The Intersection of Strategy and Design

I recently had the privilege of presenting at the Big Design Conference in Addison, Texas with my colleague Tim Parcell. Since it was a design/UX focused event we decided to present on the way that we partner together to make the work better. We showed our different POVs on user wants/needs – mine, as a planner/strategist, tends to focus more on emotional needs, attitudes, and feelings. Tim, as an experience designer, tends to concentrate more on rational and functional needs and tasks to be completed.

We talked about the need to build better experiences for our customers and the crowded marketplace full of distractions and commodity products that makes the job of the advertiser considerably more difficult than it was in Don Draper‘s day.

And we talked about ways that designers can bring a strategic point of view to their work, whether it’s at an agency, or in-house on the client side.

Here’s the presentation we gave, I hope you enjoy it:

And for those of you who don’t like slide decks, one of the attendees live-sketched the presentation and shared her sketch with us: