What exactly is UX strategy?
UX strategy is somewhere at the intersection of UX design and business strategy, as Jaime Levy explains on her book about UX strategy.
In order to create a successful product design, a product team needs to have a long-term plan that ensures a user-centric approach that aligns with the company’s goals and the user’s needs. But what exactly it is a UX Strategy and what are the important points of a UX strategy? I will go over a few aspects I find the most important. A UX strategy can be defined in different ways, but it boils down to the WHY and the HOW, and this includes:
- The team involved in the project
- The information and existing data
- The goal or desired outcomes
The plan should start defining who is involved in the project, the team’s workflow, goals, and responsibilities. Knowing who is working on a specific task helps to build a more structured and transparent work environment. It is also important to have key information and valuable existing data to start working. The strategy should begin with the discovery phase. This means that the team should deep into research to expose key information about the product they want to design. This is very important, especially at an early stage, to avoid building a product that nobody needs and nobody will use.
A strong UX strategy should also include a definition of every aspect of the product and it should take place before the initial design phase. In other words, it is setting the goals and direction that will align the team with common product vision, determine actions and mobilize resources in a proper and efficient way. Any UX endeavour should use the proper metrics to measure the ROI of any UX initiative.
Defining a UX strategy requires planning and organizing the requirements around the user and stakeholders goals. The whole purpose of a UX strategy is to help Identify a framework in order to see the bigger picture. Seeing the bigger picture helps to get the right direction of the product and how the business goals are going to be achieved.
As mentioned at the beginning of this short post, this constitutes; the human elements (the team involved) hopefully involving every member of the team, the information elements (information and data), and the desired outcomes (the users and stakeholders goals).
You can find more about the topic here