What is UX Strategy and How Can You Create Your Own?

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 UX designers 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 is able to realize what they want their 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 on 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, UX strategy 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.

How Can You Create Your Own?

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

1. Focus on Users

It's easy to get caught up in your own preferences or profit goals when designing a product. While meeting revenues 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 are a few questions that 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 that 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 wide a market as possible.