Every long-lasting, complicated process needs a strategy to slay the result. Without a strategy, you’ll unlikely achieve durable and effective outcomes.
If you want to create a UX design or make a redesign, you should know the basics about UX design strategy. With this information, you can make more deliberate decisions.
Let’s talk about UX strategy: why it is important and how ui ux design services build it.
UX strategy is…
In simple terms, UX strategy is a plan that aligns business objectives with budget and technical constraints, as well as consumer needs and experiences. The UX strategy establishes the vision, plan, and goals that business should stick to in its UX design.
Typically, a UX strategy is planned for one year. This duration is sufficient to ensure that strategic decisions and tools remain relevant. Generally, analysts and UI/UX designers collaborate on developing the strategy. Analysts define business goals, and UX design services create the product’s design and structure.
Why is a UX strategy needed?
- Clarifies the value of UX design. Helps business leaders understand how UX design contributes to achieving business goals, such as increasing customer loyalty and market share.
- Aligns company actions. Ensures all teams are working towards a unified vision, promoting internal collaboration and saving time and resources.
- Provides clear success metrics. Sets specific UX goals and metrics, allowing for the measurement of progress and effectiveness.
- Fosters a user-first mentality. Creates a company culture focused on understanding and meeting user needs.
- Bridges brand promises and customer experiences. Ensures that the business promises align with the actual user experience, building trust and loyalty in the brand.
Indicators for needing a UX strategy
If you hesitate on creating a UX strategy, these reasons are telltale indicators your business should address a UI/UX design studio:
- Your company has declining sales and conversion rates without clear reasons.
- You don’t understand user issues, such as their preferences, dislikes, and needs in the digital product.
- The existing UX strategy raises questions about its purpose and effectiveness.
- You have insufficient data on user interactions, including frequent misclicks and the time taken to reach target actions.
- You want to stay current with trends and adopt new technologies.
- You need to address weaknesses and highlight strengths to users.
Three basic stages of UX strategy
Let’s talk about these three basic stages.
Vision
Vision is the base of the UX design process. We should know our strategic intent and the ideal end result. A clear vision guides the team toward a higher-level, user-centric objective.
Goals and metrics
Goals, along with metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), link UX optimization directly to business objectives.
Strategic goals and metrics help to:
- Demonstrate why a user-oriented approach will lead to business success.
- Identify actions with the most significant impact on the business.
- Prioritize tasks, understand acceptable compromises, and manage timelines.
The key metrics can be established by the UI/UX design team based on historical data or provided by management.
Plan
A plan is essential for achieving each goal, breaking it down into manageable tasks. These tasks involve solving known UX problems, exploring new ideas and opportunities, or conducting further research. Completing these tasks allows the team to show progress in meeting key metrics.
UI/UX design agencies create a plan, defining:
- Priority areas of user experience
- Estimated timelines
- Necessary conditions and dependencies
- Key components
A plan helps to prioritize efforts and reduce uncertainties. The format of the plan can vary, with some teams using project management tools like Trello or Asana and others creating roadmaps.
The plan doesn’t prescribe research methods or concept implementation — those decisions are left to the UX design agency.
The plan’s timeframe should align with the vision’s scope, with stakeholders and participants identifying issues, setting priorities, and tackling tasks as outlined.
Components of a UX strategy
Based on the plan, goals, and vision, UI/UX design services work on the following aspects:
- Target audience analysis. Understanding the needs, expectations, and behaviors of potential users (creating user personas).
- Testing and optimization. Conducting tests with real users to identify issues and improve the user experience. The number of test users varies based on specific project needs.
- Audit and planning. Conducting audits to identify areas for improvement and creating plans outlining tasks and timelines for each product. This usually involves both technical refinement of design systems and UX research (qualitative, quantitative, or metric analysis depending on the product development stage).
- User scenario development. Describing typical ways users will interact with the product, illustrating user interactions with the site.
- Interface design. Creating an intuitive and user-friendly design, including technical aspects.
- Monitoring and data analysis. Collecting and analyzing user behavior data to assess the effectiveness of the UX strategy.
What should I start from to create a UX strategy?
Define why you need a UX strategy. Understand your goals and the problems you aim to solve. Then, collaborate with an analyst and a UI/UX design studio to develop a comprehensive strategy.
Plan strategically!
