Rob Weening

Experience strategy: Dealing with a UX mid-life crisis
April 10 10:30AM
We make changes to our user experiences based on heuristics, usability testing,
and data, but do we really know if we’re improving the overall experience
over time and across projects? If, like us, you’ve started asking yourself
awkward questions like, “Why are we here?” and “Are we really making
things any better?” and “If we don’t know, should we go on like this?”,
you might be having a UX mid-life crisis.

Vanguard’s web experience is 15 years old and we’ve been sending our
clients paper and speaking with them on the phone for even longer. Over the
years our cross-channel user experience has gone through many iterations.
Recently we made two painful discoveries.

First, as practitioners working on projects, we couldn’t consistently
describe:

- The user tasks and business goals we were trying to address.
- The metrics to show if our solutions were successful.
- The rationale for our decisions.

Second, as managers, we couldn’t answer some basic questions:

- How does the overall experience support user tasks and business goals across
communication channels?
- Is the overall experience “good” and is it improving?
- Do we have a way of prioritizing improvements?

Having made these discoveries, we thought about just going out and buying
sports cars and having affairs, but our managers wouldn’t pay for it.
Instead, we locked ourselves in a room and developed two integrated solutions:

- For practitioners, a Capability Strategy Template that defines a single
functional capability in the context of relevant user tasks, business goals and
metrics for success.
- For managers, an Experience Strategy Map that displays functional
capabilities and shows how effectively they address user tasks and business
goals across communication channels.

So if you’ve been happily iterating your user experience, but have also
started to question yourself, don’t panic – you’ve matured enough to
address some very important issues. Learn about the techniques and tools
we’ve created – our solutions might work for you too.

Intended audience
Mid- to senior-level UX professionals involved in the management or design of
user experiences.

What will the audience take away?
This case study will detail the benefits, process, deliverables, and lessons
learned. Attendees should be able to determine if all or parts of the solution
are appropriate for their organization and begin to consider approaches to
implementation.