Some-time lurker, first-time poster. Haven't commented before because I'm not a UX professional. But with 15 years of strategy experience consulting to large and small companies and as entrepreneur, I'll wade in here. My apologies for botching any protocols and being long-winded.
Chad, perhaps the work we did was rare, but I used to help lead a consulting practice that combined business strategy with interface design. We addressed the question: "How can we maximize profitable growth while also creating outstanding multi-channel user experiences?" To answer this, we needed to know a bunch of things, including: Which customers and prospects should we prioritize? How do customers become aware of, research, buy and use our products and our competitor's products (or similar products, if we're designing for a launch)? What roles do different interfaces play at the different points in this buying process, both individually and in concert with other interfaces? At which points do customers and prospects fall out of this process and where is the upside for improving it? How can a different marketing mix and better-designed experiences within and across channels capture more upside? In some cases, these issues could be answered qualitatively. However, the larger the dollars involved (or the larger the inter-departmental disagreement about direction), the more important it was to quantify these issues and do "real" analysis. This work highlighted lots of potential areas for improvement. We'd prioritize plotting the potential improvements on a matrix with company value on one axis and customer value on the other. We'd sequence implementation by which changes would have the most upside for the company (such as on short-term acquisition rate or long-term profitability) and were positive or at least neutral to customers, as well as the changes that would have the biggest upside for creating great customer experiences and were positive or at least neutral to the company (such as cost, speed and feasibility of implementation). To David's point about narratives: In order to align decision-makers across departments such as marketing, sales, user design, development, strategy, market research, etc., we created before-and-after narratives of the customer experience, highlighting areas of customer pain and profit upside. BTW, these were projects in which the broader competitive strategy (such as R&D, the company's product mix, location of manufacturing, mergers and acquisitions, etc.) was typically fixed, although at times we were addressing those issues, too. In any case, we'd ask our clients what issues were expected to be fluid and which were fixed to set the context and not be whacked by too many unexpected surprises. On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr <rob...@rhjr.net> wrote: > > > > Wilken's Law: > > The effectiveness of research is inversely proportional to the > > thickness of its binding. > > > > I couldn't agree more. In fact, Gladwell's book Blink even backs up this > idea. > > Back to the topic now ... > > -r- > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
