User experience strategy

This is a topic I'm researching a lot lately :) 

Today I was reminded about an article I found some time ago: "Why Microsoft had to destory Word" by Peter Merholz. His article is about the design process of the Microsoft Office Ribbon interface. They used what he calls Experience Principles:

Harris and his team realized that they had to essentially burn down the interface and rebuild it. After conducting deep research on how people actually use the tool, they came up with a set of what they called "Design Tenets" that guided the decision-making for the new Office UI:
A person's focus should be on their content, not on the UI. Help people work without interference.
  • Reduce the number of choices presented at any given time.
  • Increase efficiency.
  • Embrace consistency, but not homogeneity.
  • Give features a permanent home. Prefer consistent-location UI over "smart" UI.
  • Straightforward is better than clever.
These tenets were the new religion of Office 2007. Any suggested UI functionality was mapped against these tenets, and if any were violated, that function wouldn't make it in. So, a tool like Clippy, which tries to figure out what you're doing and offer suggestions, gets removed because "straightforward is better than clever."
 This is also something that is a part of the process they use at Miskeeto:

How we do it
To develop your user experience strategy, we do the following:
  • Evaluate the usability of your site/product and any competing sites/products
  • Interview stakeholders (we travel to your offices)
  • Define business and project goals
  • Evaluate technical and business constraints
  • Define success metrics
  • Establish the guiding tenets for your “experience vision”
  • Establish design criteria for all designs
  • Create sketches, wireframes, and prototypes (when needed)
  • Work with your team on implementation considerations
  • Communicate the experience vision to the team via training and presentation
  • Create documents to help you communicate the vision and our findings throughout your organization
  • Communicate and collaborate with you throughout the process
For more background information read "Developing a user ecperience strategy" by Robert Hoekman Jr. Very interesting!

At the end of Peter Merholz's article he thanks his colleague at Adaptive Path,Brandon Schauer, who turns out has also   got some great insights into this subject matter :)

I havn't read much yet of his blog, but some things I like to reference:

4 Experience hacks

I’ve been looking at my own practices and thinking through the case studies of others to identify relatively low-cost and low-effort activities that can up your slugging percentage. While none of these are panaceas, I hope they can really help improve the chances of success. I’m still working on the exact language, but here’s where I stand today:

  1. Get customer empathy into your business — see a handful of customers face-to-face, finding patterns of insights that tell you how to meet your business objectives. I think this can become almost recipe-like given the right picture of integrating business objectives and customer insights.
  2. Define the experience you want customers to have — this is an obvious step that’s too often skipped. Beyond being freaking “friendly” and undoubtedly “easy to use”, what should the experience be like? Create some experience principles to guide every design decision.
  3. Customer experience ideas are cheap. Have lots of them, but only execute the best handful. — Avoid the decision-making bias of primacy. Your first idea is rarely the best idea. Don’t waste development cycles and customer attention to find that out. Instead, have many ideas and use your insights and experience principle to vet them and find the best bets.
  4. Return to the customer context. Often. — Working on a fast-paced design project we realized that we had become so engrossed in our own understanding of the business requirements that we lost the perspective of the customer. We didn’t have budget for usability testing, so we instead conducted a “dry-run-of-one.” We found a single representative customer, halted the design process for an afternoon, and walked the customer through our best paper-based simulation of the current design. We learned tons. It was such a good use of valuable time that we stopped and conducted other dry-runs-of-one at other points in the design process. It’s may not be as rigorous as full usability testing, but it was a great ROI.

to be continued.. :)