Strategy starts in the problem domain

Hey folks,

Here are the top 10 things I found worth sharing and your UX tip of the week:

UX tip of the week

Creative teams focused only on quality and craft will face challenges. So, how can UX contribute to strategy? Here's a starting point from Ted Goas:

• Understand the problem domain. Talk to customers about their outstanding issues. Follow relevant industry news. Learn your competitors' goals. Find opportunities to intercept, bypass, or ignore them.

• Stay up-to-date on strategy. Start here to dig deeper into business and product strategy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

• Learn how the company makes and loses money. Talk with Sales to understand customer buying decisions. Talk with Customer Success to know why customers stay or leave. Talk with Marketing to understand public messaging.

• Define success metrics with Product. Show how the experiences designed solve key customer problems, contribute to the company's mission, and accelerate growth. (See also: UX Strategy by Jaime Levy)

Top 10 things worth sharing this week

1. If you haven’t heard of Driver Trees and KPI Trees, I recommend exploring them. What would the UX equivalent be? (Related: Measuring Success and Strong Product People)
   
   

2. Free resources to accelerate design projects: Octopus Wireframes, StorySet (illustrations), Framer Shapes (shapes),and Flowbite Icons (icons).
   
   

3. The Google Fonts team built a handy comprehensive guide on Fonts Knowledge.
   
   

4. You’ve probable heard about Atomic Design by Brad Frost. Daniel Pidcock applied that framework to research and created Atomic UX Research. Is it useful or too much?
   
   

5. Check out a digital archive of graphic design put together by Valery Marier.
   
   

6. Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab studied 14 participants in two days of video meetings. The solution to meeting fatigue? Take short breaks because consecutive meetings add stress to the brain.
   
   

7. Jeremy Miller talked about the Peak-End Rule, a favorite UX 'law' of mine. What if we directly asked users about their Peak-End experiences instead of using NPS, CSAT, and CES?
   
   

8. The new 4.1 version of the double diamond was just released. It seems like another example of the UX industry making visualizations about delivering value to users and businesses more complicated than necessary.
   
   

9. Blaze Type made a simple comprehensive guide on how to design fonts. Get it here.
   
   

10. Karwai Pun and the accessibility group from UK Home Office shared best practices for making services accessible.

Thanks for reading!

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Sincerely,
Gerren