User Experience (UX) is a vital consideration for any organisation wishing to remain competitive and relevant. A UX strategy is the way you define and deliver this experience.
Without a good strategy in place, UX activities end up being ad-hoc and disjointed. At best this is inefficient. At worst it can cause internal conflict, mixed messages and a lot of customer confusion.
A UX strategy acts as a framework for making mindful and coordinated decisions on what activities to work on and what to leave for another day. This enables teams to use their limited time and energy to focus on the things they believe will deliver the most impact.
It is also a way to align business and user needs, particularly by demonstrating the business benefits of a better user experience. These benefits tend to include simpler onboarding, better retention and a more positive brand experience – all of which contribute towards growth.
And as a further benefit a UX strategy acts as a guiding policy to drive customer-centric decision making throughout different parts of the organisation.
Developing a UX strategy
There is no single right or wrong way to develop your user strategy, but I think it is important to consider the following things:
- Define your UX scope – Be clear what user experience means for your organisation and what the scope of your strategy is covering. Ensure there is a common understanding of the definition and shared terminology to avoid confusion.
- Understand the challenges – Avoid diving into solutions until you’ve spent time building context and got to grips with the actual problems to be solved.
- Define vision and goals – As you build context, start Illustrating the outcome that solving the problem will provide. How will things be better? Why is the outcome important? What does it enable and what goals need to be met to move towards the vision.
- Develop a guiding policy – Compared to a rigid set of rules, a policy acts as a helpful guide for making decisions that can be used by people across the organisation. This enables more consistent decision-making and helps teams to determine the things they will work on and the things they won’t.
- Define a coherent set of actions – Create an initial roadmap of the UX challenges you’ll focus on first and the related activities. Ensure you co-develop the roadmap (and broader strategy) with other teams you work with across the organisation to gain buy-in and greater impact.
- Establish metrics for gauging progress – Establishing metrics linked to business outcomes (like better retention) has a double-benefit of helping the team see if they are heading in the right direction and tangibly demonstrates the business benefits of UX.
- Develop feedback and learning loops – Strategies must be adaptive to new learning and feedback, so put in place processes for collecting feedback from lots of sources and synthesise to create useful insights to inform decision making.
In summary
User experience is a key consideration for organisational growth and relevancy. Without a UX strategy, organisations end up taking an inconsistent approach to their experience activities which can result in negative outcomes. There is no right or wrong approach for developing a UX strategy, but you need to be clear on your desired outcomes and the key challenges you’ll need to tackle.
You also need to ensure other people have the opportunity to feed into the strategy and to be guided by it. Finally, the strategy needs to be adaptive to change and new learning.
Thanks for reading 🙂