Good UX design combines effective marketing, superior customer service, and a unique, cutting-edge product to provide quality customer experiences.

To create these, brands need skilled #uxdesigners who have well-defined goals and guidelines for the projects that they are working on. This is where UX Strategy comes in.

What is UX Strategy?

A UX strategy is a detailed plan for how to keep the user experience with a brand in line with the overall goals and objectives of the company.

It ensures that an organization knows what they want its customers to experience while adhering to established company guidelines.

A good UX strategy consists of the following key components:

• A well-defined goal for what you want the user experience to be
• A detailed understanding of your user's behaviors, expectations, and needs formed through extensive research
• A database on trends within your industry and knowledge of what competitors are doing
• A clear understanding of how the company or product is currently performing compared to where you want it to be
• A to-do list of what needs to be accomplished along with metrics to measure your success

Overall, #uxstrategy is a holistic, user-centered business plan that outlines what a brand’s user experience is at present, what they are aiming for, and how to get there.

What are the Benefits of a UX Strategy?

1. It provides a clear goal and a measure of success

There are so many ways to design the user experience for a product that it may end up resulting in a lack of cohesion or direction during development.

Creating well-defined and measurable goals helps prevent wasting energy and resources on failed attempts, miscoordination, or unproductive design methods.

2. It gives team members a better understanding of the user and keeps everyone on the same page

A designer's goal is to create user-friendly products while companies and business owners are focused on reaching targets such as profit margins, ROIs, and total revenue.

An effective UX strategy bridges the gap between creating user-centered products and overall business goals.

It keeps everyone from designers, developers, and customer service representatives, to CEOs and executives aware of user needs, company objectives, and the action plan necessary to satisfy both.

3. It bridges the gap between brand promise and actual customer experience

Due to the sheer amount of competing products within your market, having a clear brand promise is vital to make your product stand out. However, this can also present a challenge as your product may fail to live up to the customer expectation that was built up.

A good example of this is the release of Cyberpunk 2077, a long-awaited game that was marketed to be a revolutionary experience for players. However, production was met with multiple delays, then the game was released in an unfinished state with numerous bugs and glitches. It soiled the reputation of the studio behind the game and is still recognized as an infamous event in the gaming industry.

UX strategies help avoid these situations as companies can use them to compare their brand promise to the actual user experience. It can also highlight the steps needed to match the promise together with the user experience to satisfy customers.

How Can You Create Your Own?

Now that the value of UX strategies is clear, the next step is to create one for your process. Here you have 5 simple steps to do that:

1. Focus on Users

It's easy to get caught up in your preferences or profit goals when designing a product. While meeting revenue metrics is important, keeping the user experience at the forefront of your UX strategy is vital.

An effective strategy should contain a large amount of data about your users, their needs, and their current perception of your brand.

2. Define Business Goals

After getting a good understanding of your users, you can now combine user experience goals with overall business goals.

What financial targets are you expected to hit? How can you maximize employee satisfaction and efficiency? Are there any improvements to your current internal structure that can be made? These questions can be asked to help you define your business objectives within your UX strategy.

3. Create a Holistic User Experience

UX doesn't just include your user's experience with your product, it also covers all of the touchpoints a customer has with your brand.

It's important to create a UX strategy that takes into account what happens before and after a user interacts with your product. This includes aspects like marketing and ads, purchasing processes, customer support, and even service termination, if possible.

4. Set up Specific Goals

Creating specific goals makes it easy to track how effective your UX design team is and whether they were able to meet the goals that were set beforehand.

Instead of just aiming to "increase user engagement" try something more specific like "35% increase in desktop and mobile user engagement".

5. Optimize for Speed and Accessibility

Speed greatly affects a user's experience and should have a high priority in your UX strategy. Consumers like things fast and will judge products or services based on how quickly they operate.

On top of this, it's also important to keep accessibility guidelines in mind to make your product appeal to as broad a market as possible.

The Value of UX Strategy

Developing a successful and user-centric product requires a lot of time, resources, and research. It can be easy for design teams to get lost throughout development and get dragged down by endless revisions, unfocused testing, and an overall lack of direction.

A carefully crafted UX strategy helps prevent these incidents along with wasted resources in fixing development errors that may be encountered along the way. Starting with a clear strategy may be the difference between a high-flying success and a product that crashes and burns at launch.