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

Agenda

Time	Activity
8:00-9:00 AM	Breakfast and Registration
9:00-9:30 AM	What Is Design Strategy?
9:30-11:00 AM	Focus: How to Generate Real Business Value
11:00-11:15 AM	Break
11:15-12:30 PM	Definition: What You Are (and Aren't) Delivering
12:30-1:30 PM	Lunch
1:30-2:45 PM	Customer Value: Resonating with Customer Needs
2:45-3:00 PM	Break
3:00-4:15 PM	Scope: Realistically Reaching the Vision
4:15-4:30 PM	Putting It All Together
4:30-5:00 PM	Q&A