Adaptive Path Blog

Our old colleague Dan Saffer asked a brief question to the IxDA mailing list, “What should interaction designers know about strategy?” It set off an excellent discussion. I responded in the thread, but I wanted to rephrase the post here for the AP Blog.

For starters, there’s a tendency to equate “strategy” with “business”, and I think that can be harmful. There are many examples of design that aren’t suited to business, but none that aren’t suited to strategy.

When I think of strategy in the context of our design work, I think of three things:

• philosophy
• vision
• planning

Philosophy asks, “What are you about? What do you stand for, what is your approach?” Whatever it is that you will be designing needs to be informed by some underlying philosophy, some point of view. The “design mantras” for TiVo that Margret Schmidt shared with Matt Haughey are an excellent example:

* It’s entertainment, stupid.
* It’s TV, stupid.
* It’s video, damnit.
* Everything is smooth and gentle.
* No modality or deep hierarchy.
* Respect the viewer’s privacy.
* It’s a robust appliance, like a TV.

(Margret Schmidt is speaking at MX 2009, by the way. Use RNSB and get 15% off!)

Vision asks, “Where are you headed? How will you know you’re successful?” This vision is an articulation of the philosophy that motivates action. Sometimes the vision can be captured in a single compelling statement, such as Kodak’s classic, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Or the exemplar from bestseller Made To Stick, John Kennedy’s pledge: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” A philosophy is insufficient for driving design, particularly something as complex as interaction design. Vision provides the north star that guides your efforts toward a successful outcome.

Planning asks, “How will you get there?” I find that in most discussions of strategy, planning is overlooked, with people more interested in talking about positioning, competition or other big picture items. But when I’ve seen products and projects fail, it’s often because there was bad planning — the go-to-market strategy was flawed, either too ambitious or not ambitious enough, resulting in the release of products that either aren’t yet ready for prime time (say, the first release of Apple Newton) or woefully behind the pack (the first release of Microsoft Zune). Perhaps the single most useful technique we teach at Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive Design Strategy day is the Product Evolution Map, which brings rationality and sensibility to the standard product roadmap.

It’s important to recognize that planning alone is insufficient — most plans have to change, and it’s important that you have a vision and philosophy that keeps the plans on track.

With these three elements in place, your design work is grounded, and set up to succeed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Management, Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.