Gamestorming your way to a UX strategy
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The document outlines a collaborative process for developing a UX strategy that aligns with business goals, utilizing techniques like brainwriting and gamestorming. Participants created a closed lexicon of terms to generate statements before collaboratively refining them into drafts. Ultimately, a clear vision and mission emerged from this iterative process, which was well-received by executive management.
Gamestorming your way to a UX strategy
- 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.