What exactly is UX Strategy?

TLDR: UX Strategy is a user centered action plan to guide UX that enhances business engagement and conversion.

UX strategy is the first step in creating a winning user experience. It can be used to make decisions about how to design and build a product, as well as how to evaluate and improve a new or existing service. UX strategy is also called User Experience Strategy or UX plan. In this article I will be sharing my personal definition of UX strategy and how it benefits the companies that I work with. My goal is to help you form your own conclusions, not to convince you of anything. I would also really like to know your thoughts, do leave your comments at the end! Thank you for stopping by.

What UX Strategy Is and Why You Should Implement it Now

UX Strategy helps user experience by continually enhancing its purpose. UX Strategy is a user-centered action plan plan to guide UX that enhances business engagement and conversion. It involves understanding the needs of your customers first—normally referred to as a user-centric process— and then guiding strategy to help UX meet all user's needs.

UX strategy is not just about designing a perfect interface, it’s about understanding what users need and why they need it. You want to clearly understand so that UX can provide a smooth product transaction.

For any business, UX Strategy is what Google Maps is to your vacation trip. It helps you to look ahead, preparing for what may be difficult, and giving you a clear path to a certain destination. More directly, it helps to inform decision makers about minimum requirements, it guides in the selection of key elements that will be needed both internally, and externally. Last and not least, UX Strategy ensures that the business goals align with the resources and capabilities that UX can deliver.

Simple steps to create UX strategy for your business.

First things first, I should humbly express that if there was “one simple formula” to UX Strategy, there would probably be a lot more yachts floating freely around on the oceans. What we do have is a very well established process to create UX Strategy, but as always, results depend on variables. Now, please don’t let that little downer comment disappoint you. UX Strategy is a rewarding business approach holding a great probability of boosting the UX process to accomplish [insert your favorite objective here].

OK, let’s talk about those simple UX Strategy steps. 5 of them, to be precise.

1. We start with an open conversation with stakeholders about desired goals and objectives. This is usually when I bring a lot of questions to the table. In this early stage I am only trying to understand why we are interested in launching a new product, service, or implementation. I also am trying to understand what problems we are trying to solve and what our business is trying to achieve. Then we start to talk about target audience, available funding and resources, and of course deadlines as well.

2. Once we have clear goals and objectives we start to research and gather available information about our product or service. We also identify and learn all that we can regarding users, stakeholders, and other organizations that compete with us.

3. By now you understand the why, what, and how of the product or service. You also have some idea about who can build, support, distribute what you want to offer. Now it is time to create rough prototype concepts and wireframes. Keep in mind that as UX Strategist you are not focusing on traditional UX, instead, you must focus all your thoughts on how to take care of your user’s needs rather than just their interactions. You are determining what features, elements, and innovation could better solve your user’s needs. During this step you should also pay a lot of attention to content accessibility guidelines and available technology implementations.

4. So you have a pretty good prototype, now you have to start letting users test it. Again, you are not a UX designer, so your focus is on how you will conduct these tests to ensure your target audience can be better served by the test results; not to mention how you will measure the metrics you want to measure. For example, will the tests be moderated or unmoderated, remote or in person, and/or will the tests provide qualitative or quantitative data?

5. Congratulations, you made it to a possible never-ending step. Here you will establish the long-term plans related to iterations and improvements, as well as how soon, and how often, you are planning on testing changes and improvements. This is particularly important because there are elements that make a huge impact on user testing, such as seasonality, external factors like politics and economy, and even less common things like product quality or supply chain changes.

Conclusion: Having a user-centered UX Strategy benefits everyone

The importance of a user-centered UX strategy is that it elevates everyone involved, especially the user who benefits from the passion that helps a company to create better products and services. User Experience Strategy can be half-baked and still produce results, it is that effective to use, but when it is done the right way, keeping customer needs and expectations in mind, as well as designing experiences that become memorable in a user’s mind, then you are building a long-lasting business relationship that is blessed by positive user comments and raving fan reviews.

Thank you for reading my post! I am just getting started with my blog, and I really want to connect with you. I will give 6 free consultations (this bonus will no longer exist when all consultations have been claimed) to help you establish your own UX Strategy. No strings attached, just fill out the form at the bottom of this page and mention this blog post :)