What is a UX Strategy? 4 Best Practices for Building Yours

A user experience (UX) strategy is a plan that helps guide your UX design and keep it in line with your business goals. For example, imagine you’re going on a cross-country road trip, but there’s no map. Sure, you might have a final destination in mind, but you have no clue how exactly you’re going to get there. Sounds stressful, right?

Having a user experience (UX) strategy in place for your business is like having the ultimate road map to where your customers’ final destination should be. In the world of UX design, a UX strategy helps you align your goals for your audience with your goals for your business.

Keep reading to learn more about what a UX strategy is, why it’s so important, and some best practices to keep in mind when developing your own UX strategy.

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What is a UX strategy?

UX strategy is a long-term, scalable plan that aims to bring together the objectives and needs of your business with those of your audience in order to create a seamless user experience at each customer touchpoint. In other words, UX strategy is about the planning behind UX design.

Importance of a UX strategy

Having a good UX strategy in place before developing your UX design helps you ensure that your business’ goals regarding what you want users to experience aligns with your overall business and product objectives.

In other words, having a UX strategy in place is like having a map to guide you during a road trip. UX strategy helps keep you focused and clearly guides you (and your customers) from point A to point B. Rather than a cross-country road trip though, this journey refers to how users interact with your product from the moment they first lay eyes on it to the moment they make a purchase.

A great example of UX strategy is Amazon, who uses personalization to clearly lay out potential next steps for users shopping on their site. 

Especially when you have many different products and services to offer your audience, having a flexible UX strategy helps you to zero in on building the right customer experience for each target audience.

4 tenets of UX strategy

In her 2015 book, UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want, author and UX strategist Jaime Levy described four key tenets, or elements, of UX strategy.

Below are Levy’s four tenets of UX strategy:

1. Business strategy: Remember your business’ guiding principles, values, objectives, revenue streams, and competitive advantage when planning your UX strategy. Let these points guide your planning.
2. Value innovation: Go beyond demonstrating your product’s value to customers. Instead, make your product something customers will find indispensable by being innovative in your development process.
3. Validated user research: Rather than assuming what your customer value, get direct feedback from them before you start building your UX strategy, so you can ensure you’re putting effort into something that users actually want.
4. Killer UX design: Once the first three tenets are in place, you can begin to craft a UX strategy that brings value to your customers and does so seamlessly.

Best practices for building a UX strategy

Now that we’ve gone over the basics of what a UX strategy is and why it’s important, it’s time to dive into building your own.

The steps to build a UX strategy aren’t necessarily set in stone. Instead, building a UX strategy is more of a fluid process that can differ for each business. With that in mind, check out these 4 tips and best practices for building a UX strategy that benefits your customers and your business.

1. Think about your users

Your UX strategy is just that — the experience you give your users and customers. When building your UX strategy, it’s crucial that you keep your users in mind and build an experience that brings value to them. Keep your UX strategy user-centered by doing in-depth research about your target audience and even get feedback from them by reaching out directly to them or making surveys available.

2. Clearly define your business objectives

If keeping users in mind when creating your UX strategy is our number one tip, then keeping your business in mind is a very close second. When developing your UX strategy, make sure your business goals and objectives are clearly defined and top of mind.

Ensuring that your business goals are clearly defined while creating your UX strategy is crucial because it helps keep you focused. Identify the outcomes you want to achieve and build them into your UX strategy to ensure you’re creating a clear path to success.

3. Define your KPIs

In addition to defining your goals, you also want to identify the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) you’re using to measure your progress. Whether those are your conversion rates or product page visits and interactions, choose the metrics that will help you get a full picture of where you are with meeting your business and sales goals.

4. Make adjustments when necessary

When keeping users at the forefront of your mind during the UX strategizing process, it’s important to remember that user interests and habits are changing all of the time. From the way people interact with your brand to their interests, the customer journey will always be shifting and changing in some way.

To keep your UX strategy scalable and effective, keep your finger on the pulse of your audience and make adjustments when necessary to ensure you’re always keeping your UX strategy user-centered.

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