What Is a UX Strategy and Why It Matters
User experience – or UX – is one of those terms that had a precipitous rise in use around the turn of the millennia, which might have given it a false aura of nothing more than a buzzword. In truth, user experience is incredibly important, both to the person who uses a product, service, or web asset, and to the person who designs, operates, or profits from it. UX matters a lot, and because it does, it warrants a calculated and careful approach. Hence, people looking into what a UX strategy is and why it matters.
Those are some of the questions we’re here to answer. Because user experience is a phenomenon you can approach from various angles and using various disciplines, you shouldn’t expect to get a lot of concrete definitions. However, because it’s a phenomenon that many people wracked their brains on, we might offer some practical insight peppered with solid tips. Stick around, and you’ll read:
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To get to what UX strategy is, there are a couple of terms we need to understand first. Let’s start with user experience, a term that’s hard to pin down and define exactly. We’ve provided a couple of useful definitions in our article about functional animation in UX, and you’re more than welcome to use them. To keep things simple and not too technical, we’ll say that user experience is what happens to a user when they meet and interact with your product or service.
As you can understand, the goings-on in a person while they interact with a product will affect their opinion of the product. Their opinion will, in turn, affect their willingness to use that product in the future, as well as, and maybe even more importantly, affect what they say about the product to other people. You have to think about word-of-mouth.
User experience isn’t something you just hope for the best while you wait until it’s assembled by chance or as a by-product of other design choices. User experience is created deliberately, and it’s often very carefully engineered to maximize the goals of a product. That’s where UX design steps in, to ensure there’s an intentional effort behind user experience. UX strategy is what guides the efforts of UX design.
Like many other strategies, user experience strategy deals with guiding visions, attainable goals, and resources that can be allocated to achieve them. Usually, you’ll find that UX strategy is an intersection of three different areas, such as vision, customer needs, and technical capabilities. It might also be represented as a pyramid that contains the vision, the goals, and the plan. You can also think about it as the thing that tells you where you need to go, how, and why – just like any other strategy.
Whenever you’re creating a strategy, whether it’s a marketing campaign strategy, business strategy, or UX strategy, you need to figure out some really important things. You need to take stock of where you are and contemplate where you want to get. Formulate goals, then come up with the best way to reach them – considering the resources you have. Finally, you should determine how you’ll know that you’ve been successful.
Practically speaking, there are a couple of key reasons why developing a UX strategy can be important for your business.
It makes clear the value of user experience to stakeholders
User experience might not be as exotic a term as it once was, but you’ll still find people who need some convincing that it’s important enough to justify the allocation of resources needed for its design. Simply put, a UX strategy can show the stakeholders why UX design matters.
It brings the user into focus
User-centricity is a very important concept in modern business, and you have to put the user front and center when you’re considering how to design the best possible user experience. You’ll find out more about the users in the process, too, and their needs and desires, which will ultimately help you deliver more of what they want. This will benefit both the user and the business.
It defines processes and makes sure they’re aligned with the goals
There’s nothing like creating a user experience strategy to help you flesh out all the things you and your team will have to do in researching and designing user experience. And you can’t have clear marching orders without knowing what needs to be done.
It minimizes the waste of resources
You’ll want every resource you invest into the UX design process to contribute to the goal of the process. Creating a user experience strategy gives the perfect opportunity to ensure that there’s no superfluous spending or wasting of valuable resources.
It determines success metrics
There are many different metrics you can use to gauge user experience. Having a UX strategy will help you determine which metrics are more important than others, as you’ll always want to focus on the metrics that describe your specific goals the best.
When creating a UX strategy, you want to devise something that will fit your unique situation – the type of business you have, the stakeholders involved, your specific audience or customers, the unique talent and resource configuration you have at your disposal, and your specific goals.
No two UX strategies are completely alike, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have things in common, especially when it comes to the things you need to create them. Here are a couple of steps you’ll often, if not always, have to make when devising a UX strategy.
Do Plenty of Research
At the start of the process, you’ll be looking at plenty of unknowns. You won’t know the company vision and stakeholders’ expectations. User expectations will be another unknown. You might be aware of existing problems and potential challenges, but better to treat those as unknowns in need of discovery than risk complacency.
How do you shed some light on all of those unknowns? With some research, of course! Some of the methods of conducting the research include:
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Stakeholder interviews, to find out the vision and overarching goals for the business, a product, or service.
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Customer/user interviews, to find existing opinions and pinpoint the areas that could use some improvements.
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Data review and analysis, to help fill out the picture of how people currently relate to the product or service.
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Competition research, because it’s always useful to know what the competitors are doing if you plan to stay ahead of them.
If you don’t have data on task success, you might also need to perform some user testing. By the time research is done, you should be left with a clear picture of the current state of affairs, complete with the challenges you are supposed to tackle in the strategy, as well as the overall business vision you need to align with.
Determine Goals and Processes
When you understand the expectations from the stakeholders, the needs of the users, the situation in your niche and the specific problems that have arisen this far, you can start defining specific goals and finding the ways to reach them.
During this process, you’ll want to make sure that you take into account the resources you have at your disposal. It might be a good idea to create a hierarchy of goals, too. Having clear priorities can be incredibly helpful when faced with a dilemma caused, for example, by a lack of resources. It’s good to know which processes bring you the closest to your goals so that you can allocate more resources if they become available or keep them safe in case you need to cut something out of the strategy.
When determining goals, it’s a good idea to keep them as specific as possible. A certain degree of vagueness can work well for the vision part of the strategy because visions can be broad. Goals should be narrow and well-defined. The better you define them, the easier it gets to determine how to get to them.
Set Up Testing and Measurement
One of the best things about getting to set goals is that, when you know what your goals are, you have a very clear view of what you need to measure to make sure your strategy is successful. So when the goals are known, you can set the KPIs you’ll use to determine how well your strategy is going.
User experience can be tracked using many different KPIs. There are a couple of ways to look at those KPIs, too – you can group them into usability, engagement, and conversion metrics, but also as behavioral and attitudinal metrics. What you end up using should be the metrics that are the most appropriate for measuring your goals. If those metrics need to be complex, so be it.
Finally, you should put into place some points where the strategy will be tested, reviewed, and reevaluated. You can have beta-testers involved in the process if you can afford it. If not, making sure that every bit of useful data that can be tracked is tracked and regularly reviewed could do the trick.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
A good user experience is rarely a product of happy accidents, but even when it is, that doesn’t excuse you from making sure that it stays good. As your product, service, or even users change, you’ll want to make sure the UX follows and stays relevant and true.
Creating a UX strategy is necessary for ensuring you get the most out of the customer-facing part of your business, be it a product, a service, or a website. Not for nothing, but a UX strategy also ensures that your users get the most out of whatever you’re offering them, too. If done well, a UX strategy will maximize enjoyment to the benefit of users and businesses alike, so everybody goes home a winner. And that’s nice.
