In the last article, we discussed a brief overview of various UX disciplines, and why it is necessary for UX peeps to have a knowledge of all those. In the next series of articles (including this one), we will go over each discipline with the help of an assignment. So, let's dive in!

Strategy Document

The strategy document, in the UX process, is the outcome of business requirements and user research. It is the plan for what you’d like to have happened. You can influence it through the use of this document. The 2 main aspects of the strategy document are:

Business Requirements

It's important to start by clarifying business requirements. Any project needs to make money, even if it's a non-profit, you still need to clarify the business requirements, because you want to be successful, and that means clarifying goals before you start designing. You would be surprised at how many important decisions have not been made by the time you've been asked to design something.

Now Andrew Hinton says that the interface is used as a proxy for difficult decisions, and I think that's true. If some of the important decisions have not been made and you have to start making them when you're designing the interface, then guaranteed there's going to be some impact on the user experience.

User Research

So let's talk about, What is a user? Users are known by many names. They could be your customers, your viewers, you can call them the audience or your clients, whatever your organization calls them with is okay. User research means having a curiosity about your users. Really trying to figure out how they behave. What are people like as they go about their daily business? If you're trying to design a better system for how an artist works, you really want to understand how they go about creating their art.

If you're designing a business application, you want to go on the job and see how it actually work. This is observing versus asking. This is key to proper user experience research. You want to observe people in their natural habitat and see as they actually go about their daily work as opposed to just asking them about what their opinion might be on a great experience. If you were to ask somebody, how can I design you a great experience? You would not get the insights that just observing them as they go about their daily business would get you.

Coming Back to our Strategy Document

It's time to do a project. You only need your sketchbooks. Let's assume you've been hired by Blazed Burger Unlimited. They want you to design an app that allows customers to order burgers. They want their customers to be able to choose a burger from their menu, they want the app to send an email to the restaurant, who will then make the burger and have it delivered, and they're thinking that to make things simple, they'll just have the customer pay the delivery driver. They also want the app to be able to be used on any device.

Now, if you just went ahead and started designing an app based on these vague business requirements, you might run into a problem, because the burger app that might be forming in your head may be very different than what the stakeholders are forming in their head, and that's why we create documentation in user experience, to ensure that we're all on the same page, and we're all in alignment.

Let's pretend that you are now interviewing the stakeholder and getting some requirements back to gain some clarity. So some examples of this would be to ask why are you creating a burger app instead of just sticking to the old telephone method that you always had? And so he might say something like, well, I want to create something that's really engaging and fun, that makes burger ordering a really great experience.

The second question you may ask is how will we know when this has been successful? They say that they want to increase sales by 5%. Another important question is who are the users? Who's going to be using your app? And most businesses will say, well everybody, but the rule of thumb in user experience design is that if you try to design for everybody, you end up designing for nobody. So it's very helpful to target your designs to target audiences.

Now, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to write down the business goals that have been clarified. So that's our business goals, that's one-half of our strategy document. Now for the other half, we're going to find out what are the user's goals, and this is where you get to do a bit of homework. For this phase, you can construct an Empathy Map.

So this is your strategy document. Try making your own document, and do share the link in the comments :) This document will be the basis for the next task we will look at.

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