How To Create a UX STRATEGY To Support Your Business.
A practical take on how to develop a UX strategy to support your business.
WHAT IS A UX STRATEGY?
A UX strategy is a plan to improve the value for the user and the business. It’s simply looking at what our users care about, what the business cares about, and coming up with a plan to improve both.
That plan needs to cover:
What the existing problem is
What the new solution looks like
How we get there
How the user will be better of
How the business will be better of
How we know
It’s All About Alignment
Alignment not Balance
A UX strategy aligns business and user goals. This the core part of a solid UX strategy. Often you’ll hear the idea of balancing the business and user needs. That implies a sort of tension between the two. That leads to tradeoffs.
A proper UX Strategy aligns the two and leads to a solution where both sides win. (yes it’s possible!)
How To Create A UX Strategy?
Coming up with a UX strategy is straightforward. It comes down to 4 parts:
Identify the data you have around business goals and insights.
Inspect your current solution and look for UX deficiencies.
Explore potential UX strategy solutions to the problems.
Place the bet - tie it all together in a strategy statement.
IDENTIFY THE DATA
GET THE LAY OF THE LAND
Quantitative and qualitative information you get from any method of user research, analytics, customer marketing outreach, competitor analysis etc.
Understand all pertinent business metrics and the context with them For example, are they performing well, underperforming. Which ones are higher priority.
In general you may need more research at times. When appropriate, lean back into user research.
IDENTIFY What’s Not WOrking
With some of the data it’ll be clear what’s not working. Either business metrics will clearly show an underperformance or customer complaints will be loud and/or frequent.
From qualitative research it’s a bit more clear on what’s not working. Customer complaints will tell you what’s not working.
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UX Strategy Part 1 - Collect The Data [Transcript]
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the first step is to collect your data
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this falls into two categories
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your business metrics and your user insights
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as far as business metrics
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those can fall into a number of categories
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such as acquisition activation engagement
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retention revenue or referral
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there's probably other categories out there as well
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and your business probably
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or hopefully has some sense of
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here's what matters to them
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and they have a categorized their own way
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these are just very general
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metrics that fall into a number
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general categories just to illustrate (this idea to)
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collect this information
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or really collect the ones that are important to you
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and your business
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get a sense of how the business is performing good
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bad or otherwise
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the other side of of the data
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the the part 2 is user insights
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these fall into generally
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a attitudinal or behavioral category
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and then that data is either qualitative for
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quantitative
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that is collected from user research analytics
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and I might be splitting here's
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here with user research a little bit
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but
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voice of the customer sometimes is a bit separate from
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how user research is generally understood
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but not mad if you want to lump that all together
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but generally user research analytics
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voice of the customer will give you your uh
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overall picture of your user insights
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and get understanding of uh
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what's good what's bad from the user standpoint
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and so you got all this data um
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what what's gonna be obvious is there's gonna be
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some context
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but you wanna make sure you have this general context
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of of that data falls into generally three categories
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which is some sense of priority
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so your business hopefully is saying like
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here's actually what matters to us of all this data
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of all our business metrics
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or here's what we want to focus on this quarter
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this year
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whatever it might be and then from the user side
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you'll get uh their
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their insights of what matters to them
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what's important to them
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and then obviously what's good and what's bad
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so from business set from the business side uh
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shouldn't just be here's the numbers
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but also like where this number is really good
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but really crushing here or hey
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we're really falling behind here against competitors
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or just where we wanna be
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that's something we need to do better in
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and then from the user side
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they'll tell you what they love
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and what's working well
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and where you're at really solves their problems um
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and then they'll also tell you what's bad
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where there's some of their paying points where um
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either is is
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is your product underperforming
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or where there might be a gap
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like we we we really like your product for doing X
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y and Z but also got this ABC problem
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if you could solve that that would be really awesome
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so you're getting a sense a lay of the land of uh
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from a from a information standpoint
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data standpoint of what's working well
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what's not
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and what's important around the business and users
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and from there
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you'll start to kind of hone in and almost heat map on
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here are some core areas that we could focus in on for
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uh my design leaders
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or if you just playing the role of design leader
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for a bit one of the pro tips
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I would say is identify what's important
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that's not on the road map
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so hopefully
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your business is identifying some of these issues
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and addressing some of these
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and probably your product team
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product managers are
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putting out plans
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and on the road map for new features to
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address some of these issues
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but there's always a bit of a capacity issue
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where they're not going to address everything
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and often
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some of these items can be addressed from design alone
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and so
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in a way that's complimentary to your product managers
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party or UX strategy could be identifying
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here's what we're not looking at maybe
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cause it's like maybe secondary importance
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but still important that we can fix with
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we can fix an address with design
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so look at those areas as well
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and overall with all of this
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you will get a sense of what's what
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how your
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how your app, product is performing business wise
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user wise you'll have that context
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and then you'll start to figure out
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what we need to address
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the next step is to inspect your current solution
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which we'll talk about next
INSPECT
Where Is Design Underperforming?
Take a look at your current solutions and identify UX inefficiencies. These are the areas you’ll address in your UX strategy.
This can be areas where your app is underperforming on typical UX metrics (such as time it takes to complete a task).
Often it’ll be obvious where the problems are but now’s the time to really sit with it and understand the why of the problem.
Vibes and Data
Sometimes you have UX metrics to tell you how your design is performing. That can help give you a steer into what to fix.
Or customers will clearly point it out in user testing or just observing the.
Sometimes it’s more gut feel. Designers have a unique eye and can see design inefficiencies.
Sometimes it’s a combination of the two.
Find The SweetSpot
When you identify an important business metric, a user pain point, and a poor design, that’s your sweet spot. These are ripe areas to attack with a UX strategy.
Sometimes it’s only two points. You’ll see a business metric not up to par, look at the design and have a good sense why. That’s another great area to target.
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UX Strategy Part 2 - Inspect [Transcript]
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so you have your data
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the next step is to inspect your current solution
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and kind of understand
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what are we doing from the design perspective
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because again we're focused on the UX strategy here
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so you wanna look at
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what are we doing from the design standpoint
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you wanna look at um
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based on based on the day that you have like well
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is the design up to par
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is there something we can fix here
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is it is it
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can we redesign something in that sense
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and so um
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I'm not gonna talk about this in a general level
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I'm gonna give an example
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and so I'm gonna use Spotify as
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as an example to walk through this
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and this is purely hypothetical
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I
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don't know if what I'm about to talk about matters to
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Spotify probably not
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maybe it does I don't know the point is
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is just to give a concrete example of how
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you might go about doing this
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so in this example I'm gonna look at feature usage
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so again going back to all this data here
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there's one called feature usage
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so I'm gonna take that and particularly um
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because feature usage is vague
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but the particular feature
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or specific feature we're talking about
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here's sharing playlist uh
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with friends um
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so we're gonna look at that
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and so let's just say
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that's an important thing to the business
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and it may not be the most important thing
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but perhaps that shows up
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in a meeting like hey we'd really like
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for people to share more music with each other
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perhaps you look into customer feedback
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and you see that oh
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like there's a theme of
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generally people trust their friends taste in music
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if they share something
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and then you might even see from analytics
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that people are
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two times more likely to listen to a full album
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shared by friends or something along those lines
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so there's
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there's the point is if you go through all your data
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you might
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see a little bit of a trend line between all of these
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like hey
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the business cares about this customers care about it
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and uh
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we see some really good
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positive numbers from the analytic side
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and there's no real like
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I walk through that in these three steps
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but it might work the other way
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perhaps you look at customer feedback
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and you notice the theme of people saying
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I really like when my friend share music with me
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and then perhaps you look in on the business side and
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and get a sense of how often that
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the share playlist with friends is being used
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and maybe it's not used being used as much
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but you also look at the analytics and see like oh
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when actually people do use it
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like it works really well
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and we know that leads to maybe more time on the site
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or whatever might be
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which is good for the business
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or you might look at the analytics and then
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and then go look at the customer feedback
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what I'm trying to say is
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it's not necessarily a linear order
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it's a bit of kind of piecing this together
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a puzzle from different angles at different times
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so point is
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you got to put together some data and realize like
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there's some sort of like
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trend through line between what a business cares about
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customer feedback and analytics so
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get that out of there
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so from there you want to look at your design and say
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well what do we do now
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around sharing a playlist with friends
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and so this is the homepage
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and there's these three dots here
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you tap on those and then the share
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and then you can copy a link or embed a playlist there
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and so a bit a bit buried and
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and I'm sure that makes a lot of sense and and
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and
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and Spotify today and and why it works that way
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but for this hypothetical
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you might look at that and say like huh
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that's a bit buried
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and maybe it's something from the design side
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we could do there from uh
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the mobile side same kind of idea got those three dots
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this uh sheet pops up
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you gotta scroll and so you find share
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and then this
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really interesting design comes up
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where you can share this playlist
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you could customize it so and then
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and then another tap on where you wanna share uh to
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so
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you can look at all that and say again
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super hypothetical here
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not saying this is bad design on Spotify's
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end, just in this hypothetical world
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that I just made up you can all
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you can look at that and say the share is a bit buried
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uh maybe if we elevate the presence or we design it
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there's something we could do there
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that will tie back to what customers care about
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and what the business cares about
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and we can bump up those analytics
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and that could be a win win for the business uh
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and our customers and we could just do use design
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use some good UX design to solve that
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and that'll form the basis of your UX strategy
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you wanna go and explore some designs there
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we talk about that next
EXPLORE
IDEATE ON HIGH LEVEL SOLUTIONS
Explore initial solutions. These can be rough ideas mocked up in sketch format or even solutions done in Figma. Prototypes may be needed here as well.
The fidelity and importance of the problem will determine how much effort is warranted.
TESTING MAY BE NEEDED
As part of your exploration, you may need to validate ideas with users (and perhaps other stakeholders like engineering).
Bounce around ideas until you gain a decent amount of confidence in a general direction.
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UX Strategy Part 3 - Explore, Transcript
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okay so after you gather the data
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you did some inspection looking at your
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your current solution
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and next step is explore some ideas
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this is the fun part
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coming up with some early solutions
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you should do some sort of exploration session
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or sessions uh
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I like to start with sketching uh
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you'll see some of that later
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but what you generally doing is just starting
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explore the solution space
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so in our example here we're looking at
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how do we elevate the sharing experience
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um we wanna think through um
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some of the stuff we know
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and we know people like to share music with each other
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and how do we start to tap into that
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and create an experience to foster sharing
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or how can we help you connect with
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connect with each other through music
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so some themes
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there are some questions that we wanna start to
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answer and explore
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and there should be some themes of shared moments
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connecting through music
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collaboration and discovering together
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whether that's discovering music
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or whether that's discovering more about your friends
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and what their likes and dislikes are
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or just their personal experiences as well
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and so um
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you wanna do a full blown uh
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exploration session uh
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I'm just gonna go through a few examples
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uh only three
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and kind of explain a little bit of the range of
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how you should approach this
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so the first one is very simply is again
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I just kind of did like my own little sketch session
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and came up with a few ideas
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ideally you come up with several dozen
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even hundreds
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but here's a few just give you a sense of range
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the first one is to
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make the share button more prominent
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so we talked about this
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the share button is hidden under the menu
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so this concept is
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what if we elevate it into this section here
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obviously some considerations there
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in terms of what do we do with the download
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and the add
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the library and the three dots here and the shuffle
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and obviously we still wanna keep the play
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so some you know
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obviously you have to kind of work out
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and iron out the UI and UX there
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but that concept of
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what if we just make it a little more prominent
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what would happen there so little bit of the UX/UI design
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there is one way we could tackle this
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another way is
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starting to look through what our data has
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our user research and so again
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this is one big hypothetical
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and I don't work for Spotify
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I'm not sure what that user research says
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but they did put out this trend report around Gen Z
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and sharing and collaboration
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and there's a couple trends that stood out to me
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the first one is trend 1 Gen Z is craving connections
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and then trend 2
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there's this idea that
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around creating playlist for hyper niche moments
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particularly around your formative first
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so that could be your first time making out
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your first sleepover
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your first time at a new school first day of school
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your graduation first graduation
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maybe that's high school puppy love adulting
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it goes on and on or very hyper niche moments
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like you're the crazy old cat lady at 17
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or you're in love with someone you can never have
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or mom picked you up from school in the white Toyota
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minivan
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so these very hyper niche moments with some emotion
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attached to them
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and so I thought that was interesting and said well
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what if we kind of riffed off of this
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with the idea of sharing
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and kind of kicked around some ideas
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and what I came up with was
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or sketched out was this idea of mixtape moments
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so that's the concept of a someone can they
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however they get there they
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they click button says create your own mixtape moments
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and you presented it with the screen
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where you can select um
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here we have as three
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this maybe is a you can change that to 4 5 6 whatever
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I thought it might be interesting to limit it
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but you can select the number of songs for
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and then you put in who who it's for
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so this is for Zoe
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and then there's a drop down of sorts
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and obviously a ton you could do on the UX here
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but you can select your moment
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like first day of school
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moving to a new city graduation
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you can add your own custom
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and then there would be some button hit
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next you get this screen where you can add a song
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so you add your three songs that are attached to that
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um that theme
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and then you share it in this case share with Zoe
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and then on Zoe's view
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she gets her mixtape and she has her mixtape
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there are songs for the first day of school
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and she can play those songs
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she has those three songs
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or however many you choose to do
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and so that's already one form of sharing
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but she can then share it from there
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or she maybe collaborate and add her own
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and share it back so um
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just one way not saying this right
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not saying this wrong but again
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here we're just kind of exploring
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not being too critical of ideas
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but just like
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what are all the different ways and concepts
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we could come up with
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tackling the research and data that we know
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around the problem and so and then even getting uh
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even further we can look off platform
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so this is like what if we we leverage TikTok and reels
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uh this is
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you could do my top 5 songs
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or it could be top 5 first day of school songs
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wherever it might be
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if you wanna leverage some of those hyper niche moments
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and ideas you can add a song
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you add five of them and then you record
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and you record a video of you going through
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and there would be some
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UX for you to kind of navigate through and say
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this is my first song this is my second
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and maybe it's playing and then you can post this as uh
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as a TikTok or real or even maybe be
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be a lens or or theme on
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on one of those platforms as well
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so um
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again very different
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that's obviously very
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very different from the mixtape moments
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which is very different from just elevating
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the share button ideas
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you wanna come across a broad range of ideas
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in terms of like
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scope and complexity um
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or as much time as you you have
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or willing to allow
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and just kind of explore that solution space
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and so um
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and then from there you can kind of iterate on these
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come up with all the ideas
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kind of push and pull on them um
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and and
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and come up with like interesting ideas to solve
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so the problem that then you'll eventually say like
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alright
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these are the ones we wanna go and further explore and
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and play some bets on which is the next section
PLace The Bet
With a UX Strategy, you’re placing bets. You don’t know for sure if what you propose will work. Approach a UX Strategy with this in mind.
Increase Confidence As You Go.
The smaller the bet the less confidence you need. The bigger the bet, the more more confidence in it you should have. You gain confidence through testing, iterating, and validating your concepts.
As such you need to approach it accordingly.
-
UX Strategy Part 4 - Place The Bet, Transcript
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so the last step is to place the bet
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and this is where the rubber hits
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really hits the road here
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and so from those sketch sessions
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you should - I only went through like three ideas
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but really should have several dozen
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maybe hundreds of of ideas uh
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that you can start to to sort through and say like I
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I think these are the ones worth
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worth exploring uh
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so in in this case uh
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if I was to look at the ideas that we had is uh
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let's see
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we have this share idea where we're essentially saying
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like hey
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if we increase the presence of the share function
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like so we'll see increase in shares
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longer listening times
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and reduction and customer complaints
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and so you want some way to um
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in the sketch sessions
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definitely should have some way of like
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sorting through some sort of prioritize
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prioritization framework of sorts uh
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to figure out like or get a sense of
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are these hitting on the goals we want
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and once you narrow that down
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and I talk about
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some of that in another article around sketching
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but once you narrow that down
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you're like here
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the ones that were kind of interested in
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um again
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some sort of prioritization framework
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whatever you use RICE is a very standard one
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reach impact confidence effort
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so you might look at these and say
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and kind of roughly evaluate them
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you probably have a better scale than just high medium
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low unknown
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but just for the sake of illustrating what you do here
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I'm gonna keep it very high level and basic here
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and so you might look like
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look at an idea like this and say cool
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we think the reach of that would be high
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impact is high
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not very confident we just only did sketch here
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and we're not even sure
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how much effort that would take
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so from there
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you the idea is since you're placing this bet
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you wanna get as much information as you can
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with this little effort
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you wanna be efficient with that
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and what we give you more confidence
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and or give you more information to move forward
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you might run a quick usability test
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so you we most likely mock this up in Figma
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or whatever your tool is run some usability testing
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and maybe get a better sense of your
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maybe your confidence increases from there to
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to medium from there maybe wanna do some analytics
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engineering tests will not actually build this in
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but um I know what some companies
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in my experience in the past
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were able to kind of for like a better term
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inject code on top of the existing code to
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run quick tests
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and so maybe do something along those lines
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and you realize okay cool
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like we know the reach of this would be high
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we know the impact would be high
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and we're actually very confident now
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based on that - our testing that we did
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we tested to like 10% of the population
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and we saw like the shares go through
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the amount of times a share
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features use go through the roof
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so yeah and at that point
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you'll probably have a better sense of the engine
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of the engineering effort it is to build it
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and so maybe that's a medium
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so that point
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you can start to maybe talk more concretely and say
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you know it'll be like 20% increase in shares
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and 10% increase in listening times
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or whatever it might be so
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you're just kind of building confidence in that bet
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as you go through again um
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we're starting with a simple sketch it's hard to say like
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yeah we definitely should do this
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absolutely 100% and this will
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will get a return on the investment here
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so you wanna go through that effort of like
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maybe usability testing and doing some other testing
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and start to gather information
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to the point where you feel really confident in this
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bet
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00:03:15,166 --> 00:03:18,300
um going back to mixtape moments uh
100
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this is one I won't go through all of these uh
101
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in detail but that idea is
102
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you might look at this concept and say
103
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really cool really interesting uh
104
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we think there reach is a medium
105
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the impact if it does work would be high
106
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we're low in our confidence
107
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in terms of our overall estimate on this
108
00:03:34,966 --> 00:03:37,166
and we think this would be a high effort
109
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so the main one there
110
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you have a little confidence in your actual RICE score
111
00:03:41,500 --> 00:03:42,166
so you wanna
112
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maybe start doing some prototype and exploring
113
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and just again follow that idea of like
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let's get more information here
115
00:03:47,800 --> 00:03:49,600
before you could confidently say like yeah
116
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this is something we should do uh
117
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and and and go down that path
118
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and so and then maybe something like the last one
119
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that my top 5 you might say hey
120
00:03:57,666 --> 00:03:59,400
that's a cool idea but no
121
00:03:59,400 --> 00:04:00,666
we're not even gonna like touch that one
122
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like really interesting but that gets into like
123
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more social media and more marketing
124
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and that's not our game and uh
125
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we're really looking to improve the product
126
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and that comes with a whole host of unknowns
127
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and a whole path that we're not really familiar with
128
00:04:13,266 --> 00:04:14,800
so we're not even the effort on there
129
00:04:14,800 --> 00:04:16,966
it's just really high really unknown
130
00:04:16,966 --> 00:04:18,300
so we're not gonna touch that
131
00:04:18,300 --> 00:04:19,266
and that and that's part of it
132
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or maybe that's just like
133
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we'll put that in the back burner for like
134
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next quarter next year
135
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whatever it might be
136
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but really the whole idea is you're placing bets
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so it's not simply that hey
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I came up these UX ideas
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we definitely need to do it 100% it's: I have these ideas
140
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I have this level of confidence
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how do I start to increase that confidence as you go
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and so it gets into a little more of the execution
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of the UX strategy um
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because what you do come up with
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you wanna make sure you feel relatively
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confident that this will have that positive impact on
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ultimately the business and the users
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and so think about it as placing bets
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and building that confidence in those bets as you go
TYPICAL UX Strategy BETS
UX Strategy bets come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s a typical rundown of them. These can be quite big in scope, quite small in scope, or anywhere in between:
Enhancing Features
Taking an existing feature that’s already doing well and making it better.
Customer COmplaints
UX Strategy tied directly to fixing customer complaints.
Tied To Business OUtcomes
Helping the business achieve certain outcomes with a UX strategy.
Improve THE Experience
Solving for a customer problem that hasn’t been solved yet.
Tied To MetricS
A UX Design Strategy should include improving business and product metrics.
Product Design
If your product has certain product design principles tied to it, a UX strategy can revolve around redesigning the app to better suite those principles.
WHERE A UX STRATEGY FITS IN THE PORTFOLIO
UX Strategy isn’t the only thing. Product has their priorities, so does marketing. Maybe other departments.
In general. UX should be part of the day to day product development lifecycle. But, there should be a complimentary standalone effort to focus on a specific UX strategy.
Obviously every team is unique and every company has their own ways of working. In general there’s a way UX strategy can fit in:
SPIDER-MAN MEME
Sometimes the organization’s priority is solely improving the UX. In this case the product strategy is the same as the UX strategy. Call it what you want it’s all the same.
Compliment
Typically, Product is setting the roadmap of which UX is a part of that product development process. But a standalone UX strategy can compliment the broader product strategy.
Developing
Part of the UX strategy should be, developing a UX strategy. Taking time to go through the above and develop UX strategy plans.
SUMMARY
There it is. A UX Strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or even grand. A simple plan to address business and user issues is all it takes.
They key is alignment around those goals.
//Coleman