I think of strategy as the way to create a long-term advantage. For a football team, it might be to tire a big and slow defense.
For an product company, it might be to differentiate itself in a commodity market by offering high margin products. (Apple) For a social software company, it might be to create the best movie recommendation engine around. (Netflix) For a web design agency, it might be to acquire clients by focusing on web standards. For a search company, it might be to make the smartest search/ad engine out there. (Google) Tactics are the ways to do these things. The game-plan. The football team goes no-huddle. The product company produces higher quality products and builds stores in upper class neighborhoods. The social software company creates interface to elicit ratings and hires data geeks (or runs contests) to make the best recommendations possible. The web design agency participates in the W3C community and publishes case studies on how they saved a client huge bandwidth costs. The Search company tries to get Javascript on as many web sites as possible so their corpus of data is the biggest. They hire the smartest data geeks to run algorithms against it. They A/B test the results. The design strategy is manifested in how well these things are supported in the interface...how well Netflix can get users signed up and eliciting movie ratings, or how well Google can get people installing Javascript or making search queries. There are activities/actions that companies need their customers to perform for that company to be successful. It is the job of designers to create software/products/services that elicit those actions. The mediums change, but the designer's basic challenge is to support/change people's behavior. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36819 ________________________________________________________________ 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
