What is the UX strategy and how to create it?

A well-tailored UX strategy that fits your business goals and caters to customer needs is the game-changer. Read on as today we’ll uncover what a UX strategy is, why it’s so important, and what are 4 pillars that make your users’ lives easier. As a sweet bonus, our specialists will share valuable tips to help you craft your very own superb UX strategy.

What is a UX strategy?

To grasp the concept of a UX strategy fully, let’s clarify what UX is and differentiate it from its sometimes-confused sibling, UI. As these two terms sound pretty much alike, the distinction between them is often overlooked. So you — whether a young designer or business owner wanting to attract more users — should definitely know that UX and UI aren’t the same.

In simple words, UX strategy is a forward-thinking plan focused on improving how users interact with a company’s products or services. It harmonizes touchpoints with customer expectations and integrates corporate objectives and product goals, all to fulfill the needs of both visitors and stakeholders. To sum it up, UX is about designing solutions to solve specific user problems.

As for UI strategy, the key emphasis is on the product’s visual and interactive aspects. This encompasses the strategic planning and integration of design elements, including the product’s appearance, presentation, and customer engagement. In contrast, UX strategy defines the general direction and goals for the user experience, concentrating on their demands and business objectives.

UX strategy ensures users reach their destination. UI, in turn, makes this journey bright and memorable.

Why is user experience strategy important?

Think of a UX strategy as your trusty guide that benefits everyone on board: the end user, the design team, and the company of your client or your own. Without it, you’re basically on a journey with no clear path, no roadmap, and no idea if you’re on the right track.

But let’s leave all the metaphors behind for a moment and come back to the real problems of the digital world.

Long story short, with a good UX strategy, you can:

• Stop yourself from blind attempts. The right UX strategy provides clear direction for businesses to achieve their ideal user experience. Think of it as the friendly navigator, helping to find the best route for the journey rather than leaving things to chance.
  
  Even though there are so many ways to reach the same destination, not all of them are great, so you should choose wisely. If you blindly follow the wind, an exciting voyage through your website can transform into a puzzling nightmare. And that’s the last thing we want for our users, aren’t we?

• Make everything less foggy. UX strategy can help you stay focused and address the right challenge instead of wandering around trying to configure the same feature over and over again. After all, success often boils down to simplicity. So, ensure you choose the right 20% of work you need to invest time and effort in. Highlight what truly matters, eliminate the unnecessary, and attain 80% of your goals in no time.

• Show the value and the impact of your company. In essence, a UX strategy connects all the dots back to your goals. It directly contributes to the company’s success, showing your executive boards the value that you bring to the table. Just by glancing at your strategy, stakeholders can see if it clearly demonstrates the path from A to B or cause a painful headache. So, you’d rather keep it simple and remember that “less is more” will be a chart-topper for a good while.

• Foster your touchpoints. At its core, touchpoints are specific elements or interactions within a product or service that a user encounters. Those points come into play when customers engage with what your business delivers — be it ads, news, products, or any representation of your brand. Through a well-designed UX strategy, you can easily integrate touchpoints with your vision of the perfect user experience. Think of it as the bridge that connects all these elements, reflecting your company’s essence and allowing customers to enjoy their time on your website.

• Gain even more users’ hearts. A strong UX strategy not only deepens customer affection for your brand but also transforms them from mere strangers into loyal customers. This, in turn, will help you boost the conversion rate and drive more sales. When you prioritize user experience, you create a platform people genuinely love using and tell their friends about. This organic word-of-mouth marketing is often the most effective and cost-efficient way to reach new users.

Don’t design for features, design for journeys. Every click, every interaction should tell a story.

4 tenets of UX strategy

According to an American author, interface designer, and UX expert Jaime Levy, a user experience strategy is built on 4 key principles. Let’s examine each of them more closely in the list below.

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1. Business strategy. It serves as a reflection of the company’s holistic vision, highlighting its core values, distinctive strengths, diverse revenue streams, and high-level goals.

2. Focus on innovation. A company’s UX strategy aims to increase value for both buyers and the business. It’s achieved by pursuing low costs and differentiation, ultimately leading to the creation of unique solutions that generate a positive ROI (return on investment).

3. Validated user research. Card sorting, field studies, focus groups, and thorough user research are essential for validating the value of a product. These methods help companies avoid blindly developing products without a detailed customer analysis, which can save time, effort, and resources.

4. Killer UX design. A killer UX design is defined as a design that prioritizes aligning company goals with user requirements and expectations. You need to have an understanding of UX laws and principles to create a good UX design that is easy to navigate and accessible to everyone.

How to create a UX strategy?

Now, when we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to explore the main ingredients of a good UX strategy. Below, our team outlined the crucial steps most companies follow to organize their actions. As jumping straight into the design process is never the best option — first, you need to plan what tasks must be done and how exactly you want to do them.

1. Estimate your current state

Determining a future direction becomes a daunting task without a clear understanding of your current position. To chart the course effectively, we advise you to pay attention to the following:

• Common problems that the business should tackle.

To kick things off in the right direction, you should have a clear grasp of a company’s core objectives. These involve testing the success of a business model, building strong user relationships, and ensuring client loyalty.

• Issues you are already aware of and available resources.

Identify insights at hand, like a low retention rate, customer dissatisfaction, and revenue growth falling short of your business targets. Later on, find out what resources —  e.g., company workforce, budget, and loyal customer base —  you already have to tackle these issues.

2. Conduct UX research

The next step is to conduct your much-needed UX research. Typically, concise UX research includes these components: 

• User research. At this stage, you study target customers, their needs, behaviors, and attitudes to bring realistic settings and insights into design processes. 

• Stakeholder interviews. This is a research approach for gathering information from individuals or groups that have a personal interest in the success of a project. Although surveys can be convenient, we favor interviews because they offer a broader perspective and have fewer drawbacks.

• Competitive analysis. This involves researching rivals’ user experience performance to improve your product’s UX design.

• Beta testing. It’s also known as pre-release usability and user experience testing. This approach helps understand how the product functions before it’s made available to the market or customers, providing valuable insights.

• Feedback collection. UX research requires examining user feedback to identify areas for improvement in the product, ultimately leading to a smoother user experience.

3. Build a UX vision

A vision is the ultimate goal for how you want your product to be seen in the market. Plus, it answers key questions about your project’s direction and the reasons behind it, helping to contextualize the work needed at a higher level.

To develop a UX vision, it’s crucial to employ a collaborative, evidence-based approach. This method fosters better understanding and coordination among team members in their UX efforts.

Here are crucial steps for crafting a UX vision:

• Gather insights. Collect data by researching to learn more about where UX is at the moment.
• Define the ideal future state. Get in line with a perfect future UX vision for your product or service.
• Create a vision statement. Consider writing a vision statement outlining your ideal state of UX in the future.
• Develop an action plan. Ascertain the actions and materials needed to manifest your ideas.
• Communicate your vision. To guarantee alignment and comprehension, communicate the vision to team members and stakeholders.

4. Determine your focus areas and strategic goals

The main parts of your strategy are your focus area and strategic goals, kind of like the bread and butter. When you put the right amount of effort into them, they really help you get solid results for the final products. These goals guide where you’ll put your energy to reach your targets and stay in line with the UX objectives you’ve imagined.

For instance, a focus area might involve optimizing the login page to enhance user experience or boosting post-sales services. Once these points are identified, they can be translated into strategic targets aimed at achieving specific outcomes.

5. Develop a UX roadmap

In the ever-evolving world of business and technology, companies use roadmaps as trusty guides to navigate from the current state to the ideal future state of their products. Furthermore, these roadmaps facilitate open and effective communication with stakeholders and team members, fostering alignment and transparency.

Within a comprehensive UX roadmap, we not only define the rules for company adherence but also map out the practical steps required to achieve the desired goals. Let’s walk through the following steps:

• Determine the objective and goals. Determine the roadmap’s principal objective, which might include boosting team awareness, providing cross-disciplinary visibility, controlling bandwidth, or prioritizing future work.
• Gather inputs and research. Gather or perform research to understand the present state of UX and agree on an ideal future vision for UX.
• Create a vision statement. Use a vision statement to articulate the ideal future state of UX, ensuring it is well-defined and backed by research.
• Develop an action plan. Identify the actions and resources necessary to accomplish the vision, as well as high-level goals and plans, such as strategic initiatives and epics.
• Communicate your vision. Share the vision with stakeholders and team members to achieve alignment and comprehension.
• Capture the “Why.” Define the roadmap’s purpose and objectives to make them consistent with the company's strategic goals and plans.
• Customize to your audience. Tailor the roadmap view based on who will be seeing it, ensuring that all stakeholders can access and understand it.
• Be communicative. Use images and stories to give all stakeholders a clear knowledge of the UX journey.
• Leave room for iteration. Make sure the roadmap provides for flexibility and iteration as the company’s strategic goals and user needs change.

6. Define and track your KPIs

There are many types of UX KPIs, but we generally divide them into two groups — behavioral and attitudinal. Attitudinal metrics reflect how users feel about your product, measuring their reactions and perceptions. Behavioral metrics, on the other hand, track user interactions and engagements with your product, showcasing how customers use it in practice.

These two categories together provide a comprehensive understanding of the user experience and product performance. Behavioral shows how users interact, and attitudinal, in turn, reveals how they feel.

7. Go for experiments and improve your strategy

After setting your key performance indicators, the next step is to experiment with different approaches and improve your strategy.

Failure is the mother of all learning. To design your ideal product that every one of your customers loves, you must be willing to undertake various experiments and perhaps fail a couple of times in the process. 

With your designs and strategy in place for continual validation, you can create an MVP, test it with real users, and tweak it depending on their comments. 

5 tips for creating a user experience strategy

When it comes to designing user-focused products, a UX strategy is invaluable. But what’s the most effective way to formulate one? To give you all the answers you need, check 5 key tips that will assist you in creating your very own UX strategy.

Keep a user-centric approach

It’s not about your product but rather what it can do for your audience. Therefore, maintaining a user-centric approach is a must for an effective UX strategy that matches the company’s goals with UX design.

Prioritize usability over profits

Profits are indeed important, but your customer experience must always be put at the forefront. Your UX strategy should be all about user needs and your business objectives, focusing on delivering value rather than just revenue. So, it’s essential to make your product intuitive and easy to use. 

Set specific and measurable goals

The key to setting specific and measurable goals is that they must be tangible instead of being something close to “pie in the sky.” In this context, we strongly recommend you follow the S.M.A.R.T framework. This approach involves defining objectives that are clear, well-defined, and can be quantified, making it easier to track progress and evaluate success.

Consider all the touchpoints a customer has with a brand

Touchpoints are events when a customer interacts with a company. Once creating your UX strategy, always remember that user experience extends over multiple stages, such as advertisements, messaging, rules, agreements, and customer support interactions. 

Prioritize speed and accessibility

Speed and accessibility play a major role in improving user experience. Customers’ initial preference often leans towards swift services and quick response times. Hence, the more hassle-free your product or service functions, the higher the user satisfaction. 

Ready to create your own UX strategy?

In a nutshell, UX strategy is the cornerstone for achieving your ideal user experience vision, so you should start working with your team to figure one out ASAP. And if you need any help with this matter, don’t hesitate to reach out to Halo Lab. We’re here to put our experience and expertise to work, ensuring your website has a perfect UX strategy and can confidently climb to the coveted top spot!