1980k 10/22/14 1980k 10/22/14

Influencing Strategy by Design

Over the past three years, Tom Chi & I have presented ourInfluencing Strategy by Design workshop to over a hundred professional designers across the World. This full-day course teaches mid to senior level designers how to influence and improve strategic decision-making within their organization.

In particular we outline how organizational dynamics, metrics, design skills, and executive presentations can open up unique opportunities for designers and get them a "seat at the table". Over the years, I've been compiling the materials we have presented. Here's a set of our workshop materials and presentations.

Factors Limiting the Organizational Influence of Design

Each time, we start the course by asking attendees to share what factors they felt were limiting their organizational influence. Each time a common set of themes emerged: organizational imbalance, lack of shared understanding, resource constraints, and market dynamics.

When Design Influences Strategy…

At the start of each course we asked attendees to share what they wanted to see as a result of greater strategic influence. Here’s a compilation of what we’ve heard.

Organizational Dynamics

One of the first areas of focus in the Influencing Strategy by Design course is organizational dynamics. Many designers hoping to increase their role in product and corporate strategy start with their design organization and its position in the company.

Do these phrases sound familiar? “Our design organization needs to be more strategic.” “The design team is not included in up-front strategic decisions, we need to convince the organization we should be.” These circumstances are frequently blamed on either reporting structure (where the design team reports in), or a lack of organizational understanding about the role of design. While both of these factors may be in play, focusing only on them to increase influence is unlikely to yield results.

We also walk through some global trends that provide designers with an opportunity for leadership roles. Specifically Tom illustrates the transition from the 1800s craft economy to the 2000s creative economy.

Design Skills

Perhaps the biggest area of focus in the course is how a designer’s existing skills can be applied to business and product strategy. Many design organizations seek to impact strategic decision-making by learning how to speak the language of business. But until they master these new skills, they are likely to be the least qualified people to discuss business strategy at the corporate decision-making table. Yet no one else at the table besides the design team has a complete set of design skills. These skills define a unique perspective that designers can bring to strategic work. Additional information:

Metrics

We spend a fair amount of time discussing the impact of metrics on product design and strategic influence. Metrics are used by the organizations that track them to decide what initiatives to pursue, to understand the impact of behavioral trends on decisions, and to interpret the impact of past decisions.

Executive Presentations

One of the last topics discussed in the course is executive presentations. When working on strategic initiatives that impact business direction, more likely than not, designers will need input and buy-in from key stakeholders.

Presenting to executives doesn’t have to be a high stress affair. In fact, many senior level leaders relish the opportunity to hear customer stories and get an influx of data from “the front lines”. Because of their far-reaching responsibilities, executives can’t know all the information they need and are often short on time. As a result, they are data hungry and want the information they need presented with high data density and clarity. Understanding this mindset illuminates several ways to structure and get the most out of executive presentations.

We also outline several tips for presenting to executives or senior leadership within an organization.

3 Take Aways

At a high-level we advocate these three steps for any designer or design team interested in expanding their strategic involvement or influence.

HTML5, How to rethink your web strategy

HTML5, How to rethink your web strategy from faberNovel. This study will give mobile app editors the insights they need to fathom the performance of HTML5 - quoted as the new standard of the web - and adjust their multi-platform strategy accordingly.

1980k 6/26/12 1980k 6/26/12

1980k 11/4/11 1980k 11/4/11

Web strategy: The best way to research your next web project

Article Source: Click Here

THE ESTIMATED TIME TO READ THIS ARTICLE IS 6 MINUTES

In my experience many organisations rush into major redesign projects without having a clear idea of where they are going or even what is wrong with their current site. At Headscape we have found that this inevitably leads to scope creep, internal politics and finger-pointing further down the line. That is why we favour a requirements gathering phase at the beginning of projects.

Broadly speaking this falls into 2 phases: a review of the organisation’s current online presence and a discussion with internal stakeholders to establish aims and objectives.

In this post I would like to focus on the first part: the review of the current online presence.

A typical review falls into 4 stages. These are:

An expert review .
A heuristic review.
Competitor analysis.
An analytics review.

Although we often carry out all four stages, not all are necessary for every project. For example, it is not possible to do a competitor review when working on an intranet.

That said, let’s look at each of these stages in more detail, starting with the expert review.

An expert review

Typically it falls to me and my 16 years of experience working with the web to write expert reviews. They normally consist of spending a couple of days trawling the website until I know it back to front. As I work through the site I identify various issues. Many are obvious such as poor navigation or overly verbose copy. However, others can be much more subtle such as no clear calls to action or inconsistent labelling.

Once I have reviewed the site in detail I translate my findings into a report. This document does not just identify flaws it also suggests possible solutions. The document is designed to be circulated to internal stakeholders and so contains a large degree of education about web design best practice.

An example of an expert review.

The exact content of the expert review will vary. However, typically it include sections on accessibility, usability, design, content, social media etc. It also tends to focus heavily on business objectives, calls for action and how return on investment is going to be measured.

In many ways the expert review is similar to a heuristic review with the exception that it doesn’t just observe, it also makes recommendations.

A heuristic review

A heuristic review uses a standard set of criteria to measure the success or otherwise of a website. As with the expert review these cover areas such as usability, accessibility, design, content and more.

The website is measured against the criteria on a 1 to 3 rating with 1 being poor and 3 being high.

This review provides a more objective analysis of the website than an expert review because the reviewer is using a consistent set of criteria and rating to measure the effectiveness or otherwise of the website. These numerical results also enable us to provide clear visual representations of the strengths and weaknesses of the site. This enables you to see at a glance which areas require additional work.

An example of the visualisation provided in a heuristic review An example of a heuristic review where the site suffers from an obvious weakness in one area.

Another advantage of heuristic reviews is that because they use a consistent set of criteria it is easy to compare one website with another. This can be useful when comparing your site to the competition. However heuristic reviews are time-consuming and so a competitor analysis may often be more appropriate.

A competitor analysis

Depending on the number of competitors an organisation has, a competitive analysis can manifest itself in a number of ways. When there is only one or 2 major competitors in may be appropriate to do a heuristic style review. However, if there are numerous competitors a stripped down version of an expert review is probably more useful.

In this scenario a web design consultant spends a few days looking at the competitors’ websites and identifying their strengths and weaknesses. Where the competitors do something well we learn and improve upon it. Where mistakes have been made, these can be avoided in our own development project.

In certain situations it can also be beneficial to carry out usability testing on the competitors websites. These sites act as a prototype for your own development project and help identify usability issues that can be avoided on your own website.

It is important to stress however that looking solely to the competition for inspiration is a mistake. If you do not look outside of your sector for examples of best practice you are at best going to be following the competition. To truly innovate you need to look further afield for inspiration.

Examples of Higher Education websites all looking the same As can be seen from the Higher Education websites above, if you only look to your own sector for inspiration all of the sites quickly begin to look very similar.

An analytics review

The final part of the review process is an analytics review. This requires website analytics (such as Google analytics) to be installed on the existing site. In most cases organisations already have analytics installed, although they are notoriously bad at monitoring them.

An example of the Analytics review Analytics reviews can give a great insight into your users and what they want to achieve.

Analytics are incredibly important in any web project. Without them it is impossible to judge whether the web project generates a return on investment. Existing analytics are necessary to provide a baseline against which the redesigned site can be compared. However an analysis of the existing analytics can act as more than a baseline, it also provides a real insight into the behaviour of users.

The exact details of the information available will vary depending on how the analytics are set up. However, using techniques such as advanced segmentation it is possible to tell how various users behave. For example on a law firm website you could ascertain whether users who have viewed attorney biographies were more likely to contact the organisation than a user who only looked at information about the services they offered.

This type of information is obviously invaluable in designing any future website. For example, if you know users are more likely to contact you if they have read an attorney’s bio then the website can be designed to funnel users to these pages.

Is it worth it?

You may be wondering whether all of this research is entirely necessary before beginning to even discuss business objectives, let alone build the website. This is a fair question and the honest answer is that it is not always necessary to complete all of these steps. However, at the least this kind of research will inform a major redesign project. It also has the potential to save a project hundreds of thousands of dollars by revealing that what was originally envisaged is not actually required. Nothing is more dangerous than going down the line of thought which results in a website which does not meet users needs or fulfil the organisation’s objectives.