On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Neil Cadsawan <[email protected]> wrote:
> Like most answers here and in other places, it depends. Is this > strategy for a project or a business? > I think Neil's differentiation here is a very important one to make and I'd like to elaborate on it a little. It is crucial that we understand *both* types of strategy. We need to understand the basic way our clients make and/or prevent losing money and how they plan to increase/decrease this in the future, in other words their overall business strategy. This is the context in which the success of the individual project will be judged. When it comes to the individual project, we need to understand the business motivation behind it. Why does the client feel like this is worth doing? How will this project make or save the company money? What specific goals does the project need to accomplish? And importantly, how will the project figure into the overall business strategy? We need to understand all this because, ultimately, we are working for the business. Not the users (burn the heretic! burn him!!!). Our job is to use our insight & understanding about the users' goals/contexts/behaviors to make it worthwhile, easy, desirable, and compelling for them to do whatever it is the business values. This could be buying a gadget or simply reading a news article and being exposed to advertising. But when it comes to what an IxD needs to know, I think it's a little different when it comes to a website or a consumer product (including software). If you're trying to get people to buy something from a store, well, that's a whole separate discipline and I'm certainly not going to suggest all IxDs need to be Marketing experts. But what's important when dealing with products is that you need to be able to collaborate with market researchers to understand things like the target segment's buying habits, what they find compelling, etc. Of course, all this quantitative stuff needs to be analyzed concurrently with the qualitative research we do. Okay Dan, so here's the short, short version of what IxDs need to understand about strategy: - We need to know how to gather and interpret information about overall business strategy (what questions to ask, how to communicate why you're asking these questions, etc.) - We need to know how to gather and interpret information about the specific business goals behind individual projects. - We need to know how to take our understanding of the users and use it to make design decisions that will make it easy for the business to meet their goals (by meeting the user's goals) - If we're dealing with commodities (products, software, etc.), then we need to know how to effectively collaborate with market researchers. Take care, Fred ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fred Beecher Sr. User Experience Consultant Evantage Consulting O: 612.230.3838 // M: 612.810.6745 IM: [email protected] (google/msn) // fredevc (aim/yahoo) T: http://twitter.com/fred_beecher ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
