A UX strategy is created at the initial stage – before the development and implementation of solutions. It is a plan to achieve goals, consisting of three parts. A UX strategy allows you to prioritize and get work done effectively.
A UX Strategy Is What?
A UX strategy is a predetermined course of action for enhancing the user experience.
One product, service, feature, several goods, and services, or entire companies can all be covered by a UX design strategy. A solid UX strategy makes sure that user-centric solutions are incorporated into the company plan in either scenario.
Components of a UX Strategy
A UX strategy is composed of the following 3 elements:
- Vision or intention statement(s);
- Long-term objectives and metrics;
- Plan.
How Having a UX Strategy Helps
Let’s make a reservation that the pluses will differ for different teams, including different ones in size. For a small team, there are 4 main points:
Focus on value, not pixels. With the advent of strategy, it becomes easier to abandon those tasks that devour time, but at the same time bring value that is far from equivalent to the time spent.
Conscious choice. In a small team, there are always more tasks than people. At the same time, you will have a huge amount of feedback from users, a long list of competitors, research results, and your own ideas that you want to implement. But in practice, it turns out to be much less than we would like. And what to grab first – used to be a sore point all the time.
Unification of experience in all channels of interaction/parts of products. On the one hand, the smaller the team that is responsible for UX, the less acute this problem is. On the other hand, the UX team is not the only one that directly affects the user experience.
Common language. The whole team understands what goals it faces, and why they are the way we are going to go towards them. Having a shared vision makes it much easier to explain why we do one thing and not another.
How to Start
Step 1:
It is worth starting the preparation of a strategy in order to look around and soberly assess the current state of the product and what global challenges the business faces. What is important to pay attention to:
- Common challenges facing businesses;
- Known Issues.
Step 2:
Once it becomes clear what is happening with the product and with the business right now, it’s time to think about how you would like the product to be perceived in the future. What we wanted in the first version of our strategy:
We wanted to be seen as the #1 helper in improving other services, no matter how much the person who improves them “fumbles” in SD.
Step 3:
The strategy is adopted for a certain period of time. You can take a period of 6 months or more, subject to the availability of intermediate control points.
Step 4:
One of the most important parts of the strategy is a set of specific rules, the observance of which will allow you to achieve your goals (in particular, that the product is perceived as intended in step 2).
These rules should not be narrow (for example, should not be limited to visual design). Rather, they should set the direction, leaving some room for choice. They should be high enough so that they can be used by different specialists.
Step 5:
A high-level plan is needed, it must take into account that for some points the above information may not yet be available (and this is normal).
Step 6:
A mandatory part of the strategy should be the definition of metrics that will help assess whether what you are doing is helping you achieve your goals. It may very well be that difficulties will arise with this because some of the indicators have not been measured and there is no data on them – it’s okay, the main thing is not to forget to add the task of starting to collect data, first in the plan.
