UX Strategy Flashcards
UX Strategy
A UX strategy is a plan that fosters shared understanding of direction toward achieving goals before designing and implementing solutions. It serves to intentionally guide the prioritization and execution of UX work over time.
UX Strategy 2
A UX strategy is a plan of actions designed to reach an improved future state of the organization’s user experience over an established period of time.
A UX strategy is a business strategy — end-users pay for products and services that make organizations profitable.
Scopes for a UX strategy
Scopes for a UX strategy can range to cover a single product, service, or feature; multiple products and services; or entire organizations. Regardless, a strong UX strategy ensures that user-centered insights are integrated with the business strategy.
Practitioners must also be able to clearly articulate how executing the strategy will make the business more successful.
This vision or end-goal state must be strategically positioned — meaning research-based and viable in the market.
3 primary components that make up a UX strategy
Vision or statement(s) of intent
Goals and measures
Plan
- Vision or statement(s) of intent:
you have to know where you’re going and why. As part of the overall strategy, a user-centered vision or a mission statement, sometimes in conjunction with other guiding principles such as key-value propositions, differentiation or positioning statements, communicate these aspirations and ideal outcomes. Think of your vision as the summary of your product or service in its ideal form and of the value it provides.
Key-value propositions
A company’s value proposition tells a customer the number one reason why a product or service is best suited for that particular customer.
Differentiation or positioning statements,
positioning refers to acquiring a space in the mind of the customer whereas differentiation is a marketing strategy companies use to make their product unique to stand out from competitors.
Strategic intent and positioning emerge from either:
Solving a few key problems for many users
Supporting the broader needs of many customers in a narrow market
- Goals and measures:
Goals, along with metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), should directly connect UX improvements with business goals.
It’s important for UX to understand how an organization makes and spends money and what it cares about.
Otherwise, your user-experience goals and metrics will seem irrelevant and disconnected from the business priorities. Without knowledge of how the business works, UX will be unable to find opportunities that impact the current business model, let alone imagine new ones.
Strategic goals and measures establish and communicate:
Why the business will succeed by becoming user-centered
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in UX
Define objectives and measurable key results to guide and track UX work. Use OKRs as a tool to align your team, provide focus, and a tangible way to monitor progress.
Outcomes Over Outputs
Teams often fall into the trap of focusing on outputs (features, deliverables, and artifacts). Instead, a mindset shift of working toward purposeful outcomes (problems solved, needs addressed, and real benefits) leads to better results.
Roadmapping includes 6 key high-level steps:
Establishing goals,
gathering inputs,
creating themes,
prioritizing themes,
visualizing and sharing,
revisiting and updating.
A UX roadmap is
A UX roadmap is a strategic, living artifact that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a UX team’s future work and the problems it needs to solve. Roadmaps should make realistic promises, value functionality over pretty visuals, and be strategic documents instead of feature-specific release plans.
UX-Vision Statement
A UX vision is an aspirational, future-state view of an experience people will have with a product, service, team, or organization.
Create vision statements using a collaborative, research-backed process to increase team members’ understanding and alignment of UX efforts.
Objectives describe
Objectives describe the actions or steps to take to reach the goal over time. Objectives may focus on solving a known problem in the user experience, exploring new ideas and opportunities, or additional user research and knowledge needed.
Strategic goals and measures
Establish and communicate:
Why the business will succeed by becoming user-centered
Actions with the highest business impact
Prioritization, tradeoff, and deferral decisions
UX strategy plan
The plan helps to prioritize activities and address uncertainties.
A plan is needed to achieve each goal and every goal breaks down into multiple objectives.
The plan should also include:
- Focus areas in the user experience
- Approximate timing
- Prerequisites and dependencies
- Constituents to include
The plan broadly communicates what needs to be considered and when, while working on the objectives. However, it isn’t perfectly linear and rigid, nor does it dictate how to conduct research or which solutions to execute
DesignOps
DesignOps is the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.
Executing the UX Strategy
After establishing the primary components of the UX strategy, it’s easier to identify and organize the supporting factors needed to execute it efficiently and effectively.
Factors needed to execute UX strategy People:
How people and roles are allocated to form teams
How teams are assigned to goals and results
How crossfunctional teams interact across lines or units of business
Budget for recruiting, compensation, education, and rewards
Factors needed to execute UX strategy Process:
Consistent research, ideation, design, and development practices
Content-management models and service-design processes
Milestones and governance standards
How leadership is informed and kept aware
How the strategy adapts and evolves over time
Budget for ongoing research, recruiting, and participant compensation
Factors needed to execute UX strategy Tools and standards:
Content standards and design systems
How the brand is reflected in the experience
How to set up backlogs, track tasks, and plan releases
Budget for tools
A good UX strategy is one that
Is one that optimizes for growth and development, while keeping user needs at the center of it. UX leads are often great catalysts for setting a UX vision and strategy.
