User experience (UX) is a crucial element in product design and development. It involves the processes that companies use to create products that offer users practical, logical, and meaningful experiences.
UX affects how users perceive products, how they interact with them, and the ease or difficulty of completing tasks.
To ensure that your organization effectively integrates good UX practices, it requires a well-thought-out strategy. A solid UX strategy ensures that user experience is prioritized at every customer touchpoint, helping products maintain their appeal in a competitive market.
What is a UX strategy?
A UX strategy serves as a roadmap for a team to prioritize and implement effective user experience practices. When executed properly, this strategy ensures that user-centered design remains at the forefront of goals and decision-making, ultimately leading to the creation of human-focused products.
You can develop a UX strategy for a single feature, an entire product, or even for the organization as a whole.
An effective strategy should encompass all aspects of UX design, including planning, development, branding, appearance, usability, and functionality. It should also outline key measures and goals.
Some important components of a UX strategy include:
- Information Aspects: This involves gathering and analyzing current customer feedback, data from interviews, and insights collected through various research methods.
- Human Aspects: This entails considering the perspectives of various stakeholders, including designers, programmers, developers, engineers, and, most importantly, the end users.
- Outcomes: This encompasses aspects such as functionality, aesthetics, features, and metrics for measuring success.
Why is a UX Strategy Important?
UX design involves creating products that are not only visually appealing but also simplify and accelerate user actions. Developing a UX strategy ensures that the user remains at the center of all design and development decisions, ultimately leading to a better experience for them.
A well-defined strategy increases the likelihood of designing products that both delight users and address their needs. In today’s competitive landscape, lacking a UX strategy can result in falling behind. Studies indicate that design-led companies—those that prioritize positive user experiences—enjoy a 41% higher market share and 50% more loyal customers compared to companies that do not focus on design.
The benefits of an effective UX strategy include:
- Establishing a ‘source of truth’ for team members to reference regularly, keeping everyone aligned and moving in the same direction.
- Providing clarity around the concept of UX design, ensuring that it has a clearly defined measure of success that all stakeholders understand.
- Helping key stakeholders recognize the tangible benefits of UX design, thus promoting its value within the organization.
- Creating a clear pathway to fulfill the promise of enhancing customer experiences, rather than issuing broad statements that lack actionable value.
- Transforming the vision of positive UX into reality.
**What’s the Difference Between UX Design and UX Strategy?**
UX design focuses on creating useful, logical, and meaningful experiences through products. In essence, UX design is the act of creation, while a UX strategy consists of the guidelines that help bring those designs to life.
A UX strategy aligns the team towards a common purpose, ensuring that user experience is considered at all customer touchpoints. Ultimately, UX design represents the overarching principle, whereas a UX strategy serves as the roadmap for implementation.
**The Risks of a Weak UX Strategy**
Having no UX strategy or a weak one can lead to significant challenges for a business. Customer retention is crucial; businesses rely on customers using their products or services repeatedly, not just once. Products must offer genuine benefits, and in today’s competitive landscape—where customer retention and reviews are paramount—expectations are higher than ever.
Customers desire products that not only solve their problems but also provide enjoyable experiences, seamless transactions, and user-friendly functions. They do not tolerate learning curves, clunky features, or flaws in their products.
Good UX can address these concerns, ensuring that products fulfill their promises. If UX is not prioritized in your designs, you risk disappointing customers, which could lead them to seek alternatives to meet their needs.
Without a solid UX strategy to guide the team, the concept of user-centricity may remain an unfulfilled ambition rather than a reality.
**Core Aspects of an Effective UX Strategy**
An effective UX strategy typically incorporates seven key components:
1. **Vision Statement**: This is the overarching vision for the product or service—what your company aspires to be for its customers. A strong vision should articulate the problem you intend to solve for customers and the benefits of solving it. For example, Amazon’s vision is, “Our vision is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” This focus on customer-centricity helps keep the company aligned with its goals.
2. **Define a Business Strategy**: Once the vision is clear, it becomes easier to formulate an overall business strategy. All efforts, whether related to UX or not, should align with the overarching business strategy. It is vital that the new UX strategy does not conflict with or complicate the overall goals of the business.
3. **Conduct Research**: Research is crucial for creating customer-centric products. You need a clear understanding of your business’s current position, competitor activities, and market demands before building a UX strategy. Without research, you may waste time and resources on services that customers neither want nor need. Research should always precede goal setting or planning. Methods for gathering data can include interviews, surveys, usability testing, contextual inquiries, concept testing, focus groups, external data analysis, A/B testing, and more. Essential questions during this phase include:
– How can we expedite our service?
– How can we simplify our offering for the end user?
– What are our competitors doing?
– How can we better serve our customers?
– What distinguishes us from the competition?
– Where are our customers least loyal to us?
– What can we do to refine our business offerings?
– Do we have data to support our intentions, goals, ideas, or assumptions?
Remember, research is an ongoing process. Continuously gather feedback from customers, stay updated with trends, and monitor competitor releases. This ongoing research should inform your efforts to enhance your service for end users.
4. Core goals
Your core goals are the key aspects of the strategy that you intend to achieve. These core goals will help to develop the overall plan—as the plan will turn these goals (and your milestones) into actionable steps.
Your core goals should revolve around the end user and relate back to the problem you’re solving for them. They should also link to the core research you have completed.
Remember your goals should be measurable and specific. If your goals are too vague—such as improving customer engagement—they’ll be much too hard to quantify. You should be able to specifically measure results that prove you’re achieving these goals.
Some specific and measurable UX goals could include:
- To increase customer engagement by 20% by the end of the financial year
- To make information architecture easier to access and decrease customer support tickets by 33%
- To improve overall app reviews from a 4.1 rating to a 4.6 rating by September
- To improve customer retention by 10%, which will, in turn, increase our profit by [x] amount
5. Key milestones
In any strategy, there must be key measures of success—otherwise, it’s challenging to know if the team is on track or not.
Key milestones also help the team to feel as though they’re achieving goals while the overall project is still in progress, something that can prove very motivating.
The milestones should align with the core goals of the UX plan and link to the research completed in the earlier stages.
To create the key milestones, you can use sentence starters such as:
- We’ll know we have succeeded when…
- Our first intention is to…
- We most want our customers to…
- Our highest priority goal is…
- The following goals may take us longer to achieve…
6. A Clear Plan
A crucial aspect of any effective UX strategy is having a clear plan that breaks down all goals into actionable steps. This plan serves as a reliable reference for all parties involved, ensuring that everyone stays on track. It should be a living document that is regularly updated and accessible to all team members.
The plan should include a timeline, specific actions assigned to different teams, and measures of success. By breaking down the goals into manageable steps, the team can effectively reach key milestones.
Additionally, the plan should feature check-in points and opportunities to adjust the direction if the results of any changes do not meet expectations. Ultimately, this plan keeps all team members aligned towards the same objectives.
7. Run Structured Experiments
As part of your UX strategy, it is essential to conduct experiments and iterate based on the insights gained from them.
As you progress through the plan and work toward your goals and milestones, you should implement structured experiments. Instead of making widespread changes across the organization without preliminary testing, it is beneficial to implement gradual releases for testing and learning purposes. If the results are positive and customers benefit from the changes, you can roll them out more broadly. If the results are not as expected, take the opportunity to iterate and test again.
The findings from your test-and-learn phases may lead to significant adjustments to your plan and goals; this is perfectly acceptable. The key is to enhance your UX based on solid evidence and accurate data, rather than relying solely on the opinions of team members.
Being open to change as you gather feedback from usability testing, beta testing, or other types of experiments is vital. This adaptability helps your team stay responsive to customer input and continually improve to meet their expectations.
How to Execute the UX Strategy
Effectively executing a UX strategy requires collaboration among all key stakeholders to work toward common goals. It’s crucial to keep everyone aligned and moving in the same direction. Consider the following essential areas:
Primary Stakeholders: Strong UX clarity throughout the business starts at the leadership level. This ensures that a customer-centric approach permeates the organization. All primary stakeholders should be clear about and motivated by the UX strategy. Since primary stakeholders may be driven by business value, demonstrating this value over time can help secure their support.
Secondary Stakeholders: Team leaders, including project managers, product managers, and lead researchers and designers, must also align on the benefits of UX. They are responsible for guiding the daily actions of the company.
Your Customers: Feedback from current customers is invaluable when developing a new UX strategy. Their thoughts, feelings, and comments play a crucial role in shaping improvements, updates, and future releases.
Competitive Customers: It’s important to consider what users of competing products are saying. Understanding their preferences can provide insights to enhance your own UX strategy and reveal what users are seeking.
Beta Users: When launching a new product, gathering as much information as possible from beta users is essential. This feedback can inform your strategy and aid in making critical adjustments before the final release.
Trends and Data: Analyzing data regarding existing products is vital when creating a UX strategy. Identifying trends can significantly influence the success of your product or service.
Example of a UX Strategy
A UX strategy should encompass all core components of an effective guide while being tailored to your specific offering. For instance, a dating app will have a different UX strategy than a series of SaaS products with external touchpoints.
As an example, a productivity tool’s UX strategy may begin by addressing the challenge of workers struggling to block out time for focused work. The productivity app might tackle this issue by pausing notifications on users’ phones, tracking important tasks, and providing a timer for each task-related work session.
The company’s vision could be: “To help our customers work effectively and productively on one task at a time without distractions.”
Research conducted by the company may reveal that people face significant distractions throughout the day. Data could illustrate the average number of distractions an employee encounters daily and how long it takes to refocus. User research might indicate that workers prefer tools that minimize their phone usage during the day.
The company’s goals may include increasing the amount of time users spend on the productivity tool, as this reflects engagement and deeper focus. These goals should be specific and measurable, with key milestones, such as tracking the total number of hours users spend on the platform.
Multiple strategies may lead users to achieve this goal. Therefore, it’s essential for the team to develop a plan of solutions, test and learn from new design features, and iterate accordingly while maintaining a user-centric focus.
The Importance of a UX Strategy
A strong UX (User Experience) strategy is fundamental for any company that wishes to remain competitive in the marketplace. UX focuses on designing products that align with human behavior, addressing user needs, and creating meaningful experiences for their benefit.
An effective UX strategy enhances the likelihood of considering users across the business, driving positive change at all customer touchpoints. By fostering a cohesive vision among teams, the right UX strategy helps transform the concept of positive user experience into tangible outcomes, ultimately benefiting the end user.
FAQs
Is UX part of product development or marketing?
Typically, a UX team operates separately from both marketing and product teams; however, in some organizations, it may be integrated into the overall design team. While UX shares similar goals and principles with marketing, marketing primarily focuses on customers at a later stage, including go-to-market strategies, advertising, content creation, and more. Product teams are chiefly concerned with product development, including design, development, and iterations. In certain companies, mixed product teams may incorporate UX designers, while others may have a dedicated UX team that provides vital insights from user research.
Regardless of the structure, UX team members play a crucial role in ensuring that user experience considerations are integrated throughout the organization for the benefit of the end user.
What’s the difference between a UX strategist and a UX designer?
A UX designer primarily focuses on the end user and their experience with the product. In contrast, a UX strategist shares this goal but also considers how adopting UX best practices can impact the entire business and how they align with the overall business strategy. The UX strategist typically collaborates with key stakeholders to embed UX principles throughout the organization, while the UX designer usually emphasizes testing, learning, and iterating based on user feedback.
What is UX in product development?
UX in product development ensures that the products created deliver valuable and meaningful experiences to end users.
What is the most common deliverable of a UX strategist?
The primary goal and main deliverable of a UX strategist is to produce strategic presentation decks and briefs. They utilize information gathered from research, user feedback, the overarching business strategy, and discussions with stakeholders to establish the core principles and goals that form the foundation of the overall UX strategy.
