Interactive Strategy

By Aaron Louie | 0 Comments | Posted in in User Experience | Permalink

Recently, I've been trying to find a concise label that describes the niche that user experience architects occupy in strategic planning. In most large-scale web site redesigns, we begin with an understanding of business goals and marketing/brand strategy. Then we take time to discover the target audiences' goals, context of use, wants, needs, and mental models. We then analyze and correlate the business/marketing goals to the audience goals and emerge with a strategic plan for accomplishing, prioritizing, and measuring those goals. So - what to call this process and its output?

Turns out, it's sometimes called Interactive Strategy. In my brief, unscientific review of web search results and blog posts, there seem to be three somewhat-related definitions of this term:

• A strategic plan for achieving business and user goals through interactive media (e.g., web sites, games, & mobile devices)
• Interactive technologies (usually games) that enable users to plan, simulate, and/or execute strategies
• Interactive methods for strategic planning (usually involves facilitating human-human interactions)

What's common between all three of these definitions are (1) intentional planning and (2) bi-directional feedback loops. In each case, the actor doing the planning is the business or the user. Likewise, the feedback loops occur between business & technology, people & technology, and people & people.

I'm of the opinion that user experience architects need to consider all three of these perspectives when facilitating the strategic planning process. Why? Because the business's goals must survive the user-centered design process.

The gods of User-Centered Design may strike me down for saying this, but the ultimate reason businesses and organizations have web sites is to make money. There may, of course, be more nuance to a web site's purpose than this, but it must, in the end, support the organization's ultimate goal of continuing to exist. Supporting this goal requires insight into how the site will provide something of value to people so they will spend time, money, and attention on the web site. If the information architecture and interaction design do not, in some way, support that final goal, we have failed as user experience architects.

Getting to the golden ideal of a user-centered web site that supports business goals requires a lot of negotiation. This is where those human-human interactions are so crucial. It is often our role as user experience architects to facilitate the conversation between business stakeholders. As user advocates, we also act as intermediaries between end users and the business and IT stakeholders. We must keep track of and enable feedback loops between the various representatives of the business, users, and technical staff so the final product (and ongoing experience of it) delights the user, makes money for the business, and is easily built and maintained.

So what's the role of the user experience architect in Interactive Strategy? Here's how it works, in my experience:

• Research: Without adequate information about the goal, the current status, and what's in between, an "expert recommendation" is not a strategy. It's an educated guess, which can carry a ton of risk. Talk to people on the client's side - business, marketing, and IT stakeholders - and to members of the target audience. Document what they want to do (goals & objectives) and how they want to do it (strategies & tactics).
• Analysis: Take all of that input from all your conversations with all those people and organize it. Using content analysis and theme analysis techniques, generate a hierarchical taxonomy of goals and objectives for the business and for users. Create a similar taxonomy of strategies and tactics is created from the multitude of feature requests and action items collected during our interviews. At ZAAZ, all of these items are then correlated and summarized in a big, 3-dimensional spreadsheet (the Blended Agenda Matrix).
• Planning & Prioritization: Using the insight gained in the research and analysis activities, work with the client to determine the sequence of steps they'll take to meet user's needs and accomplish the business goals. It's usually impossible to implement every strategy at once, so the work must be broken in to phases and prioritized. Using the Blended Agenda Matrix, you can see which strategies will address the highest-priority business and user objectives. Business & IT stakeholders will need to determine which parts of the solution can be implemented first. You can then define how interactions should be structured to keep users engaged as the site evolves.
• Design: For each phase of the solution, design for interaction. Interaction implies a conversation, so design ways for users to talk back to you, to talk with each other, and play with the technology. Make it interactive. Make it fun. And, most of all, create a framework for the design to evolve over time. Look at the first-run experience and how you'll progressive unveil new features and keep users interested and consistently delighted.
• Optimization & Iteration: This is where the evolution happens. Refine the interactions in response to user behavior and feedback. Through usability testing, you can discover whether the design actually works for users before and after it's launched. You can see what's working (and what isn't) via web analytics and online surveys, and multivariate testing will take the guesswork out of which design tweaks will fix the inevitable problems that crop up. Most important of all, refine your strategy over time. Challenge your own assumptions and change your approach based on new information.