Commentary

Within the corporate cubicles, whether as employees or as creative consultants, as user experience professionals we must continue to push the user’s agenda higher up the food chain until it is a strategic element of the business. When those in authority pay lip service to user experience, but fail to invest in it; when they compromise the users’ experience in the name of “business”, or if they choose to ignore the user experience altogether, they fail to address the heart and soul of their business. If we accept their position, if we are complicit with their strategy, we fail in our responsibilities to the people who matter most to the business, the customers. We not only fail to do our job, we fail to engage in an essential political process: shifting the business to pay attention to its users.

Architecture is the sustainable process

But what if we are lucky enough to wake up inside an organization already sold on the benefits of user experience design (spending our time profitably solving user experience issues rather than fighting a guerilla or propaganda war)? We can pat ourselves on the back for having landed a dream job, to be sure, but can we claim we’re practicing user experience architecture? Architecture is more than simply defining a user experience. 

User Experience Architecture is more than defining a user experience: it establishes a sustainable process of designing user experiences.

Designing a user experience is the job of a designer; creating a process of designing user experiences is the job of an architect.  Creating a sustainable process that drives ongoing business is by definition a strategic process of the company.  If the business truly believes it is offering differentiated user experiences, it must establish an ongoing, sustainable process to generate these offerings.  User experience design attains the status of Architecture when it takes a seat at the table to drive the business. Obversely, without that strategic visibility and contribution to the business, user experience design is at risk on every project, no matter how earnest our managers are about pursuing it. 

Architecture is more than design on steroids

In Nathan Shedroff’s presentation to CHIFOO in October, he provided a wonderful graphic underscoring the difference between architecture and design. The diagram illustrates Shedroff’s vision for a sustainable process of product development; the graphic works equally well in identifying how user experience design, when applied at the strategic level of the business, transforms into user experience architecture.

On the left side of the figure, the business spends time and resources figuring out its game plan. With a plan (strategy) in place, the business divides up resources, assigns tasks and gets down to doing its business thing, indicated on the right side of the figure. In Shedroff’s view, user experience, engineering and business must all work together on both corporate strategy and implementation to provide a sustainable development process.

Historically, when companies invest in design at all they consider it a function of product development. Positioned on the right side of the diagram design competes for resources with other development functions. In this “implementation” context, with little connection to the larger strategy, design’s role may be reduced to styling or surface treatment. In the worst of circumstances management eliminates design from the development effort to reduce costs or shave time to market.

On the flip side, organizations that invest in design at the strategic level are positioned to respond to “game-changing” shifts in their offerings. User experience design on the left side of the diagram offers management yet another unfocused view into the business’ future. In this “strategic” context, design offers potential without much clarity. In the worst of circumstances, for a company without a disciplined approach to strategy definition or product development, design at the strategic level may distract a company to the point of failure.

User experience architecture defines an end-to-end framework with its feet firmly planted on both sides of the diagram. On the strategic side, user experience architecture offers business strategists an intimate view of their users with intriguing opportunities for differentiation and innovation. On the implementation side, user experience architecture provides the development teams a structural framework in line with the company’s strategic goals. Equally important, a well defined user experience architecture (as a set of deliverables, not just as a process) helps maintain consistency across projects to promote the company’s branding goals and opportunities. In addition, with user experience architecture as a framework, team members on both sides of the diagram have a conduit for communicating changes: designers, engineers and marketing planners can communicate to strategists key user experience discoveries made during the course of development; similarly business managers have a means of communicating any shifts in user experience strategy to the development side.

User Experience Architecture and ‘The Vision’

I have spoken with several business leaders in the past year who have struggled with articulating their product vision.  They have roadmaps: technology roadmaps describing the trajectory of their technology ecologies; product roadmaps describing the evolution of their various product families and other roadmaps to communicate various aspects of their business to different audiences; but they are searching for a compelling vision of their products and services.

User experience architecture as I’ve described it is uniquely positioned to provide a comprehensive vision of our companies’ offerings. Because user experience aspires to address every touchpoint of a company with its users a user experience architecture provides a comprehensive vision of a product and service integrated with all other functions of the company. Consider how a roadmap would be reframed as a User Experience Roadmap: instead of viewing technology shifts in terms of their impact on delivering a product, technology shifts are described in terms of supporting future experiences. Similarly, product roadmaps aren’t described in terms of features; instead products, services, marketing campaigns, web site releases, new packaging, training offerings and the whole ecology of the business is expressed in terms of key user experiences the business expects to address into the future.

Leaders in user experience share this view. In the book “Subject to Change”, Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz et al, discuss UX in much of these same terms. They describe both a UX Strategy (having a strategy for designing user experiences) and incorporating UX into the business strategy.  As they put it, UX design is a means of “creating a long Wow!”, an ongoing process of maintaining customer loyalty, not through some artificial loyalty program, but through the consistent and continual release of stellar experiences.

User experience architecture isn’t the sole owner of the vision, but because it provides a comprehensive framework with design research and thinking at its core, it is uniquely positioned to present the vision from a customer-centric point of view.  Given that most companies claim to put their customer first, why shouldn’t user experience architecture be an integral part of our companies’ strategic and products/services design?

In the next article, I finish this first section on the political and strategic nature of Architecture. What actions can we take to improve the visibility of user experience and improve the likelihood of it being incorporated into business strategy?

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