What an experience strategy does

The purpose of an experience strategy is to translate a business problem into a design problem.

A good experience strategy:

1. is effective: a design solution that satisfies the problem defined in the strategy will, when executed (designed and implemented), will solve the business problem;
2. is practicable: the strategy can be designed, implemented, deployed and used;
3. is politically viable: both the client and vendor team (design, implementation, deployment) are fully bought into the strategy and accept it as a standard by which subsequent phases in the project lifecycle will be guided and evaluated;
4. is clear: the client and vendor team are in explicit agreement on what is required to satisfy the design problem, which means that if the vendor design team solves the problem as defined in the strategy the solution will be approved by the client;
5. is inspiring: the strategy should provide the vendor design team with the kinds of insights and challenges that impel the team toward an effective solution, and should provide the client with a sense that  what is being designed is worthwhile;
6. is evaluable: the strategy defines its own success criteria, so that when the strategy is executed (designed, implemented, deployed and used) the client and the team will agree on the degree of its success.

To this end, an experience strategy concerns itself with three domains:

1. The experiencer — the person for whom the experience is intended (a.k.a. “user”, “audience”, “stakeholder”, or specific segment, such as “customer”, “employee”, “investor”, etc.). This subdivides into a) understanding the experiencer objectively — in factual/observational demographic and behavioral terms and subjectively — and b) understanding the experiencer subjectively, which means to understand how the world looks from that particular person’s perspective. This latter kind of understanding is elusive and perplexing, difficult to talk about and impossible to quantify in direct terms. Nonetheless the existence of this kind of knowledge — insight — is impossible to deny, and, nowadays, hazardous to ignore. Having insight into as well as factual knowledge about people gives as organization an enormous advantage over those that do not. It makes the difference between providing something satisfactorily utilitarian and something people love and enthuse about and welcome into their lives.
2. The organization who is providing the experience — which also has an inner and outer dimension analogous to the subjective/objective understanding of the experiencer.  The organization’s a) inward dimension is what it is trying to accomplish for itself, what it is capable of accomplishing, and what effectively differentiates its competition; and its b) outward dimension is how it wishes to be perceived by the experiencer, and specifically how it is perceived as different from its competition.
3. The medium of the experience — both its possibilities and limitations — which extends beyond the designed artifact into the touchpoints surrounding the artifact which strongly influence the quality and effectiveness of the experience.