What is UX Strategy?

UX Strategy is a plan designed to communicate salient direction of how to reach a desired future state of user experience. Furthermore, UX strategy creates alignment between user centric needs, business objectives and technical capabilities. We believe UX Strategy allows all disciplines involved in the execution of a project to better understand the direction they are headed before investing in designing and building the experience.

A consistent and well established UX Strategy will answer many of the following questions:

What is the value proposition to the user?
How does this product or feature map to our vision?
Why are we building this this experience from a business perspective?
How is success measured for this experience?
How does this experience translate across channels and touch points?
What is the priority in this experience?
What are the goals and objectives of this experience?
What is the approximate timing for this project?

Why do we need UX Strategy?

A well defined UX Strategy helps ensure alignment across distributed teams and within teams. Leading to better outcomes due to a well articulated vision, plan and goals. Resulting in less overrun of cost and time required to achieve a specific outcome.

UX strategy makes the vision, plan and goals more accessible to all parties involved with executing a user experience outcome. UX Strategy enables executives to verify and align with the overarching strategy. This in turn makes it easier for leadership to see the value in this user experience initiative.

Clear measures of success make it easier to understand how the experience design will impact business outcomes. This ensures that the team is heading the right way to our desired future state of user experience.

Overall the various disciplines involved in the execution of the user experience will have user centric perspective to guide them.

How do you practice UX Strategy?

Establish strategic user experience goals which are aligned with overarching business strategy. Validate these goals with stakeholder interviews and customer interviews or voice of customer data. Additional research can be useful as needed such as competitive analysis, current state analysis, clickstream data review, etc.

Once you have a clear understanding of the stakeholder expectations and customer value proposition, begin to synthesize your research findings into a conceptual ideation. Validate the conceptualizations with business stakeholders and customers to ensure you are on the right track.

Produce a UX strategy roadmap to articulate milestones that coincide with objectives and goals. The roadmap is often iterative and requires updating at various checkpoints.

Evaluate and assess the people and resources needed to execute the strategy. Determine high-level estimates to map out high-level schedules and costing.