Tag Archives: strategy

UX research and strategy meetup

UX Research and Strategy logo with Jennifer Jen Blatz UX design

“I heard about a need in the UX community, and I decided to meet it.”

This quote pretty much summarized the inspiration behind how the newest UX meetup group in Dallas got started. UX Research and Strategy, now just over a month old, has had one successful event so far, and continues to grow.

I regularly attend meetups, and while attending those, I heard repeatedly that attendees wanted more resources on UX research. They wanted to learn about different methods, best practices, how to “sell researcher to executives,” and other topics along those lines.

So I reached out to a couple of former co-workers and fabulous ladies, Lauren Singer and Lorie Whitaker to see if they were interested in helping me create a meetup group focused on UX Research, and with Lauren’s suggestion, Strategy too. They thought it was a great idea. First we crowd sourced the idea, to test that it was a valid concept. We posted the idea on LinkedIn to gauge interest in the topic. We got a lot of positive feedback and interest so we decided to move forward with the group’s formation. Thus UX Research and Strategy was born.

Jennnifer Jen Blatz, Lauren Singer and Lorie Whitaker at the first UX Research and Strategy meetup.
Jen Blatz, Lauren Singer and Lorie Whitaker celebrate the inaugural UX Research and Strategy meetup in May 2019.

Our first meetup was held at Lifeblue in Plano. Our generous hosts provided food and beverages as well as an amazing view from their 12th floor balcony.  Crazy storms rolled through just a couple of hours before our event was supposed to kick off. We were not sure if anyone was going to show up. No one wants to drive in monstrous thunder storms. But by the time the event started, the storms  passed, the skies cleared, the temperatures dropped (a very good thing in Texas) and the crowd started rolling in. We had nearly 50 attendees which made our first meetup much more successful than we anticipated. Woot!

Attendees at UX Research and Strategy
Leaders of UX Research and Strategy shared the group’s mission and goals with attendees.

We first started the night with introducing ourselves and the group. We shared the group’s mission and motivations. Then we asked the attendees to participate in an exercise with us. The leaders of UX and Research and Strategy wanted to make sure that this group is meeting the community’s needs. This goes back to the original ask of what people felt was lacking in the UX community, and how we can fill that gap. What better way to get feedback on the group then have the members brainstorm the direction the group should go?

Members share the hopes, fears and ideas for the UX research and Strategy group's direction.
Attendees of the first meetup brainstormed their hopes, fears and ideas for the UX research and Strategy group’s direction.

We asked the members to break in to smaller groups to come up with their hopes, fears and ideas for the group.  Again, we wanted attendees to weigh in and help us shape the topics the group would cover through 2019 and beyond.

Everyone was happy to participate in this brainstorming activity.  After the groups explored the fears, hopes and ideas for the UX Research and Strategy groups, we then recorded some of the highlights in a shareout so that all attendees could hear the fabulous ideas people had.

Hopes, fears and ideas for the UX Research and Strategy group
Hopes, fears and ideas for the UX Research and Strategy group.

We wrapped up the night with a bit more networking and idea exchanging. What were the leaders of UX Research and Strategy planning on doing with this information? Planning out all of our future events, of course!

If you would like to stay on top of what the UX Research and Strategy group is up to, be sure to connect to us on LinkedIn. Also follow the group on Eventbrite to see all of the fabulous events we have happening in 2019 and beyond.

UX Strategy Canvas

UX Project and Strategy Canvas Jennifer Blatz UX Design

There are a plethora of Canvases out there on the internet these days to help teams define and scope a project. You have Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX Canvas, and the Business Model Canvas, and the User Centered Design Canvas, just to name a few. All of these canvas structures provide value in many ways. And many of them share similar types of content that helps drive the team to a better understanding about the project.

For an organization I was working with, I needed to take a slightly different approach. I needed to display other things that were not included in the standard and approved canvases already existing. So I came up with my own UX Strategy Canvas template.

How can we determine what we will be building when we are still trying to define the problem and figure things out?

What makes this Canvas different from other canvases is the inclusion of UX deliverables and activities. Yes I know, that at a high level, UX deliverables should not be explicitly stated. How can we determine what we will be building when we are still trying to define the problem and figure things out? Yes that makes total sense. But the organization’s UX process was so immature, and our product partners did not know what to expect from the UX designers, so we needed to set some expectations for the design journey. Now I’ll talk about the different sections of the UX Strategy Canvas.

Project

This is the very highest level summary of the project. It includes two major components: The Vision Statement and Project Details and Deadlines.

The Vision Statement

A few overarching sentences about what you want the product to be. It defines the scope and purpose of the product without getting specific about how the purpose will be achieved. The vision statement describes the intent rather than the execution.

Project Details and Deadlines
  • Deadline for Delivery to Dev: Date design needs to be wrapped up
  • Release date: Date that dev is finished and it will be released
  • Point in the process: Planning, concepting, design, delivery, etc.
  • Key Players: Product, designers, engineers, key stakeholders
  • Systems involve: Focus Areas, Backend or Front end systems, Control panels

Customer Problem and Pain Points

The problems you are trying to solve for the customer. The particular pain points that this project is trying to address.

Circumstances of Use

The who, what, when, where, and why of the product. This is user focused to have a basic understanding of who we are designing for.

Design Criteria

The design principles that are specific to your product. How your design makes the experience meaningful and improves usability. How design elements like fonts, colors etc., will improve the experience. Useful design criteria are based on your research, and are written with the goal of differentiating the product, of improving upon what’s already been done, and of setting a high bar.

UX Activities

List the high-level UX strategies and deliverables that you intend to include with your project. This is so your product partners and engineers know what they can expect to be shared and collaborated with in the process of designing the project.

Success Metrics

Again, the success metrics is broken down in to two separate entities: Business and Customer success definitions.

Business Success

How success relates to the business goals: UX metrics fall into the 5 categories summarized with the acronym  HEART: happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.

Customer Success

How success relates to the customer’s goals: UX metrics fall into the 5 categories summarized with the acronym  HEART: happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success.

Summary

Granted, I understand that these do not define all things for the  project. But the point of this canvas is to have a benchmark and starting point to get all of the team on the same page. The UX Designer, UX Researcher or Project manager can ask the questions that I recently wrote about in my article “Questions to Ask Your Client in a Kickoff,” to get the team aligned on the project. Those questions, along with a better understanding of the customers needs, goals and pain points are the basis of this UX Strategy Canvas.

Please let me know if you have any feedback, questions or comments on my UX Strategy Canvas template.

Questions to ask your Client in a Kickoff

Jennifer Blatz UX design kickoff questions
The kickoff meeting is a great place to start your exploration in to a new UX design project.

So you hear a new project is coming your way. And you don’t know anything about it. You see on your calendar that a meeting has been scheduled with your product manager, the developers and a few other people you don;t know. This initial meeting is what is known as a “Kickoff Meeting” and this is a great opportunity for you to get some questions answered.

Questions answered?!? Yikes. What questions? Well that is pretty simple. You start to think about what information you need to get the project started. As a UX designer or researcher, there might be a million questions swimming in your head about the project. And you worry that there is no way you are going to get them all answered in one hour-long kickoff meeting. And that is OK if they are not all answered in that first meeting.

The purpose of this post is to give you a check list of questions to come prepared to the kickoff meeting. There is nothing worse than blanking out when you hear that infamous prompt: “Do you have any question?”

Well of course you do, you have a million of them But you have suddenly drawn a blank.

Jennifer Blatz User Experience UX designer

OK. Let’s fix that. As with any project, it’s good to have a plan and come prepared. Here is a list of questions that you could ask at a kickoff meeting (or followup if you run out of time) so that you have information to get you started on a project.

Questions for the Kickoff

  • Tell me a bit about the project. Give me a bit of context.
  • What are the goals of the project?
  • What is the motivation behind this project?
  • How would you define success for this?
  • What research already exists for this project or something similar?
  • What do you want to find out through research?
  • What is the timeline and deadlines?
  • What are the user’s main pain points?
  • How do you know these are the main pain points?
  • What do you think is missing (from the design/app/interface)?
  • What do you think would make it better?
  • What do you expect the outcomes or deliverables to be?
  • Who are the stakeholders we should be talking to?
  • Are we leaving out any resources?
  • Where do we go from here to get started? What are the next steps?

They key here is to squash assumptions and to understand the project’s motivation, goals, success metrics, expectations and deadlines. A few key questions, at your fingertips, should help you to gather this very important information.

How to do a Content Audit

Is your company thinking of updating their website and you need to figure out what content already exists on your site?

AND what new content they want to include?

AND what old content should be carried over in to the new site?

Then is sounds like you need to do a content audit.

What is a content audit?

According to Wikipedia a content audit is the process of evaluating content elements and information assets on some part or all of a website. 

In a related term, content inventory, is a quantitative analysis of a website. It simply logs what is on a website. A content inventory will answer the question: “What is there?” and can be the start of a website review. A content audit will answer the question: “Is it any good?”

Specifically, Slater states that the content audit can answer five questions:

  • What content do we already have?
  • Who is making this content?
  • How do people find it?
  • How is it performing?
  • Is the content current (accurate) or outdated?

I came across a great, and very in-depth resource to assist you with your content analysis. On The Moz Blog there’s a great article called “How To Do a Content Audit – Step-by-Step” and it chock full of great resources to help you get started.

Here is a breakdown of some of the topics covered:

A step-by-step example of our process

  • Step 1: Assess the situation and choose a scenario
  • Step 2: Scan the site
  • Step 3: Import the URLs and start the tool
  • Step 4: Import the tool output into the dashboard
  • Step 5: Import GWT data
  • Step 6: Perform keyword research
  • Step 7: Tying the keyword data together
  • Step 8: Time to analyze and make some decisions!
  • Step 9: Content gap analysis and other value-adds
  • Step 10: Writing up the content audit strategy document

Enjoy and good luck!