In the 90s, we didn't have a process when we designed software. I was making interfaces, prototypes, building software, early web stuff, and I don't know how we did it, but we did it without wireframes and sticky notes, journey maps, site maps. I don't know how. It was like, I guess we were just playing chess in our head and using analytical thinking to design software and strategize what we were building. And this didn't go on forever.com, bubble crashes. They didn't blame it on us having a lack of process. They blamed it on us having no business model, but by the year 2002, 2003, information architecture interaction design and eventually user experience design developed a methodology that a lot of agencies and enterprises followed.  I'd pretty much have these jobs at agencies where I'd be given a requirements deck or brief, something that said exactly how the product was supposed to work with all the features, and I was supposed to build it on spec and on time, and that was pretty much what I was doing for years and years. And I was getting very frustrated because I didn't have a say in what the product would actually be. And then I got to work on my first discovery phase, and this was rad because all of a sudden I was working directly with the stakeholders, and I was having the opportunity to learn about the customer segment that we were targeting and do research trying to pinpoint these customers and understand why or why not they might use our product or service. And I got to do competitive research and put it together in this real fancy brief and present it to the stakeholders, and then whether they accepted it or not, we would move into the implementation phase, and I had other monkeys doing the wireframes at that point. And what I decided it was all I really wanted to do was the discovery phase. I really just wanted to focus on that, and so I started learning more about it because at the time it was evolving, and people were starting to call it user experience strategy. There wasn't any books about it. There was a mention of a book in Indie Young's mental model, she had the word UX strategy in there as part of an equation that Jesse James Garrett wrote, and there were some articles about it and some loose frameworks that barely made any sense, but I was looking for something that explained all the techniques, gave a definition, and a really solid framework that was repeatable. And there wasn't, and the agency I was working for, they wanted me to focus mostly on discovery phase and then on to managing the teams to build out the products and services. So I build, by 2010 I decided I was going to start my own practice that just did UX strategy or if the clients hired us to do UX strategy, then we would do the UX design as well, we hedged a bit. So we had deliverables that were the standard user experience deliverables, wireframe, site maps, et cetera, but the focus was really on doing strategy. That was the only way I would work on the product. And I've been doing that ever since, working as a consultant doing UX strategy. And then by 2013 I got this harebrained notion that I should write a book on UX strategy. I had already started teaching it at a college in Los Angeles, and so I thought well the students kept asking for my DAGs and my deliverables, my templates, and I was like I need a book, and there was no book. So even though I was, maybe still am a terrible writer, I thought I'll go ahead and write a book. There was a girl in my class who said she was getting her masters in writing, and so I said hey, I'll pay you, you can write a book, let's write a proposal. We submitted it to O'Reilly Media, they accepted it. We had to have a sample chapter, it was a nightmare, I learned how hard writing a book is. Just even writing a proposal is, and for all of you who are thinking about writing a book, I'd think twice about it, I mean unless you're cool with taking two years off from work, not making any money and probably having to pay a lot of people to support you, while you sit alone in a library or do somewhere and write this book. And so my process was basically I had all these recordings of all my lectures and I had them transcribed and then I wanted to put them together so that I had a framework and a series of techniques. And this required reading a butt load of business books because I knew a lot about software design, but not so much about business strategy. So I had to read the classics, Drucker's, you know, management, tasks, responsibilities and practices, then moved on to Michael Porter, having a competitive advantage. Then I had to get into how to explain how to do competitive research and analysis. So this was a really expensive book, business and competitive analysis, really, really boring. And then I had to learn about gathering competitive intelligence. And this was like so complicated for me that I bought this book, competitive intelligence for dummies. And that helped. And then I had to get up to speed on more contemporary pop business concepts. So I read Alex Osterwalder's business model generation and I was basically able to move on to coming up with the first tenant of my framework, which was business strategy. The idea is that business strategy is the plans and choices and decisions that a company uses to guide itself to greater probability. So once I had that nailed, I had to figure out my second tenant, value innovation. And so that meant moving on to Blue Ocean strategy, where they talked about value innovation, where you're trying to bring the cost of either running the business or what you're selling to your customers down, but bringing the value, the value proposition, what you're offering up. Like a really good example of that I think is Airbnb, if we think about it compared to a hotel, in most cases we'll pay less, but we get more. We'll have a kitchen, a bigger space, we might stay in a more hip or part of town. They have true value innovation. And I read, of course, the innovator's dilemma by Clayton Christensen and crossing the chasm, this sort of thing, you know, get up with the disruptive innovation thing. Moving on, applying value innovation to software design, and trying to figure out absolutely what was the primary utility of a product. Because a product is composed of many, many features. But what were the things that were absolutely indispensable? And really focusing on that. That to me was core to UX strategy. So then, I had to figure out how I was going to explain validated user research. Lean startup had come out, which totally made me have to rethink how I was going to explain this discovery phase. Because it had changed now where it wasn't just this thing that you're going to do upfront, but something that you're going to, strategy was something that you're going to actually revisit throughout the process. Build measure, learn, build measure, learn, build measure, learn. So after reading that, I'm saying, uh-oh, I have to rethink my whole thing. And then reading running Lean by Ash Maria and understanding how he was doing these problem solution interviews upfront without any product for user research. And the idea was that you wanted to get measurable results by typically asking more closed-ended structured questions so that you could see patterns and get to a point of validation or invalidation. And I started then learning about Steve Blank, where basically Lean startup came out of this idea of customer discovery, where you want to go out and actually discover who your customers are. And I mashed up his ideas with Alan Cooper's about phase provisional persona and came up with validated user research. This idea that your product is not a product until you're selling something. That it's really just an experiment. And that we want to rapidly prototype something and get it in front of customers slash users as soon as possible so that we could learn, A, is it solving a problem that they actually have?  And I don't really have a book to show you on Killer UX because Killer UX is something that just comes, right? You never know until you see it sometimes. But to me, it's making something that's absolutely frictionless. If you think about Steve Krug's book, Don't Make Me Think, of course, we want them to be able to use our products and services without having to think. It's not about how many clicks but how hard each click is. And taking that to the next level, for me, it's about conversion. It's about getting my suspects into the funnel, whether that be our landing page, downloading our app, and thinking about all the pain points along the way, turning them into actual customers and repeat customers and then evangelizers of our product that tell everybody, hey, this product or service is so great, we're going to keep using it over and over again. That's Killer User Experience Design. Really about designing for conversion and thinking about our products in terms of a funnel and not thinking about, oh, I'm going to make a site map and it's going to have all these templates and it's going to go from here to here and here's the second level and here's the third level. That's not how I approach information architecture. For me, it's about what's the first thing they need to do, what's the last thing they need to do, and how am I going to get them to these different points and take away the pain points and figure out a metric along the way. So I'm really into funnels. And I'd like to stick this guy down a funnel. Anyway, I had to figure out how to explain my numerous techniques in my book and put it together in a way that people could practice it in a linear order first as they learn it and then be able to kind of plug and play the techniques as needed. And this book was targeted at two very distinct audiences, user experience designers who didn't know that much about business strategy and wanted to learn to be strategists and entrepreneurs who thought they were really great strategists and knew everything there is to know about business but knew nothing about design but wanted to get, figure out the ROI of user experience design. So I wrote out the techniques in a way that anybody could read, that anyone with, regardless of their background, could figure out. So the first thing was how to validate a provisional persona. And a provisional persona, as Alan Cooper described it basically, is what you use when you don't have time to go out in the field for three months and do proper ethnographic research. And a little research is better than no research. And so a provisional persona, sometimes called an ad hoc persona or proto-persona depending on who you read or believe, is this idea that is a placeholder. And we just like think about a bunch of different assumptions and break it into real simple, real simple descriptions that are basically different attributes that all need to be validated and everything needs to be, to me, contextual to the product. I mean I would see these personas when I worked at agencies where they would say she drives a Volvo, she has two dogs, and it would be a product about buying an airline ticket. Like what does that have to do with anything? And I would see these just like wacky, wacky personas that were just made to make the client happy and not really used as a tool. Sure maybe they gave engineers empathy at some point 20 or 30 years ago, but they sure weren't doing a lot in terms of helping us figure out from a strategic point how we were going to build the product for a specific customer segment. I didn't want just one customer who drove a Volvo and had two dogs to buy my products and services. I wanted a group of people. And so that was the first big change that I advocated for these things that we figure out a customer segment and that we went out and used what Steve Blank called customer discovery to figure out where they would be and talk to them and not say hey would you buy my thing? I got this great idea for this thing, but instead say hey I want to talk to you if you have this problem. Do you have a hard time, you know, parking your car? Do you have a hard time figuring out a good rehab to go to? Do you have a hard time, you know, finding a parking place and then finding your car afterwards, whatever it was, and getting out there and saying I'm going to do five or ten interviews to start and measure the results, just trying to validate that I'm actually solving a problem and then maybe at the very end, sneaking in, if there was an app or a website that did something like that, could you imagine using it and then they might say yes and then you say well how much would you pay to use it? Or how often would you use it? And this is a process that we would do that I do with my clients before we even get started. It's backwards engineering the solution and thinking first about what is the problem we're trying to solve with our products and services and validating them, because if we make something that doesn't solve a problem then we're not going to have product market fit. So the next technique, which I will be delving into deeply tomorrow in my conducting competitive research and analysis workshop is the first of my big spreadsheet exercises, where we go out, we now say this is our value proposition, who are our direct competitors and our indirect competitors to our value proposition. So if we go back and think about Airbnb, their direct competitors were the other websites at that time, the other platforms that were similar to it, where as an indirect competitor it could be a hotel, it could be not even going out at all, it could be staying with a friend and figuring out basically looking at each of these competitors, the companies that had them out own them and saying how much funding do they have, are they leveraging social media, what are their key features, what's their competitive advantage, all of these different data points and doing a methodical attempt of filling out a spreadsheet so that we could then do a proper analysis. And this is a really intensive, labor intensive technique, but something that helps you understand that you might be building something that already exists and is perfectly fine and it's a waste of time to even start doing it or that exists in a complete red ocean. This goes back to blue ocean strategy, with blue ocean strategy meaning there's room to grow, there's new, there's room for innovation, there's not a bunch of sharks like in a red ocean attacking you and turning the water into red and so by ignoring your competitors, essentially you're just like whatever I'm doing is great because I'm great. And that's not going to necessarily help us win, we're only going to be lucky. So let's say we see this opportunity, we see this gap in the marketplace where people aren't exploiting and we can make a piece of software that's going to solve a problem that we validated and now we need to think what is our value innovation? Now we could spend a lot of time doing a journey map but what if we want to do something quickly to get us so that we can start prototyping so we could take that out into the field to learn about and so I decided storyboarding was the best for me, I have a film background and telling a story is really easy, it has a beginning, middle and an end and the beginning should be the problem, right? The user in this case, the yuppies, their kids are off to school and they need a way to leverage their house but they don't want to just rent it out every day on Airbnb but that model they like and so the end of course is there's the wedding, you know they made 10 grand and they're happy and so we're just figuring out really the few interfaces, the few experiences that may be happening on the funnel or outside the funnel offline or online that are core for people to experience the value innovation of our product and then once we have the storyboard which is just a group exercise and it can be done with sketches, it can be done with just copy pasting images from Photoshop using Airbnb in this case and just changing a few words, however it is that really helps your team figure out what is it we're trying to do with this thing, what is it we need to do to get them down the funnel so they experience the value proposition and then from there make a prototype fast, right? This is one that a team I was working with did for Hyperloop and we basically, this one was done in just in mind today I would probably do it also using Envision but the idea is we want to just quickly mock up these ideas that look as good as possible, not low fidelity because I don't believe that users can just sort of kind of imagine by looking at sketches how the thing is going to look. I don't believe that there's necessary bias like oh it looks done so I don't want to say something bad and hurt their feelings just tell them I didn't design this thing I actually think it's kind of bad do you think it's bad? Well tell me would you like use this type of thing and asking them questions that are specific to the experiences not usability questions. We don't care about usability questions at this point what we care about is would they use this thing does this value proposition resonate? And then you take that prototype out into the field so another lean lightweight form of user research is gorilla user research so I have a chapter on that and it's not the gorilla that we saw at the beginning it's the one with the two R's and the two L's like gorilla warfare because it's a war we are fighting to not lose time and resources while we build out this product we want to make sure we're on the right path so we got to get this prototype knocked out and in front of people who match our provisional persona our customer segment so we need to do our own advertising and do our recruiting and try to find these people whether we're using Facebook or LinkedIn or Craigslist or whatever and then get them into an environment whether it be a cafe or a library somewhere private that's not going to make them feel like a lab rat and ask them questions that are specific to the product whether you're solving a problem and would they use the solution and of course another spreadsheet I love these spreadsheets right because I'm trying to be methodical capturing all the data the users are going one two three four five I have this I made the toolkit with the book and it's four spreadsheets and they're not they don't calculate anything they just help us keep track right so if I see a spreadsheet done by someone that's working with me that has empty gaps I'm like oh well did you not find this because it doesn't exist or did you not finish this and so then we can really compare this the answers to the questions across the rows and then lastly was this technique to help with designing for conversion and it was a matrix a funnel matrix and the idea is that we're trying to figure out what are the steps that the user has to take along their journey the suspect the lead the prospect the customer to get them to become a repeat user what were the steps they needed to take what was the what did the business have to do to make it work and what was the KPI what was the metric that we cared about most not vanity metrics but what was the metric that mattered to know for sure that they made it to the next level of our funnel made it down and so my book was released in 2015 I can't believe I finished it and surprisingly because I was obsessed with the UX strategy I didn't think anybody else was I thought this was you know I knew there was like three people on LinkedIn at that point before it came out that said they were UX strategists so I thought okay it's a labor love whatever but apparently people started wanting to learn about it there was this book and I was the lucky person who wrote it first and got it out there and my students were just like signing up in droves for my classes at USC I'm not sure if it was because it was easy a or fun or because they really believed it was useful to learn product strategy techniques I started getting asked to speak around the world and do these workshops because there's so much stuff on UX design and so little or nothing on UX strategy the book all of a sudden was put out in all these languages that I don't read or speak and so I was pretty excited and certainly surprised that people cared about UX strategy and now if you go to LinkedIn you'll find about 10,000 people that call themselves UX strategists or practice UX strategy so it's a real methodology that's starting to take hold in our profession and this is great but you know I've been doing this for eight years and I've been kind of getting a little bit burned out doing the same thing over and over again and I was kind of looking for something to ignite me to get me excited to get obsessed over and so I luckily got this weird Skype call set up with this potential client and he said I've got this project for you and I always set up Skype calls because I want to see what people look like and make eye contact and so I did and he said I work for a healthcare company we do life sciences and data science and we bought a bunch of companies and we're trying to put them together and it's a bunch of different puzzle pieces and we want to hire you to do digital transformation and I was like what is that so I had to go buy more books and there were so many digital transformation books I didn't know where to start so what I did is I just read the ones of the blue covers and the one I really liked the most was by this woman Lindsay Herbert because she had pretty much a framework and a prescriptive way to practice digital transformation and she talked about it at a high level it's basically the next level of your strategy where you need to understand the business models and it's not just of the products but of a platform and you need to understand the customer experience and then you need to understand the internal processes at work in order for that company to actually incorporate all these new digital strategies so that they too all the employees can be innovative and so I'm going to give like the typical case study and that everyone loves and it's an American case study so please pardon me if it's not familiar but basically it's how Netflix ate blockbuster we blockbuster the stupid store all over America where you'd go and you'd look around fluorescent lights at videos that you could rent all along comes Netflix and all of a sudden we could just browse their website and it's then this little thing came in the mail we'd stick it in our machine watch it send it back and boom blockbuster goes out of business and Netflix goes through a serious digital transformation from being a company that mails out DVDs to a streaming company and what's important about digital transformation is that it has digital business model differentiate differentials right so in this case the value proposition of Netflix was no late fees easier access wider choices and personal recommendations and then the value network differentials right and this is like when we think from the standpoint of the incumbent being blockbuster what did what did Netflix Netflix have that they didn't which was the subscription model e-commerce website data assets and recommendation engine warehouse and distribution system and no retail cost because that's what was killing blockbuster so basically digital transformation needs to come from the top down it needs to really be you know from the CEO or the CIA CIO who says hey let's do this thing it needs to be embraced by the entire company because it affects the culture the processes the business processes and empowering people to be transparent so that everybody can be involved in the process and it certainly touch touches on all types of technology right especially big data especially artificial intelligence and it can and when we're looking at it we want to look at companies that are outside of the typical hipster tech companies so for me working with the healthcare company was a big opportunity so back to my story these were the things that we've done this far it's I'm only four months into a one-year product project and that is the first thing is we needed to have all these products fit into the same framework this is one borrowed from GE I can show theirs but basically a component library and templates and frameworks so that everything could fit nicely into it and have a persistent look Phil the second thing we needed to do was take these provisional personas but apply them to roles around health care and see if we could find overlaps across these roles and validate them next was prototyping lots of rapid prototyping thinking about all kinds of crazy ideas where we can employ all the new technologies to in this case healthcare and just see what the stakeholders like get excited about and then of course my ugly spreadsheets but looking at the competitors now at a platform level this was a big difference than just looking at things at a product level because the goal is we want to take doubt all these different puzzle pieces and put them together in new ways so we could create something that is truly disruptive for these companies that already are big companies so they don't turn into blockbusters so with digital transformation the sky is really the limit I'm super excited to now be doing that and not just UX strategy and for those of you who are interested in doing UX strategy or digital transformation I say jump hop to it you don't have to just go up and go from UX designer to manager if you want to do analytical and critical thinking just give your sticky notes arrest and make friends with ugly spreadsheets thank you


I'm a believer of globalization. Olympic is the spirit of globalization, make the young people connect to each other, make every country connect to each other. We believe that Alibaba should focus on happiness and health. We believe that we should make more young people join the sports, make the world happier. The difference between Amazon and us, Amazon is more like an empire, everything they should control themselves by and so.