Tuesday, February 19 - Design Strategy
This activity-rich seminar gives you the tools you need to establish and implement an effective design strategy, one that meshes business goals with appeals to the target customer. This session is led by one of Adaptive Path’s Experience Design Directors, Brandon Schauer.
Who is this workshop for?
One of the biggest challenges that UX professionals face is the ability to frame their work as clear wins for business. The Design Strategy session is for managers, practitioners, interactive marketing, usability, or any accomplished UX professional looking to make a greater strategic impact with their work. Brandon will share concepts and methods that will help you connect your work to the larger company strategy or push forward with your user experience responsibilities despite a clear strategy.
What will be covered?
The day is structured around four components — strategic focus, strategic definition, customer value, and scope — to help you diagnose and overcome strategic challenges with targeted approaches and methods. The day begins with:
- Defining design strategy
- How it connects with business strategy
- A short case study of design connecting with business strategy
Strategic Focus
This first component ensures your UX work generates business value:
- How strategic focus enables design to connect to real business value
- A model for maturing the role of UX within your organization
- A process model from organizations that connect design to business value
- The symptoms of a lack of strategic focus
- Practice working with business partners to dispassionately prioritize the focus for UX projects
Strategic Definition
The next component of design strategy requires a clearly articulated description of the user experience that everyone buys into:
- Recognizing when you lack definition
- What separates definition from requirements
- Multiple examples of how to create a tangible definition of a user experience
- Practice and discuss a method to create and agree on strategic definition with your business partners
Customer Value
The third component helps you to pinpoint the unique value your project offers to customers:
- A compelling example of differentiating a service through the value it delivers to customers
- An analytical tool for finding points of differentiation
- Symptoms that you haven’t clearly defined customer value
- The elements of a viable offering of customer value
- Practice one method for defining customer value that can guide the positioning and design of a user experience
Scope
The last component of design strategy ensures a project’s scale is in keeping with the focus, definition, and customer value:
- How you can tell when scope is impacting strategy
- The relationship of scope an strategy, and how the web is changing these relationships
- Practice a method for aligning scope to match the design strategy and to respond to organizational need and market change


(5 votes, average: 3.8 out of 5)
February 18th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Just to help you focus on getting the most out of the Design Strategy workshop, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be posting slides, links to references, and handy files/templates to this event site. So enjoy the day and do whatever you need to do get the most out of it!
February 19th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Definitely some useful tools from the first half day. Looking forward to file access (ansered the question I came here for).
February 19th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
[…] You’ll find Brandon’s slide deck for Design Strategy here […]
February 19th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Overall, Brandon provided some useful tools and methodologies to address many of the pain points we deal with. Following the exercises, I would have liked to have seen more success stories, showing us how the methodologies were applied in the real world.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Loved today’s workshop. One thing I kept thinking throughout the day is how great it would be to have a reading list of design strategy articles, books, and etc. to refer back to later on.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Is there a way to get page #8 in a version not redacted?
Thank you,
Currtis
February 19th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Lol. I redact my comment, i see it is a template.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
s/Lol./LolzCat,/
February 20th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Here are two of the books mentioned:
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream
By Geoffrey A. Moore
Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The…
By W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne
Lulu.com was mentioned.
I’ll be providing an inventory of the strategy facilitation tools outlined on my site: uxdesign.com… all here are invited to contribute to that.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am
For more books on strategy, check out our reading list:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/readinglist.php
Brandon recently made some strategy additions — they’re all under business on that list. Enjoy!