For readers who are unfamiliar with the term UX strategy, I would like to provide some background on what UX strategy is, before diving into what situations indicate a need for a UX strategy.

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The post Who Needs UX Strategy? first appeared on UX Central.

A sure sign that a behavior is disappearing is that there are new buzzwords and lots of talk about it. Now, we’re supposed to be in the age of customer engagement, experience, relationships and loyalty. The impression is given that these things matter when in fact they don’t.

Loyalty for most organizations is a one-way street. The customer is expected to be loyal to the brand. The idea of loyalty to the customer is not even considered. A survey by Kitewheel found that 73% of customers felt a loyalty program is for brands to reward loyal consumers. However, 66% of marketers surveyed believed that loyalty programs are for consumers to show loyalty to brands.

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The post Relationships are expensive first appeared on UX Central.

But to do that requires another problem of scale: preparing the organization to understand and apply design methods typically associated with the design team, and ultimately allowing those teams to solve their business and customer problems by putting those approaches to work.

At Nasdaq, we calibrate, tune, and refine what else we can be doing as a design team to help the rest of the organization benefit from our approaches and our methods. These are a few of our latest explorations into establishing the company as a design-aware organization.

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The post Enabling Design Influence at Scale first appeared on UX Central.

To this day, many do not question Taylorism, primarily because it was the foundation of many business, engineering, and marketing texts. All of these professions built their knowledge atop the same foundation—which is as old as the Harvard Business School, making it roughly the same age as game-changing innovations like the assembly line and incandescent light bulb.

For over a century, workers in most spheres—from manufacturing to the front lines of service counters to the back office—have been held captive by the idea that the division of labor is the right approach. The tacit acceptance of Taylorism by most business leaders has had a huge impact on the workforce. Has anyone ever asked you to critique this idea or propose an alternative?

Those who live by the aphorism “Anyone can have an idea, but only rock stars can implement them” might pause to reflect on the 115 years over which Taylorism has influenced everyone’s working lives.

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The post Toward a Culture of Integrated Practice first appeared on UX Central.

Aiming to increase sharing not just within the respective product teams, but also with others in the design community, I took some of the engineers’ everyday principles and turned them into agile approaches the design team could practice for faster decision making, improved collaboration and increased overall designer satisfaction.

In this article, we’ll review five engineering principles and processes that can be directly translated to the design discipline.

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The post Engineering our Design Teams first appeared on UX Central.

No matter your status or situation, whether director or loner, you are in a position to lead, to raise the bar in a place where it consistently sits lower than you think it should.

As an in-house UX professional, I’ve formed and run UX teams for multiple companies. As a consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of clients on hundreds of projects. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to get what you want. Most of these things can be applied whether you’re inside of a company or consulting for one, whether you’re a fledgling designer or a veteran leader.

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The post How To Become A UX Leader first appeared on UX Central.

Jane gathers an audience to pitch some ideas on changing things organizationally to help fix this. She walks into a cold room, blurts out facts around how logical her ideas are, peppering in some emotional anecdotes. She speaks out into the darkness of a silent room. 10 slides later, one stakeholder makes a binary statement about considering her ideas and balancing them with other priorities. Jane thanks her “1 shot” group and takes the slog of sadness back to her cube, lamenting that her organization will never change. Within two weeks, Jane has picked up her backlog of tactical design (“red widgets, please”) and her presentation joins the graveyard of good ideas.

So what happened? Jane is good designer for her company. Her ideas around change are good ones. Was it her company being resistant to change? Did they think her ideas were infeasible or wrong?

Perhaps the issue is something completely different. Perhaps it’s not about the quality of her ideas or something specific with her company. It could be, but the more likely reality is that she isn’t using her great design skills internally to affect organizational change.

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The post Use Your UX Skills on the Inside: Becoming an agent of change in your organization first appeared on UX Central.

The post Video: 7 Success Factors For Getting Innovation Going In Your Organization first appeared on UX Central.

The post Video: Growing User Experience In Your Organization first appeared on UX Central.

A digital strategy is the who, what, when, and where of listening and responding to consumers, bridging brand experiences, iterating offerings, and collecting and activating consumer relationships in order to accomplish an actionable and measurable objective. — Digital strategist Bud Caddell

Simply stated, a digital strategy is a plan for how to support business goals through the benefits of digital tools. Strategies guide us in major decisions by providing a sense of direction and cohesiveness to our work. Having a well defined and clear digital strategy ensures that decisions about digital channels are not made on impulse (“let’s make a new app”) or merely in response to available technology (“let’s use QR codes”) but rather as part of a coherent plan that enhances the user experience and maximizes business opportunities. However, we can only have a sense of direction after we have properly oriented ourselves—and this is where the ecosystem map helps.

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The post Designing Digital Strategies Part 2: Connected User Experiences first appeared on UX Central.