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Jaan got hold of an iPad back home in San Francisco, but Andreas in Sweden must wait a little bit longer for his. Here’s what Jaan did on his first weekend as an iPad owner.

The Problem

The iPad has arrived, and now everyone wants to get on it. But for those of us involved with UX, it is far from business as usual. There’s a very particular challenge involved with user testing on the iPad.

No one has ever used one before. In fact most people haven’t used or even seen any tablet in real life. Regular user testing is comparatively easy – everyone has been on the web or worked in a desktop app, and thus has a frame of reference.

Not so with the iPad. Or the WePad, ExoPC, Notion Ink Adam or any other pad, slate, tablet, screen, deck or thing.

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This is a companion post to “Strategy Basics: It’s Really all about having a Plan” from 11 March. It is a good idea to skim that post before reading this one. Otherwise the combination of the web and orange flavored milk might not make much sense.

Congratulations, your client the Think Vitamin Dairy have had a few weeks to mull over what you presented and are now fully on-board. They are super excited about how you will help them sell more orange flavored milk. So exited in fact that they seem to be rushing it a bit.

You always want a client to drive their project forward but sometimes you need to slow them down. Preparation and double checking every aspect of the plan is crucial. You don’t want to pay for sloppy prep later on in the project. (more…)

Strategy. You hear about it all the time. One must have a strategy/work on a strategy/follow a strategy and so on. Business types like to say “strategy” a lot as it sounds big, complicated and important.

And it is important, but there is no need for it to be complicated. Quite the opposite.

At the heart of it all “strategy” is just about having a plan for the thing you are working on. Or as Wikipedia puts it “a strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal”.

Getting the Strategy Right

If there is ever a time to look at what’s important in a project, it is early on, in the strategy stage.

Let us assume that your client doesn’t have a strategy for their next web project.

Before you build, design, code or write anything you need to think about what the project needs to achieve.

This is in part because strategy can mean almost anything, depending on the needs of the client, the size of their audience and ultimately the goal of your client. And it will mean different things at different times during the life-span of a project: you may have one strategy to launch with, another for the ongoing management of the site and so on.

Thinking the project through, seeing how one thing leads to another on the way to the project’s goal is a very healthy thing to do.

The one thing all strategies must have in common is that they tie in with your client’s overall business goals. (You’d be surprised how often clients themselves forget this simple fact!) If it doesn’t, the client will never be happy with your work even if they were the ones who ignored the business goal connection.

That’s why you should be thrilled when a client asks for your help in developing their web project strategy (or asks you to help them find someone who can create it for them).

It is an excellent opportunity to make sure that you, or the people you choose to collaborate with, create a to-the-point strategy that helps the client reach their goals and in the process makes you look like an absolute star who deserves lots more commissions. (more…)