Define Themes

UX Themes align across groups and stages, achieving a better understanding of the work done through their problems to solve and expected outcomes. They can help identify areas of collaboration when teams are working on overlapping user needs or when cross-workflows are needed, helping to unite stable counterparts, engineering, design, product, and research with a comprehensive approach to executing the category vision.

Increased focus and decreased churn

UX Themes focus on a more significant, holistic problem area rather than discrete features in a milestone. This reduces the need for fire drills and mitigates context switching. This focus will allow designers to dive deep into related needs-based problems that lead to a comprehensive experience, including all associated touchpoints in the product.

Additionally, allocating more time to addressing validated user needs with solutions rather than assumptions will reduce design and research churn in the product development process. This approach also benefits the engineering teams, as they can focus their efforts and build to the scope envisioned in the theme while reducing context switching and avoiding the need to refactor the code in the event of a redesign.

Enhanced strategic collaboration

UX Themes influence strategy through collaboration with Product Managers to define the goals, identify and prioritize unmet user needs, and transparently maintain and update the product roadmap over time. Themes also allow us to understand our value as a team by measuring our success against the business outcomes our counterparts define for each theme.

Roadmaps and UX Themes

UX Themes organized by priority become a UX Roadmap. This roadmap complements the product roadmap and does not replace or supersede them. Therefore, it’s helpful to think of a UX Roadmap as a view of the Product roadmap through the Product Design and UX Research filter.

Resources