Inside Microsoft's vision for the future of Windows, Office, and work
The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision - Jared M. Spool - Medium
When you create an experience vision, you try to mentally picture what the experience of using your design will be like at some point in the future. As we conduct our research exploring best practices for experience design, we’ve discovered that nearly every successful team has actively created an experience vision that they frequently refer to. Often their visions are for experiences five or ten years in the future.
These visions act like a flag stuck into the sand somewhere on the horizon. The team can clearly see the flag, yet it’s far enough away that they won’t reach it any time soon. Because the flag is clearly visible, the team knows if every step they take brings them closer or farther away. If the flag weren’t visible, the team wouldn’t know and could wander off in an undesirable direction.
The experience visions of the successful teams all have the following qualities:
A few of the organizations we’ve studied have one or two people at the top of the organization that just know what the vision should be. One company that immediately comes to mind is Apple, who had Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive as their visionaries. Apple’s success with its products come directly from the visions that Steve and Jonathan handed down.
However, most organizations don’t have a visionary at the top of the organization. These organizations need to get their inspiration from someplace else.
When no visionary is present, most teams find their inspiration from in-depth research of latent user needs and desires. Latent needs are things users can’t elaborate on their own because they don’t know what’s possible. For example, few people would’ve told researchers they wanted home-delivered DVDs. However, through careful research, the team at Netflix saw how miserable many people were with the video store experience and created a solution that would catapult their business to the head of video rental industry. They repeated this when they launched into streaming.