Contents
Introduction
DECODED:
CORE UX
STRATEGY
The Missing Link in
Digital Transformation
Jeff Hendrickson
Copyright 2021+
Jeff Hendrickson
All rights reserved
A link to free research and rapid prototyping templates is at the back of the book.
Praise for Decoded: Core UX Strategy
Jeffs life-long passion for learning is conveyed through this book, helping YOU learn the fundamentals of UX Strategy. From the title, you can tell that Jeff intended for you to build the foundation to become a knowledgeable UX practitioner. UX Strategy is a difficult concept to teach or learn, and there are inherent skills an individual needs to possess to deliver it in a digestible and straightforward fashion, close to what Jeff has woven together throughout his extensive career.
If you are leading your organization through digital transformation challenges, youll need his sage insights to be successful. With the concepts decoded, youll have the tools enabling you to understand user goals, needs, and wants more comprehensively.
---Marc Macaluso, CEO, Union Pointe
There are too many tech projects that although complete correctly they never really fulfill the businesss goals. I call these projects successful failures and there are too many of these in business today. User Experience is a discipline that can greatly increase the success of your project meeting or exceeding your companys expectations. If you are looking for a high-level understanding of user experience, then go get another book because this one is filled with a deep understanding of the UX discipline.
I had the pleasure of participating in several UX Design Thinking workshop facilitated by Jeff while we both worked at GE Aviation. Jeff has a masterful understanding of how to get a group of people to understand the real problem and maneuver that group to find solutions. In this book you will find the information needed to help projects and the businesses they support, succeed.
---Travis Wissink, CTO, Military Digital Group, GE Aviation
Anyone fortunate enough to have attended one of Jeffs Design Thinking courses will already know how passionate Jeff is about this subject, and what a positive impact his enthusiasm, his approach and his ideas will have on your own engagements. This book provides the perfect refresher for those already familiar with these concepts, or an eye-opening insight for those coming to this for the first time.
---Robert Marriott, Business Analyst and Design Consultant
I have been working with Jeff for almost 2 decades on different kinds of projects. When we met, we were both in the apparel business, and I grew to quickly appreciate Jeffs creative side. I am very much a left-brain guy, so I valued Jeffs ability to problem solve within the parameters of Brand Promise and price constraints. I now know that Jeff is a good creative problem solver because he is also a strong left-brain thinker as well. He has great range both vertically and horizontally. By vertical I mean that he manages the process from macro to micro. And by horizontal, I mean that he probes and balances logic and creativity.
He can attack both the logical and the creative aspects of any given scenario. And he proves that very early in this book when he calls out the need for balancing People and Tech along with Creativity and Logic. Problem solving is a process of discovery, and discovery has a lot of moving parts. And these four disparate variables must be managed and co-mingled into a harmonious outcome. Knowing which variable to lean on at each moment of discovery is key. Jeff keeps us mindful of all the moving parts so that all available options are examined during the process of discovery.
---Jeff Sward, Founder and CEO Merchandising Metrics
This book is a great foundation for anyone who is seeking how to apply user experience to amplify their Digital Transformation. Jeff explains the benefits of how user experience can benefit cross functional teams as well as product strategy. Jeff also does an excellent job enabling his design thinking workshop to come to life on the pages, so practitioners can learn how to lead sessions that are insight driven and collaborative.
---Cristine Cravens, User Experience and Design Thinking leader
The culture and bedrock of our team [at GE Aviation] rested upon a shared belief that serving others ahead of thinking of yourself was the key to our success. We coined this culture wingman and in every sense of the word this is the spirit Jeff embodied. As you read through his deeply held UX passion in the pages ahead you will see a thought leader that always wants to make others around him better. No matter where you find yourself in your digital transformation this book is a must read to get it right.
---Andrew Coleman, President & General Manager GE Digital
Weaving "UX Strategy" and "Design Thinking" as buzzwords into a conversation is easy. Introducing their actual concepts and methods into an organization is really hard. To help you with the latter, Jeff Hendrickson's little book presents a compact and hands-on introduction to these two important topics: instead of numbing your brain with endless theoretical explanations, his focus is on learning how to "do UX" by, well, doing.
Hendricksons no-nonsense approach helps teams experience the benefits of a systematic user experience practice first hand both in the companys bottom line and in the teams cohesion, motivation, and success.
---Jochen Wolters, UX & DesignOps Lead
Jeff establishes UX as the key ingredient to Design Thinking, linking concept to adoption to outcomes. I am grateful to Jeff for the opportunity to participate in a number of the real-life examples he highlights in the text and experience first-hand the power of UX.
This book is a must for users, stakeholders, and executives at both the business unit and company levels engaging in a new Digital Transformation project or have experienced DT projects that never moved beyond the workshop stage. I trust you will enjoy and benefit from Jeffs teaching, just as I have.
---Paul Haskitt, Sr. Solutions Architect
Foreword
How do you deal with a constantly changing and ever evolving world, markets, and competition? How do you survive and stay relevant when you, your team and company find itself in uncharted territory? Thats the situation we are all in today. This is where we all stand. It started with Digital Transformation and was exacerbated by COVID-19. The transition from physical to digital has caused companies to rethink every aspect of their business from their core business models to their main product offerings, and it has caused organizations to rethink their operations and work models as well.
Lets face it the digital revolution and the COVID-19 pandemic have caught all of us by surprise. One hundred years of MBA training in assets and risk management became useless overnight. 100 years of HR studies in workforce organization and management became irrelevant history. What has survived and what helps organizations move forward is the methodology of Design Thinking a framework of thinking and coping with the new, unexpected, and uncertain reality to arrive at new and unexpected solutions.
Design Thinking originated in the 1960s in the field of engineering in order to creatively solve problems. But I think it became very widely adopted and popular with the emergence of consumer software. It became the primary tool to improve the usability of software programs, i.e., UI/UX design of computer programs. This adoption is quite interesting. Why is it that software made Design Thinking so popular? This interesting evolution points to the keys for its success. Software GUI was completely uncharted territory. There were no prior design paradigms, no textbooks, no experts who had done it one hundred times before. There were no users to ask what they like and dont like.
