UX Strategy: How To Align Design And The Business
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Here's a practical take on how to developer a UX strategy to support your business.
What Is A UX Strategy?
A UX strategy is a plan to improve the value for the user and the business. It’s simply looking at what our users care about, what the business cares about, and coming up with a plan to improve both.
That plan needs to cover:
- What the existing problem is
- What the new solution looks like
- How we get there
- How the user will be better of
- How the business will be better of
- How we know
It's About Alignment, Not Balance
A UX strategy aligns business and user goals. This the core part of a solid UX strategy.
Often you’ll hear the idea of balancing the business and user needs. That implies a sort of tension between the two. That leads to tradeoffs.
A proper UX Strategy aligns the two and leads to a solution where both sides win. (yes it’s possible!)
This is key whether your doing incremental updates or designing a brand new zero-to-one product.
How To Create A UX Strategy?
Coming up with a UX strategy is straightforward. It comes down to 4 parts:
- Identify the data you have around business goals and insights.
- Inspect your current solution and look for UX deficiencies.
- Explore potential UX strategy solutions to the problems.
- Place The Bet - tie it all together in a strategy statement
Identify The Data
Get The Lay Of The Land
Quantitative and qualitative information you get from any method of user research, analytics, customer marketing outreach, competitor analysis etc. Talking to your customers to identify their pain points is key here.
Understand all pertinent business metrics and the context with them For example, are they performing well, under performing. Which ones are higher priority.
In general you may need more research at times. When appropriate, lean back into user research.
Identify What's Not Working
With some of the data it’ll be clear what’s not working. Either business metrics will clearly show an under performance or customer complaints will be loud and/or frequent.
From qualitative research it’s a bit more clear on what’s not working. Customer complaints will tell you what’s not working. Customer interviews will tell you problems that need to be solved.
Inspect
Where is The Design Under performing
Take a look at your current solutions and identify UX inefficiencies. These are the areas you’ll address in your UX strategy.
This can be areas where your app is under performing on typical UX metrics (such as time it takes to complete a task).
Or where your product is under performing against tried and true usability pillars.
Often it’ll be obvious where the problems are but now’s the time to really sit with it and understand the why of the problem.
Vibes & Data
Sometimes you have UX metrics to tell you how your design is performing. That can help give you a steer into what to fix.
Or customers will clearly point it out in user testing or when you are observing the users.
Sometimes it’s more gut feel. Designers have a unique eye and can see design inefficiencies.
Not saying you should solely rely on instincts alone. Vet it out, do some research and validate it.
Sometimes it’s a combination of the two.
Find The Sweet Spot
When you identify an important business metric, a user pain point, and a poor design, that’s your sweet spot.
These are ripe areas to attack with a UX strategy.
Sometimes it’s only two points. You’ll see a business metric not up to par, look at the design and have a good sense why. That’s another great area to target.
Explore
Ideate On High Level Solutions
Explore initial solutions. These can be rough ideas mocked up in sketch format, wireframed, or even solutions done in Figma. Prototypes may be needed here as well.
The fidelity and importance of the problem will determine how much effort is warranted.
Testing May Be Needed
As part of your exploration, you may need to validate ideas with users (and perhaps other stakeholders like engineering).
Bounce around ideas until you gain a decent amount of confidence in a general direction.
Place The Bet
With a UX Strategy, you’re placing bets. You don’t know for sure if what you propose will work. Approach a UX Strategy with this in mind.
Increase Confidence As You Go
The smaller the bet the less confidence you need. The bigger the bet, the more more confidence in it you should have.
You gain confidence through testing, iterating, and validating your concepts.
As such you need to approach it accordingly.
Typical UX Strategy Bets
UX Strategy bets come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s a typical rundown of them. These can be quite big in scope, quite small in scope, or anywhere in between:
Enhancing Features
Taking an existing feature that’s already doing well and making it better.
Improve The Experience
Solving for a customer problem that hasn’t been solved yet.
Tied To Metrics
A UX Design Strategy should include improving business and product metrics.
Customer Complaints
UX Strategy tied directly to fixing customer complaints. .
Product Design
If your product has certain product design principles tied to it, a UX strategy can revolve around redesigning the app to better suite those principles.
Tied To Business Outcomes
Helping the business achieve certain outcomes with a UX strategy.
Where A UX Strategy Fits In The Portfolio
UX Strategy isn’t the only thing. Product has their priorities, so does marketing. Maybe other departments.
In general. UX should be part of the day to day product development lifecycle. But, there should be a complimentary standalone effort to focus on a specific UX strategy.
Obviously every team is unique and every company has their own ways of working. In general there’s a way UX strategy can fit in:
Spider-Man Meme
Sometimes the organization’s priority is solely improving the UX. In this case the product strategy is the same as the UX strategy.
Call it what you want it’s all the same.
Compliment
Typically, Product is setting the roadmap of which UX is a part of that product development process.
But a standalone UX strategy can compliment the broader product strategy.
Developing
Part of the UX strategy should be, developing a UX strategy. Taking time to go through the above and develop UX strategy plans.
UX Strategy Summary
There it is. A UX Strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or even grand. A simple plan to address business and user issues is all it takes.
They key is alignment around those goals.