What do you do when you need to create a UX strategy for your company? Here's what we did, in a poster presented at UXPA 2017 conference in Toronto.

1. Strategy: A business strategy is a set of guiding principles
that, when communicated and adopted in the organization,
generates a desired pattern of decision making.
– Michael D Watkins, HBR, Sept 10, 2007
UX Strategy: UX strategy is the “Big Picture.” It is the
high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals
under conditions of uncertainty.
– Jaime Levy, UX Strategy, O’Reilly 2015
Three Stages of a Game
– Gray, Brown, and Macanufo,
Gamestorming, O’Reilly 2010
Inputs
Activities
Start
here
Outputs
Closed Lexicon Brainwriting
After brainstorming,
we weren’t any closer
to a strategy, mission,
or vision, but we did
have a lot of words
to work with.
Using the words from the first exercise, I created a set vocabulary
for everyone to use. Each word was written on a stack of post-it notes,
so there was one for each team member.
All the stacks went up on the whiteboard, and each person was
instructed to take one of each of the words. Then each person created
their own statements from the words provided. When we determined we
needed a new word, we’d make copies for everyone to use. We started
with 60 words, and ended with about 70.
At the end of the activity, everyone had one or two sentences, in
“caveman speak” (we didn’t have multiple copies of words, so some
things were missing. But everyone had aversion of their own thoughts,
created from the closed lexicon.
I took each “caveman” versions of the statements and added
the necessary articles and verbs to make them into complete
sentences. I created sheets that had each one of those sentences
at the top and lines for each of the other people to write in their
versions.
Each person started with their own sheet and passed it to the
person on their right. Then we spent two minutes riffing on that
sentence. We repeated the pass-and-rif process until we’d all had
a chance to modify each other’s statements.
So now we had 49 statements to
choose from; 7 sheets that started
with one statement, but which now
each had 7 variants on them. Every
person had had the chance to add,
edit, and remove things from every
other person’s statements.
While we knew that a UX
strategy needed to come from
and support the business
strategy, that wasn’t enough
for us to go on. We started with
a small set of HBR articles, the
company strategy, and some
definitions. And a whiteboard :)
Gamestorming Your Way to a UX Strategy
Jen McGinn
Director of User Experience
Veracode, Inc.
Copyright 2017, Veracode, Inc.
In the 49 potential options
we’d come with, there was
no clear winner, but several
themes emerged. Using those
themes, I created draft vision
and mission statements and
took them back to the team
to review.
Everyone’s voice had been
heard, and we had a path
forward that we could easily
communicate to executive
management. And they were
thrilled.
There was a little tweaking,
of course, but in the end,
all of the people in the process
felt like their intent was there.