The Corporate Vision as a Seed for Our Experience Vision

It’s unusual to think of a corporate vision statement as a powerful UX tool — possibly because it’s unusual to think about the corporate vision statement at all.

These written-by-committee generic statements of where the organization might go in the future feel like an easy thing for everyone to ignore. And most people do. But, maybe we shouldn’t.

Vision statements are often drafted by an organization’s senior leadership. They use the statement to signal to customers, investors, analysts, and others where they think the organization will go. The senior leadership wants to give others a reason to choose their organization beyond just what exists today. The vision statement is the promise of tomorrow.

Typically, the corporate vision authors work to keep their statement vague. It needs to explain how the organization is different from any competitors. Yet, tomorrow is a long way away, and leadership doesn’t want to make promises they can’t keep. That’s why making it vague works to their advantage.

Fortunately, it’s the inherent ambiguity that works in our favor, too.

The Struggle with Research is Real

When it’s time to rally our entire organization around the potential of delivering great user experiences, there’s no better approach than creating a strong experience vision. Experience visions are a compelling picture of the future that gets everyone excited about what our UX team, working with the rest of our organization, can deliver.

In an ideal world, we’d craft our experience vision from our deep research into our users’ current experience. We’d study what our customers and users are trying to do and see where they run into problems. Our experience vision would tell the story of what using our product or service would be like without running into those problems.

Yet, conducting that deep research can be hard for some UX teams, especially when they’re just getting started. They haven’t unlocked the resources and time they need to do that kind of investigation.

This is where UX leaders get stuck. They need the experience vision to get folks excited about the power of great UX and see the benefits from…