual designers, user researchers, and a design manager.
Neither Anita nor Tom are used to collaborating with a mature design practice, as they usually work with a consultant who handles UI design tasks. Moving forward, they want to ensure that they can effectively engage with this new design practice and, more important, collaborate to meet the aggressive goals the business has set.
As Anita reads the UXD Playbook, she realizes that working with an experience design team is a highly collaborative process. She also realizes that she can rely on the team in ways she is not used to; she can have a true “partner in crime.”
As the experience design team is being built, Anita is actively involved in hiring. As an interview panelist, she wants to make sure she is hiring based on mindsets as well as on the candidates’ quality of impact on the experience value chain. In fact, Anita wants to make sure that candidates applying for the user researcher role can help drive key elements of (Chapter 21: “Hiring Play”). In fact, Anita wants to make sure that candidates applying for the User Researcher role can help drive key elements of the following:”
As the team coalesces, Anita is ready to collaborate (Chapter 36: “Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play”) with this new group and looks forward to the magic they can make happen together.
As Tom reviews the UXD Playbook, he likewise begins to understand that there are many ways to engage with the new design team. He realizes that he needs his engineering team to work more collaboratively (Chapter 36: “Cross‐Functional Collaboration Play”) with this new experience design practice and that a research team can increase empathy for and understanding of users.
Tom also understands how to leverage and collaborate on artifacts such as:
Overall, Tom has a much better understanding of what he can expect from an experience design practice and how he should collaborate with his colleagues to deliver the best experiences possible.
Moving forward, Anita and Tom want to ensure that they can effectively collaborate to meet the aggressive goals the business has set.
“THE HEIGHT OF YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS WILL EQUAL THE DEPTH OF YOUR CONVICTIONS.”
– WILLIAM F. SCOLAVINO
As you come to the end of this book, I hope you’ve built a deeper understanding of the power of experience design in a rapidly digitally transforming world. I also hope that you’ve been able to identify a few relevant plays to leverage within your organization. Just remember that this journey is not going to be easy, as you’re going against the laws of inertia, and therefore it will take you a few iterations to get it right.
To better enable you in this pursuit, I’ve distilled the essence of this book into two aspirational manifestos: one for practitioners to enable them in their journey in designing the best experiences, and the other for business and design leaders to enable their teams and organizations to drive business value through user experience design.
The 10 commitments in each manifesto are meant as reminders of the effort required to get it right. I would encourage you to print the relevant manifesto and display it in your work environment so you and your team are constantly exposed to it.
If you’d like to print this out you can go to www.UXDPlaybook.com, where you’ll find a version to share within your organization.
Congratulations on making a sizable dent in your experience transformation journey. It’s been a joy sharing my life’s work with you. If you enjoyed reading this book and are itching to get started or learn more, allow me to offer a few suggestions.
www.uxdplaybook.com is our dedicated site for this book. It offers a wealth of resources that include extra plays that are not in the book, instructional videos where we walk you through a real‐life application of a play, templates to share with your teammates, assessments to help you understand where you fall on the maturity model, my advice to each persona covered in the book, and much more. It also has access to a community of fellow practitioners who are in a similar pursuit as you.
For those of you who want more hands‐on training and coaching, be on the lookout for tailored training courses to enable you to lead with more confidence and be more successful in your professional journeys.
For organizations looking to transform with user‐centric experiences, we also offer custom consulting engagements designed to help you fuel your growth and leapfrog your competition. You can find more information about our enablement courses and custom engagements at www.uxreactor.com.
| uxdplaybook.com | image | uxreactor.com | image |
| image PRASAD KANTAMNENI | image JAMIE YOO | |
|---|---|---|
| I am in the business of experience design because... | …I strongly believe that user experience design is the new currency of success for businesses. I am also sick and tired of business building tons of features in the garb of digital transformation and getting it wrong. | …It is where we can converge around users to apply reason to creativity. Products are made to be used by people who need a problem solved. This means every product should have a clear reason for existence, but it can address the problem in any multitude of ways. |
| Your favorite play and why | The shared empathy play: When deployed well, the transformation is very visible in all aspects of people, process, and environment. For instance, it affects how the organization behaves, hires, incentivizes, and makes decisions. | The experience metrics play: This play makes the user the focal point of how success is measured in a company, and only good things happen when a company measures success by their user’s success. |
| Tips on how to fuel business growth through design | Experiment! Take one of the plays and try it, learn from it before moving to the next play. You can only win or lose the game if you play it. :) | Know thy user. |
| image | image | |
| image ELINOR CHANG | image VINAY DRAKSHARAM | image SARAH KHALID |
| …Experience preserves what makes us human in an age of rising automation. Humans still crave to be understood, cared for, and empowered in a digital world. Experience fills the void that technology isn’t programmed to deliver by first understanding the person and then crafting the experience we are born to seek. | …Experience design can help businesses reach their desired goals, while keeping their users happy. Additionally experience design is not just looking after the end users, it’s a triangulation between users, business, and technology. | …Experience design—good and bad—has an impact on how we move through and interact with the world. I’ve seen and experienced what happens when there is negligence in experience design, and I’d like to be part of the solution. :) |
| The culture design play: Culture is the bedrock of an organization and defines how successful your organization will be in the long term. This play primes organizations to be user‐ and experience‐first by helping organizations build the right cultural pillars. | The experience ecosystem play: This play allows you to see the forest before focusing on the individual trees. Helps see the big picture before diving straight into design. | The design problems and opportunities play: The correct identification of the problems to solve is paramount. This play also emphasizes tracing a design problem from conception to design solution to validation. It’s oh‐so‐satisfying to be able to trace solutions to problems and then govern the effectiveness of the solution. |
| It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Focus on building sustainable systems to achieve your outcomes. | Iterate … iterate … iterate … | Take the time to understand the unmet needs of your users. Find that sweet spot of what’s really important for them to get done but they have trouble doing. |
| image | image | image |
| image KALYAN GUMMADI | image JONATHAN HWANG | |
| I am in the business of experience design because... | …I believe that design can make people’s lives exciting and better and opens up disruptive market opportunities for businesses. | …Thinking about design through the lens of experience is to think holistically. It gives us a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us. |
| Your favorite play and why | The culture design play Culture is the most important in any organization. A user‐first culture delivers great experiences for anyone in the organization ecosystem. | The experience benchmarking play The concept of different levels of inspiration is not only pragmatic, it is incredibly fascinating and empowering to be able to connect dots that previously seemed like they had no relation. |
| Tips on how to fuel business growth through design | Get your hands dirty and be ready to learn a lot of new things in the process. | Make sure you are solving a need and not just providing the product or service you think people want. |
| image | image |
Throughout the process of putting this book together, one thing that became clear to me was that curating an effective body of work like this is much easier imagined than done. This book is the result of many individuals who have encouraged, influenced, and contributed.
There are quite a few people to acknowledge in this journey, and I would like to recognize a few of them.
Foremost. I would like to acknowledge my cofounder (and brother) Prasad Kantamneni, without whom UXReactor would just have been a pipe dream. A little more than 20 years ago he was the first person to introduce me to a nascent field of study called human factors. Both of us eventually earned graduate degrees in the discipline, and it transformed us into human‐centered problem solvers.
In addition, there’s the awesome team at UXReactor, which has steadily grown to more than 60 practitioners across three continents. It’s not uncommon to hear phrases such as, “Is there a play for this?” or “We should write this as a play” in the team’s day‐to‐day conversation. The plays shared in this book have been created, tested, and evolved through the team’s constant pursuit of improvement in all aspects of our practice. I would like to acknowledge the leadership team of Vinay Draksharam, Kalyan Gummadi, Jamie Yoo, Sarah Khalid, Elinor Chang, and Camilo Rendon Gomez, who on a daily basis direct key aspects of the people, process, mindset, and environment at the firm.
It would not have been possible for the Playbook to evolve and strengthen over the past seven years without the lessons we’ve learned through our dynamic collaboration with our client‐partners. Their belief in our philosophy and process has been our pillar of strength. I would like to thank Kurt Van Etten at RedSeal; Guru Sankararaman and Jay Vijayan at Tekion; Nabil Bukhari, Carla Guzzeti, and Shyam Pullela at Extreme Networks; Randy Sieffert, Amy Lokey, and their team at ServiceNow; Lewis Black and his leadership team at Actian; Greg Petroff and his team at Compass; Rizwan Pirani and his team at DataCore; Steven Miller at 8x8; Michael Homeier and Barry Hill at Nokia; and Balaji Parimi at CloudKnox/CloudPhysics.
The process of producing this book involved support from quite a few contributors that I would like to acknowledge.
Apart from the core contributing team listed in the previous section (“The Players Behind the Playbook”) I would also like to acknowledge my teammates Grace Ang and Padmaja Maddala, who spent significant time contributing to and reviewing this book.
We were also fortunate to have some very capable volunteers, representing the various personas this book was written for, reviewing and providing feedback in true user‐first fashion. I would like to acknowledge Lalatendu Satpathy, Kelly Patchet, Uday Gajendar, Justin Hou, Mukul Bhist, Kate Vyvial, Saibaba Attelli, Wendy Kastner, Nithya Lakshmanan, Kurt Van Etten, Steve Venkateshan, Sridhar Machiroutu, and Peter Wohlsen for their effective and timely feedback.
This book went through multiple iterations and it is a much better product because of the editorial support we got throughout this process. Foremost to acknowledge is Richard Narramore from Wiley, who first believed in publishing a book that focused on the power of user experience design fueling business growth and subsequently set the initial structure and narrative. I would also like to acknowledge Emily Moberg Robinson and Bryn Mooth, who spent significant time editing and providing feedback to improve this book.
Finally, achieving the ambitious goal of having a highly visual finished product would not have been possible without the awesome illustration skills of Dario Bolivar and layout skills of my teammate Diana Sánchez.
On a personal front, this book is a result of my decades of experience in various environments and situations that directly influenced my philosophy, mindset, and passion for driving business value through design.
I would like to acknowledge Dr. Sundaram Narayanan and Dr. Ray Rothrock, who nurtured my inquisitiveness during my graduate studies at Wright State University; Dr. Nuray Aykin who was my first non‐academic manager at Siemens (to a naive intern); Chris Rockwell at Lextant, who gave me my first opportunity to be a full‐time teammate and nurtured me to think in a system‐thinking way; Darren Beyer at Wildcard Systems (FIS), who created an environment for me to dabble in product management; Corey Bernardo and KC Teis for enabling my transition into design leadership at Pay‐Pal; Catherine Courage for providing me the support and empowerment to build design teams at scale at Citrix; and Dasaradha Gude, who helped mentor us in our early days of UXReactor.
I would also like to acknowledge the awesome faculty of the General Management Program at Harvard Business School, who have deeply influenced and enabled my business acumen.
My late father Col. KLK Prasad (Ret’d.) who as an officer in the Indian Army exposed me to the soldier’s ethos of esprit‐de‐corps and always leading from the front.
Last but not least I would like to acknowledge my dear mother Ratna Kantamneni, who helped instill in both Prasad and me the fundamental philosophy of pursuing what we believe is right in life and not focusing too much on the fruits of labor. Without this philosophy we would not have taken the path of delayed gratification by leveraging UXReactor to finesse and evolve the Playbook.
A
Action (taking), collaboration (usage) 194
Activation agents, empowerment 96
Activation, building 84
Activities, planning/documenting 214
Adobe, Lightroom launch 54
Aha moments 84
Airbnb, case study 97
Apple, product ecosystem 109
Apprentice 75
Approvals 219
Architect, career transition 282
Artifacts
Assessment, conducting/documentation 193
Attitudinal methods 150
Automotive shopper requirements, Driving Sales study 39
Awesome practitioners, mediocre practitioners (contrast) 125
B
Balanced Scorecard 14
Behavioral methods 150
Board of directors, reporting 31–32
Business
Business-to-business (B2B) firms, organizational silos (navigation) 13
Business value by design (bv.d) 48,90
contrast 276
C
Call to action (CTA) 255
Candidates, evaluation 124
Career ladder 128
Channel partners, responsibility 64
Chief customer officer (CCO), role 61–62
Chief information officer (CIO), insights 278
Chief product officer (CPO), role 62
Chief technology officer (CTO), role 62
Collective user empathy, growth 98
Colors (foundation component) 254
Competition, impact 29
Competitors, problem solving 283
Complexity, understanding 55
Components 255
Conceptual inspirations 208
Consolidated workflow 256
Content design 241–242
Content designer 266
Content experience designer 61
Continuous improvement, importance 33
Continuous innovation 226
Convergence 250
Correlations 177–178
Coworkers, game plan 286–287
Cross-industry inspirations 208
Cultural fit 124–125
Culture 138
Culture design 92–93
Curriculum 255
Customer support, digital systems velopment/administration 24
D
Dashboard screen, mindset example 52
Data
Da Vinci, Leonardo 50
Dead-end questions 163
Decision making, capabilities 130
Design
Design business
Design-centric companies, outperformance/differential 26
Design doing 207
Design leader
Design Management Institute (DMI) study 26
Design opportunities (DOs)framing 235
DesignOps, responsibility 65
Design quality assurance (design QA) 258–259
Desktop, digital modality 30
Detail, attention (Walt Disney) 42
Detailed design 238–239
Devices, usage 107
Dialogue, initiation 249–250
Differentiated digital experiences, occurrence 26–27
Digital-at-scale enterprises, investment (IDC prediction) 28
Digital companies, success 27
Digital experience
Digital growth strategies 26
Digital products, investment 28
Digital services
Digital systems
Direct competitors, assessment 192
Direct inspirations 208
Disjointed digital experiences, nonacceptance 25
E
Economic moat, importance 32–33
Ecosystem 267
Emotional metrics 139
Emotional variables, rational variables (contrast) 169–170
Empathy. See User empathy
Engineering
Enterprise organization, structure 65
Environment, fostering 138
Ethnographic studies, usage 80
Evaluations 171–172
Executive leadership team (ELT) 279
Experience
Experience design 230–231
Experience ecosystem 104–105, 224
Experience-level specifications 256
Experience practitioners
Experience-specific recruiting process, development 126
Experience transformation (XT)
Experimentation
External collaborators 64
F
Feedback 219
Findings, activation 172
Formative research 146
Foundations 254–255
Framework-level specifications 254
Frameworks, power 14
Functionality-driven empathy maturity 100
Functional silos, collaboration (fostering) 114
G
Gainer, Paul 44
Goals
Grant, Adam 95
Grassroots agents, impact 96
Grids/layouts (foundation component) 256
Growth, game plan (example) 274
H
High-fidelity designs 256
Hiring 122–123
I
Iconography (foundation component) 124
Ideas/startups, failure (percentage) 34
Illustration (foundation component) 254
Imagineers, detail attention 42
In-depth interviews, usage 80
Indirect competitors, assessment 192
Individual responsibilities, accounting 130
Initiative (support), resources (usage) 102
Innovation 272
In-person sites, shutdown 22
Inside-first, user-first (contrast) 35
Insights
Insights curation 174–175
Inspiration, gathering 284
Interaction designer 266
Interaction experience
Interaction notes 256
Interaction design 240–241
Interactive voice response 30
Internal collaborators 63
Internal operations, technology investments 28
Internal stakeholder, visualization exercise 54
International Data Corporation (IDC), investment prediction 28
Interpersonal dynamics, development 131
Interviews, conducting 124
J
Judgment capabilities 130
K
Kiosks 30
Knowledge navigator 120
L
Lansley, Andrew 35
Leaders
Leadership
Leading by experience manifesto 292
Leading questions, usage 163
Learning journey, creation 72
Lessons learned, reflection 200
Lightroom launch (Adobe) 54
Logical metrics 139
Long-term profits, protection 32–33
M
Maintenance, consistency 178
Manifestos 290
Mapping interactions 234
Marketplace disruption 36
Markets, discovery 13
Mature bv.d, immature bv.d (contrast) 276
Merger and acquisition (M&A)
Metrics, improvement 13
Migration 281
Mindsets, process, people, environment (m.p.p.e.) 48
Mobile, digital modality 30
More enhanced experience (MEE) 193
Most transformed experience (MTE) 193
Multi-faceted hiring criteria, building 124
N
Nest (thermostat), growth 27
Nurturing environment, fostering 132
O
Objects (artifacts) 107
Obsolescence, risk 24
Onboarding screen, login experience (contrast) 51
Optimization, building 235
Organizational alignment, vision-type 219
Organizational experience maturity 131
Organizational impact, opportunities 131
Organizational maturity 139
Organizational silos, navigation 13
Organizations
Outcome mindset
Outcomes 248
Over-the-top (OTT), digital modality 30
Over-the-top (OTT) experience (Walt Disney) 40
P
Paradigm shift 24
Participant
Partners 218
Patterns 255
Patterns/correlations, finding 07–108
People
Phone interview 126
Play
Playbook
Portfolio review 126
Practitioners
PragmaticUX (PuX)
Presentation 164
Problem
Product
Product experience
Product manager, responsibility 64
Product user experience (product UX)
Project, lessons learned 200
Protocol 170–171
Prototypes 256
Prototyping option 118
Purpose-driven empathy maturity 100–101
Q
Qualitative methods 150
Quality assurance (QA) 213, 231
Quantitative methods 150
R
Rational variables, emotional variables (contrast) 169–170
Recruitment
Relationships, identification 107
Research
Results, achievement 138
Résumé review 126
Review, structuring 249–250
Right environment/mindsets/process 49
Right method, selection 162–163
Right people 49–60
Right tools 184
Roadmaps, usage 225
Rohrer, Chrisian 150
Role play, usage 80
S
Sales team, interaction 31–32
Satisfaction scores, decline 22
Scaffolding, building 88
Scanning, ease 16
Scenarios, consolidation 236
Scope, agreement 199
Semantics 34
Sensorial research 146
Sequencing 214
Shared activities 219–220
Shared processes, 219
Skills 136
Small design
Small organization, structure 65
SME-driven empathy maturity 100
Socialization
Socialization, importance 84
Soft skills 125
Solutioning rhythm, creation 230
Sources, data extraction 183
Stakeholders
Standard & Poor's 500 company, average age (Credit Suisse research) 29
Strategic planning, mandate 56
Strategy 88
Study plan 212
Success
Summative research 146
Sustainability, achievement 89
Systemic implication 55
Systemic relationships 234–235
System-level quality check 260
Systems
T
Tablets, usage 30
Task-driven empathy maturity 100
Tasks, success criteria 171
Team
Technical fit 125
Technology
Tesla
Top-down IT system, impact 35
Training, digitization 22
Trends 177
Typography (foundation component) 254
U
Universal alignment, ensuring 198
Updated playbook, requirement 26
Upper management, decisions 22
User-centered design, impact 27
User-centric experiences, impact 172
User-centric organization
User empathy 52, 78–79, 218, 287
User experience (UX)
UX-led organization, characteristics 66
User-experience-centric world, building 32
User-first culture, sustainability 96
User-first, inside-first (contrast) 35–36
User-first organizational environment, fostering 92
User insights, portfolio (building) 31
User interface (UI)
User research
Users
User segments 84
V
Validation 213–214
Value
Value Added Resellers (VARs), responsibility 64
Value-driven empathy maturity 100
Vendors, impact 64
Viability, ensuring 24
Vision. See Experience vision
Visual design 241
Visual designer 266
Visual experience designer 61
W
Walt Disney
Web digital modality 30
What if we (WIW) questions 206
White-space brainstorming 207
Wireframing, usage 285
Workflow 213,267
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