What is UX strategy?
The user experience strategy or UX Strategy is a way to address & plan a digital product. This strategy aligns the business goals, user’s requirements & technology to ensure the utilisation of the resources in the right direction.
UX Strategy is the “big picture”, a high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainity.
Earlier, companies used to focus on business strategies and develop products in order to meet their goals. But now, the focus has shifted to a customer-centric strategy. It now places a stronger emphasis on satisfying the customer’s needs through user research and design practices.
Why is UX strategy important?
A valid strategy is a difference between success and failure.
The purpose of any strategy is to create a game plan that looks at your current position and then helps you get to where you actually want to be.
When a product is launched, it is not just the product that needs to be fully functional, but also all the other touchpoints with which the user will be interacting.
UX strategy considers all such aspects and aids everyone working on the project. It makes sure that the team is judiciously using all the resources available to develop the product and features that will provide a good user experience.
With every project, there are assumptions and assumptions are a form of uncertainty. UX Strategy starts with user research which helps in eliminating all such assumptions and provides a rock-solid foundation.
How to plan a UX strategy?
1. Set clear goals
When you create or re-design a digital product, there are many complex tasks involved. In the digital product world, time delays, increased costs, and bad user experiences – get exacerbated when there are no clear goals among team members. This is a perfect recipe for chaos.
Setting clear goals requires you to account for your strengths and be mindful of your weaknesses.
Every project requires countless tasks and hours of hard work, and this is why it becomes essential to draft a clear, error-free and robust strategy. It helps deliver a solution that is aligned with the business goals and meets the users’ requirements.
At times, the designs are incredibly creative and captivating, but the organisation fails to meet the users’ expectations.
This happens when a designer forgets to consider the users’ needs, which means the purpose of the design is not fulfilled. To avoid the same, we have provided actionable tips in this article on how to delight your users with a great user experience.
Users are more likely to use a product that helps to get the task done instead of those that look good but fails to meet them.
2. Define challenges
Research is crucial and the most variable step in any project. The bigger the project, the bigger, will be the research activity. Designers consider this phase as the key to creating a superior user experience.
The research is done by asking ‘what’ & ‘why’. The research is aided better when the information is gathered around the product, problem and placement.
If you are starting out as a UX researcher or UX designer, this article will help you in planning effective UX research.
3. Ask your clients
Ask your clients many questions to get a clear understanding of the project, product & goal.
Question for Clients
- What is the mission of the company?
- How much budget are you willing to allocate?
- What is the definition of success according to you?
Questions for Research
- Who is the target audience?
- What are they using now?
- What are the issues that users are facing?
To know more about what questions to ask your clients in a design brief, explore our article.
4. Approach the problem
After a thorough analysis, comprehensive data can help understand the problem areas and generate ideas to solve them. This phase is all about brainstorming and coming up with different ideas.
These ideas can be finalised by proceeding with the interactive wireframes and prototypes — the designers, based on all these work crafts ideas with developers’ help to create a sample.
5. KPI & measurements
At this phase, the digital product is launched and tracked in real-world usage. This helps us decide whether the product is ready to launch or needs to go back to its earlier stage.
Conclusion
To come up with a service or product that tops the class is vital for a company to be successful. Designing a product that serves the purpose of a delightful experience is equally vital if you want to have a well-placed product.
With the UX strategy, it becomes easy to develop a product and solve the problems by addressing the correct issues.
Earlier, the marketing strategists used to believe in handling product development as part of marketing. But that is no longer the case. Now, product development requires a proper strategy that revolves around the user experience and creating it at an early stage can surely help the entire team.
Aakash Jethwani
Founder & Creative Director
Aakash Jethwani, the founder and creative director of Octet Design Studio, aims to help companies disrupt the market through innovative design solutions.
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