A documented vision helps teams articulate their UX goals and identify and prioritize UX efforts. Without a strong, shared vision, team members may not be able to articulate the purpose of their work or the value that work provides to the greater organization.

This article provides a practical, step-by-step, collaborative process for creating a vision. It involves understanding the current state of UX, aligning on an ideal future vision, and determining an action plan for bringing the vision to life.

In This Article:

What Is a UX Vision?

Definition: A UX vision is an aspirational, future-state view of an experience people will have with a product, service, team, or organization.

The concepts of a UX mission statement and a UX vision statement are often and easily conflated, though they are different:

  • A vision statement is an aspirational statement that answers the question: What do we want to become in n years? Who do we aim to be in a reasonable amount of time?
  • A mission statement answers the question: What collective value do we generate now? What do we do as a group that helps realize that aspirational vision?

In other words, a mission statement captures who we are and how we provide value now; a vision statement captures what we want to become. Both should inform the overall UX or design strategy (the steps for achieving our vision) and be checked against our goals and objectives (metrics or indicators of how well we are achieving that vision).

Vision statements can exist at different levels. There are 2 common types of visions that are relevant for most UX teams:

  • Product visions describe the impact and value that a product or service will provide to the people who use it.
  • Team visions describe the value that a team will provide to the company or the impact it will have on a product or service. Team visions are useful for teams undergoing rapid growth or change or for teams attempting to promote drastic cultural shifts to maintain an aligned and steady momentum.

Deciding which type of vision is important for a team depends on the current state of UX at the organization. Perhaps there are severe usability issues with a product or there is disagreement from stakeholders about product direction. In that case, a product vision could help visualize what's next. On the other hand, maybe other departments throughout the organization are unsure of the value provided by the UX team and don't know how to engage with it. In that case, a team vision could be a powerful tool for increasing understanding of UX.

The Process: How to Create a UX-Vision Statement

Both vision statements and mission statements should be created as part of a collaborative process so that the entire team is rallied around and believes in the final output. Because of the group activities and discussions involved, a strong facilitator is necessary to drive the process. (The facilitator can be a member of the team if they can display objectivity in leading discussions and if team members have an appropriate level of trust with this facilitator and each other.)

Creating a UX vision is a 3-step process, with stages of understanding the current state, visioning, and planning activities required to realize the vision.

Stage I: Gather

Goal: Collect or Conduct Research to Understand the Current State of UX

The first stage involves aligning external stakeholders and gathering existing knowledge. Resist the urge to jump straight to ideation exercises and plastering sticky notes on walls or Miro boards. Collect and distill any research knowledge that already exists and consolidate stakeholder views already in place. If no existing research exists, it's a good time to conduct some.

Depending on the knowledge already available, several methods can build current-state understanding:

  • Stakeholder interviews: These allow the team to understand the current perception of any processes, successes, and obstacles from various external perspectives. In addition, they help engage stakeholders in the process, therefore building buy-in for the vision once it has been created.
  • Usability testing: If no user research exists, even a small study will provide great insights about UX issues that need to be optimized in a future-state version.
  • Competitive analysis: This method helps the team identify competitive strengths and weaknesses of the current experience so that strong elements of competitor products can be built into the future-state vision.

Stage II: Envision

Goal: Cocreate a Shared, Research-Backed Vision

The second stage is about defining what the team or product should provide in comparison to what it currently provides. This step is typically a collaborative workshop session where key stakeholders and team members align on a shared future-state vision that they create together.

There are 3 steps in this workshop:

  1. Share and review existing research
  2. Brainstorm and prioritize future-state attributes
  3. Craft a vision statement

Share and Review Research

One goal of this stage is that the wider team understands the existing research. Plan a dedicated time and space for reaction to and sense-making of findings.

One way to help team members engage with vision-related research insights is an activity called Obstacles and Opportunities. In this activity, a research lead presents major themes in research findings — categorized as opportunities or obstacles — to team members, who can then react to each theme by using color-coded dots (i.e., dot-coding) to mark them as:

  • Agree: Items they agree with
  • Disagree: Items on which they have a different perspective
  • Surprising: Perspectives they have not considered before or did not expect to hear
  • Essential: Items they believe are critical to recognize or improve for the future-state vision to be successful

Individual team members can assign as many categories to each theme as they feel are relevant. (Note: This method of dot coding is slightly different than dot voting, where participants use dots to vote on the importance or value of items within a set of items.)

Team members add their coded reactions (colored dots assigned to categories) to obstacles and opportunities revealed during stakeholder interviews.

To reduce groupthink and bias, allow team members to individually assign their categories on a sheet of paper before going up to the shared space to code the statements.

Brainstorm and Prioritize Future-State Attributes

After reviewing the current state, ask the team to envision how the ideal future-state differs from the current state. To constrain the team's ideation, provide a focus question such as:

  • Where do we want to be in 5 years?
  • What does it look like when we are providing our full value?
  • What does the ideal experience look like?

The workshop slide below shows a focus prompt to describe the ideal state in 5 years. Providing a reasonable yet aspirational time constraint (e.g., 2–5 years) enables the team to be creative during ideation while still remaining somewhat grounded in reality.

A focus question provided to a team helps brainstorm the future-state vision of its digital presence.

With the focus question as a guide, have the team individually generate future-state attributes on sticky notes during a timed round of silent brainstorming and then post these attributes up in a shared space. Follow with a round of affinity diagramming, where the team works together to cluster related attributes into groups, giving each group a high-level descriptive label. Finally, the team can use dot voting to prioritize the attribute groups based on what team members believe is most important for the future state.

A team clusters and votes on top attributes for their future-state vision.

One method of dot voting for future-state attributes is to allow people to vote for both must-have attributes and nice-to-have attributes. Give people 5 red dots and 5 green dots. Instruct them to put their red dots on the attribute clusters they feel the future-state vision must have and the green dots on the things that are nice to have. (Red dots are worth 2 points, and green dots are worth 1 point.) The votes can then be tallied and compared in order to understand where the team collectively places the most importance.

After dot voting on future-state attributes, votes are tallied to determine the importance of the different categories of attributes.

Craft a Shared Vision Statement

Finally, the group uses the top attributes as inputs to create potential vision statements. During a timed activity, each team member drafts vision statements individually and then shares them with the group. If being democratic is important to your team, you might follow group sharing with another round of dot voting, where team members identify strong elements or phrases from each draft statement. Then the vision lead takes these as inputs to create a final vision statement.

Stage III: Plan

Goal: Identify Activities and Resources Required to Realize the Vision

At this point in the process, the team has a solid understanding of the current state, as well as a documented vision statement describing the ideal future state. This stage is about closing the gap between those 2 states. Collaborative methods are used to identify resources and activities required to bring the vision to life and then prioritize and roadmap those items into an action plan.

Here, lead a group brainstorm by asking the team: In order to make this vision a reality, what do we need to create or provide? To provide structure to the brainstorming process, you can use Requisite Roundup — which involves having team members think about what would be needed within predetermined categories, such as:

  • Processes: Workflow, planning, communication, meetings
  • People: Roles, headcount, supporters, skills, buy-in
  • Tools and tech: Systems, software, repositories, automation
  • Governance: Standards, policies, prioritization

For this activity, break up the team into small group or pairs. Write each category on an envelope and assign one envelope per small group. During timed rounds, small groups brainstorm items for their category on sticky notes or index cards and place them in the envelopes. At the end of the round, envelopes are passed, continuing until each small group has had an opportunity to generate items for each category.

A team member brainstorms items that are necessary to bring the vision to life within the Tools and Tech category.

After brainstorming, team members work together to review the generated required items and assemble the generated required items into a draft timeline, working together to determine which required items should be in place first.

Team members organize activities and resources required for their vision into a draft roadmap.

What's Next? Communicate the Vision

In order for the vision to gain momentum and spread throughout the organization, there has to be some way to communicate it. Create some sort of artifact to help others imagine the future state the team has envisioned. The artifact could be just about anything (e.g., a formal document, a video, a vision board, a prototype) based on the culture of the organization.

The document below is an example vision artifact used by a team to share and communicate the future-state vision of its digital presence. It captures the vision statement as well as prioritized objectives and tactics the team identified for realizing the vision.

A formal document capturing a team’s vision statement and supporting tactical goals

This is a crucial step to hold the team accountable and engaging others with the vision. Even when created within a strategic and collaborative process such as the one outlined in this article, visions will fail if they are not shared and visible.

Conclusion

When created using a systematic and collaborative process such as the one outlined in this article, visions are powerful tools for aligning teams, guiding work, and prioritizing initiatives.

Follow these 3 guidelines to ensure the vision is as strong as possible:

  • Ground it in research: Gather and share existing research — or conduct research when none exists — in order to provide a foundation for understanding the current state, and inspiration for the future-state in form of user needs and desires.
  • Be inclusive: Invite others into the process. Use collaborative methods to increase buy-in and ownership, and consider a wide set of opinions and insights.
  • Share it out: Communicate the vision to others with engaging artifacts that capture the ideal state and the priorities identified to realize the vision.