Why and How Businesses Should Create a Winning UX Strategy

As more and more of our daily business interactions happen online, it is important to deliver a seamless user experience across all devices. Provide a digital experience that keeps the users hooked to your product while also reflecting your brand and that aligns with your end-goals and positions your brand in the right light.

How can this be accomplished? By defining a UX strategy and making simple, explicit UX plans.

What is UX Strategy?

To start, UX strategy is not UX design. UX strategy is the process of building a rationale that provides direction to UX design efforts. UX strategy, if done right, will help you in designing a flawless user experience which not only pleases customers and users, but also presents your app/product in the right light.

In a nutshell, UX strategy helps organizations determine the critical experiences which are most important to the customer segments and prioritize these experiences to gain the maximum economic value.

So how do you do that? Let’s go through the most important steps.

How Do You Create a UX Strategy?

Essentially, here are four steps that you must follow to create a winning UX strategy.

1. Determine a Business Strategy

It is likely that your organization maintains a fair number of documents that reflect your workflow, your policies, and the strategic side of your business.

Now is the right time to make the best out of these important documents. Use them to create a winning UX strategy.

Your business should do its homework and run through all the detailed documents. This will help you understand the core business principles. Further, the inputs you extract here will come in handy while designing a complementary UX strategy.

We will highly recommend you to go through the operating strategies, the recent marketing plans, the 5-year plan as to what the company expects to achieve in the coming years, and industry reports.

Although a few of these reports might bounce off your head, you must invest your time in understanding the core. You could also take the help of someone from the company to join you.

This step will provide you an idea of the USPs of the company and will help you in competing within the industry.

Quick checklist:

• Did you go through the important branding documents of your company?
• Do you have a fair understanding of the business principles?
• What about the 5-year plan? Did you check that?

With an overall business strategy, you can create an effective UX strategy.

2. Create a Value Proposition

Likely, your brand envisions to deliver a promise of value to its users. Perhaps it is the primary reason why a user should buy your product or service. This is also why people will bother to read about your product or use it. Make sure your brand has a clear value proposition for consumers.

Your UX strategy must be in line with all these agreements. It must be relevant and aim to solve customers’ problems. It must provide measurable results. Further, it must stand unique and provide customers with a clear idea as to why they should buy from you and not from your competitors.

Focusing on all these aspects will help you create a UX strategy that is in accordance with the end-goals of the company, and reflects on its brand story. Further, this way, you will also be making way for a UX design which is exactly how you perceived it to be.

Quick checklist:

• What customer problems is your product aiming to solve?
• Do you have competitors in the market? How is your product different from theirs?

Create a value proposition to get the most out of your UX plan.

3. Use User Research for Validation

You have a great idea. You have timed it properly. Above all, you have a great team to execute all the required tasks properly. Great, but something is missing: strong user research.

User research helps you verify if you are on the right track in terms of a value proposition.

There are various ways through which you can conduct user research – gaining inputs from focus groups, studying ethnographic data, doing contextual inquiries and more. Although all these methods provide great results, each of them is rather assuming than validating. And assumptions do go wrong.

This is why it is highly recommended to verify user research through reality-check by obtaining direct feedback from users. Interact with your target audiences, gauge their mood, and then formulate your UX strategy based on the derived inputs

Quick checklist:

• Have you dated your product properly? Is your target market ready to welcome a new product?
• Have you gathered feedback from your target audiences and understood their behavior?

User research will help your company institute effective UX strategy.

4. Deploy a Great UX Design

Creating a great UX design is an important part of UX strategy. A UX is all about how a user feels when they are using a digital product while trying to accomplish a task or goal. You will be surprised to see that even small actions that your users take on your website or application are tied to customer acquisition.

From a simple sign-up process to adding products in an online cart, these design touchpoints define the experience of your customers with your digital product. All these experiences, to a large extent, determine how likely a user will accomplish the desired action – particularly, making a purchase.

Top UX designers help you make the most out of all the opportunities that come to you. They help you drive user engagement, define critical moments and features, and help you at focusing on innovation.

It is important to mention here that you can only arrive at a great UX design when you follow the other three important elements of creating a UX strategy that we already talked about, namely - business strategy, value proposition, and validation of user research.

So, now, that you think you have a great UX design in place, it is the right time to test the waters. How? Ask a few questions to yourself and determine if your UX is what you intended it to be in the first place. Find gaps to improve and self-reflect. Our checklist will help: Quick checklist:

• How will you rate the UX of your product on a scale of 1 to 10 and why?
• Is there any room for improvement?
• What is that one thing that your competitors are doing differently in terms of UX design?

It is important to understand that the golden rule to arrive at a great UX design is to improve, test, and improve. Keep the process going!

Create a Winning UX Strategy

To conclude, UX strategy is not only about designing a flawless UX but it is also about you think and perceive user experience.

It is about researching what’s already available, identifying the gaps, recognizing the needs, running structured experiments, failing, and iterating until you develop something that is valuable and solves the problem areas of a section of the society we live in.

With this in mind, it is the right time to wear your capes, take risks, push the boundaries, and craft a winning UX strategy that resonates well with your target audiences.