I was fortunate to attend China’s 5th annual User Friendly (www.upachina.org/userfriendly2008/en/index.html) conference in Shenzhen in October. What an impressive conference! China’s user experience community is growing rapidly and has the benefit of doing so when our field is well established.

Especially exciting to me was the theme of strategy and user experience. Paul Sherman, president of UPA International, opened the conference by reminding us that we are change agents. “Change agents must have conviction to state the facts based on data” even if the results are unpleasant. A strategic view of user experience, he said, requires a long term focus. Jason Huang, President of UPA China talked about the opportunity to make UX more strategic, and the barriers facing the UX community in China. 

Susan Dray presented a broader view of usability, aligning our activities with strategic business goals and the value proposition. Both Susan and Ginny Redish emphasized the value of user research to the whole company, not just to inform a product design or redesign.

Wayne Hom, CTO and EVP of Augmentum, described how UX can deliver value across the organization, from products to services and customers. Rachael Austin, Senior UCD Manager at HSBC, talked about her team’s global leadership role. They map the whole customer experience, including systems and in-branch experiences.

Change is always a theme in my projects involving in-house software design. I like to say “when you’re designing your systems, you’re designing your business”.  As such, we start with business goals—where is the business going, what are they hoping to achieve, and how can we align our design with those business goals?

Strategic user experience means looking across the organization, taking a view beyond each application or website. Paul talked about helping neighboring disciplines understand users—bringing data to the whole organization. Jason emphasized that our methods can target many business problems, it’s not just about research and testing. Ten years ago, my team and I created Corporate Usability Goals for several clients, goals aligned with business goals and designed to be applied across disciplines.

This validates the approach I teach in my UX Strategy course, which offers a kind of balanced scorecard approach. Start with business goals and enable adjacent groups to determine their own goals in support of the UX strategy, whether they are customer service, marketing, sales or product development. This allows the UX strategy to evolve in a cohesive way, and helps deliver a consistent customer experience. Of course, this approach is all about change—for us, for our companies, for the way we influence our businesses. That’s pretty exciting.