Strategy Articles & Videos

  • Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions

    Journey maps are useful for building common ground in an organization, but practitioners often have questions and misunderstandings about their scope and how to create them.

  • Using Prioritization Matrices to Inform UX Decisions

    Visuals such as charts and matrices can help practitioners base important decisions on objective, relevant criteria instead of subjective opinions.

  • The 5 Steps to Service Blueprinting

    Five key steps comprise a framework for service blueprinting that can be scaled to any scope or timeline.

  • Marketing Email and Newsletters: UX Findings Then and Now

    New research finds big changes in newsletter design and in customers’ attitudes toward marketing email.

  • Translating UX Goals into Analytics Measurement Plans

    Focus on UX goals to drive analytics measurement plans, rather than tracking superficial metrics. Identify the core goal of a design to meaningfully measure it.

  • Seamlessness in the Omnichannel User Experience

    Companies must support painless transitions across channels in order to create a usable omnichannel experience.

  • Optimizing for Context in the Omnichannel User Experience

    Design for each channel’s unique strengths and role in the customer journey to create usable context-specific experiences.

  • UX Stories Communicate Designs

    Help internal audiences empathize with users and buy into your design goals with well-crafted stories that build insight and focus on users and their needs.

  • Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners

    Successful journey maps need to be focused on a clear business goal, well communicated in the organization, and truthful to user needs.

  • Minimize Design Risk by Focusing on Outcomes Not Features

    Resist the urge to lead with implementation. Once you know what the need is, you’ll know what to build.

  • When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps

    Journey maps combine two powerful instruments—storytelling and visualization—in order to help teams understand and address customer needs.

  • Customer Journeys and Omnichannel User Experience

    Organizations must create omnichannel UX strategies that optimize the end-to-end user experience of completing a task across devices and interaction channels.

  • How UX Professionals Collaborate on Deliverables

    82% of UX professionals collaborate with other team members to produce deliverables. Ideation workshops and “four-eyes” reviews occur frequently, both in-person and remotely. In addition, the roles and contributions of collaborators vary widely.

  • Simplicity Wins over Abundance of Choice

    As the number of choices increases, so does the effort required to collect information and make good decisions. Featuritis can be an exhausting disease for users.

  • Content Migration Alone Is Not An Effective Content Strategy

    While fairly popular, “lift and shift” is not a viable content strategy. It is a folly fueled by fear, limited resources, inexperience, and politics. There are better ways to ensure high-quality intranet content, and two award-winning designers offer their insights, proving that a bright attitude makes all the difference.

  • Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?

    Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered goals.

  • Segment Analytics Data Using Personas

    Persona-inspired segments can be used in website analytics to uncover trends in data and derive UX insights. Better than (a) lumping everybody together or (b) segmenting on demographics that don't relate to user behavior.

  • User Involvement for User Adoption: An Intranet Strategy

    Involving employees early and often in intranet design projects can not only improve usability, but also encourage user adoption.

  • Availability in the Cross-Channel User Experience

    Don’t limit common activities to a few channels. Identify and support users’ top tasks on all channels and strive to make secondary tasks available.

  • Five Essential Analytics Reports for UX Strategists

    Google Analytics is filled with very useful information for UX Strategists defining a baseline and tracking trends in order to define goals, strategies, and concepts for a brighter tomorrow.