Matt's Brain

Good design needs strategy that is more than just a bit of jibber jabber between people with marker pens.

As a result of the recent discussion about design process on my current project I’ve had to give some thought to design strategy and how to talk about it with the business.

In particular the value of having a strategy documented as opposed to just articulated amongst members of the design team.

We work in an agile environment which means we try to be documentation light (See this excellent post on that subject, from Smashing Magazine of all places) so there is a natural inclination on the business/dev side not to use any sprint time for documentation that doesn’t add directly to that sprint.

I won’t go into the full discussion here, or the oddness of needing to develop a strategy to develop a strategy but it seems like a good opportunity to share some bullet list level reasons that developing and documenting a strategy adds value to a project. First of all it might be helpful to specify what I mean by a design strategy.

Working Definition

We define a design strategy as the design principles we intend to use to deliver our business goals, and how these will be implemented. Every design decision is expressed in terms of its place in delivering the results necessary to achieve a particular goal.

For example for software to support sales people in a financial organisation:

• Business Goal: Be profitable
• Supporting Goal: Create situations where client wants to trade with us
• Business Strategy: Be first to client with trade idea

The design strategy to deliver this might be:

• Design Principle: Enable salesperson to get idea to client from any place, at any time
• Supporting Principle: Ensure sales person can put an idea or material supporting an idea in front of a client with the minimum amount of system interaction possible.
• Example Application: Sales people often use new articles to initiate a conversation with clients and to support sales ideas. A possible application of this strategy might be enabling a salesperson to open a chat window with a client from a news item they are viewing with one click. The chat would automatically be populated with a link to the item. This simplifies and speeds up the workflow of opening a chat window from a separate menu and then switching back to the news item to copy the link and then switching back to the chat to paste it again.

6 Reasons

It may seem like a lot of work for a fairly simple interaction design decision, but by framing our decisions in this way we are creating several advantages:

1. Better Decisions – In conjunction with other UX artefacts that spell out our understanding of users (such as personas) we make sure that our decisions are focused on the right business problems and are decisions that are relevant to the types of users we have.
2. More Transparent Decisions – By documenting both the rational for our solution and the user environment we are delivering our solution in our thinking is transparent to the business. It can be challenged early if we are working from incorrect assumptions or going down a problematic path. We also now have a framework for keeping debate over design decisions focused, increasing the probability of decisions being made based on good design and business principles as opposed to internal politics or short term vested interests.
3. Faster, Cheaper Design and Development – Because this framework allows us to make better decisions up front and deal effectively with challenges, there is less time spent in endless design reviews and less design work that needs to be rethought further down the line. This gets design delivered faster with more room for considered thought and exposure to the business and users.
4. Better implementation – The responsibility for a good user experience is shared across the whole team, not just in design. By making the strategy transparent it can be used across the organisation to inform the delivery of our desired user experience informing (for example) development decisions, sales decisions and project planning decisions.
5. More (and more focused) Innovation – Working to a strategy keeps designers focused on the bigger picture when working on the small details and allows us to design proactively as opposed to reactively. This creates opportunities to think about the whole solution and leads to an environment where designers can innovate, constantly challenging if the solution is a good as it should be. (See Brendan Nelsons excellent Grid Iron vs Football metaphor here for more on this.)
6. A Clear Message of Intelligence and Value for stake holders – As well as leading to better and faster design a clear strategy makes it easier for the business to show value to their stake-holders. They can demonstrate that they are making good, innovative and informed decisions. A good strategy links every decision back to the business goals that created the need for your project in the first place, and anchors those decisions in the reality of your actual users.

So … very businessy this post, but kind of important. If as a designer you’re invested in doing good work a strategy is vital for creating the conditions to do it. It’s been my experience that a strategy that is under the radar, articulated by designers but not shared with the rest of the team isn’t enough.