UX Strategy: Step-By-Step Guide for SaaS Companies

How do you develop a robust UX strategy?

This is the main focus of the article.

We also look at:

• What a UX design strategy is
• Why it’s important
• Its core principles and elements
• A practical example of a company with well-established UX strategies

Let’s dive right in!

TL;DR

• UX strategy provides guidance to the UX design team on how to create and improve experiences that satisfy user needs.
• Such a strategy helps the team put themselves in the shoes of the users, better understand their needs and pain points, and make the user experience consistently good at all stages of the user journey.
• A robust UX strategy is also a valuable differentiator helping you stand out in competitive markets.
• According to Jamie Levy, the main tenets of a UX strategy are business strategy, value innovation, validated user research, and frictionless UX.
• UX vision is a clear and inspiring statement that guides the long-term design strategy and keeps teams and stakeholders on the same page.
• Goals are the specific UX objectives the product aspires to achieve, for example, improving usability.
• The plan, often depicted in a UX roadmap, outlines the work necessary to achieve the goals.
• The strategy should also have information about the UX team, processes, and guidelines.
• Start designing your strategy by clarifying the business goals.
• Next, conduct customer and market research to identify opportunities for UX improvement, and use research findings and business goals to formulate the UX vision statement.
• To make the vision actionable, break it down into specific objectives and select corresponding success metrics.
• Include the desired outcomes in the roadmap along with who will realize them and roughly when.
• Once you start implementing your UX strategy, keep testing and experimenting and use the insights to inform future iterations.
• Want to see how Userpilot can help you inform and implement your UX strategy? Book the demo!

What is a UX strategy?

A UX strategy is a plan that guides product design and development.

It focuses on providing a seamless, intuitive, and satisfying user experience, leading to user engagement, retention, and conversion.

This involves researching and understanding user needs and pain points to create a framework for a product’s design and functionality and aligning it with business objectives.

Why is it important to create a user experience strategy?

Let’s have a look at a few main reasons that make a UX strategy important.

Fosters a customer-centric culture

A research-driven UX strategy helps product teams empathize with customers and better understand their needs, wants, and pain points.

Thanks to that, they can design user experiences that not only enable users to achieve their goals but also feel appreciated and cared for. This translates into higher customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Helps in creating a competitive advantage

While it’s very easy for competitors to copy your features, an outstanding user experience is much more difficult to emulate.

Consequently, it can differentiate your product in the market and give you an edge over competitors. This makes it easier to acquire new customers and command premium prices.

Improves key metrics at each customer touchpoint

As a comprehensive plan, a UX strategy enables delivering a consistently positive user experience along the whole user journey.

By optimizing the UX at all customer touchpoints, you will improve your key success metrics.

For example, you may be able to get more sign-ups or demo bookings from your landing page, boost activation and adoption rates inside the product, and increase free-to-paid conversions.

What are the principles of UX strategy?

According to Jaime Levy, the author of the 2015 bestseller UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products That People Want, a robust UX strategy should be based on 4 main principles.

1. Business strategy – the company’s guiding principles, necessary for the long-term growth and sustainability of the organization.
2. Value innovation – providing an innovative and disruptive solution to user problems at a lower cost to maximize the perceived value of the product.
3. Validated user research – researching and validating solutions before their development is critical to ensure you target the right customers and align the product vision with genuine user needs.
4. Frictionless UX – achieved through experimentation and iterative development, it empowers users to easily accomplish their tasks.

Key elements of an effective UX strategy

An effective UX strategy is made up of a UX vision, goals, plan, people, processes, and guidelines.

Vision

A UX vision is a clear and inspiring statement that serves as the guiding light for a product’s user experience strategy.

In short, it represents the future state of the product’s user experience and the perfect interaction between the user and the product.

The vision aligns stakeholders and team members around the desired user experience, and it’s crucial for guiding design decisions throughout the product development process.

Goals

Goals are the specific objectives that a product aims to achieve in terms of user experience, like improving usability, increasing user satisfaction, enhancing inclusivity, or reducing user errors.

They serve as a guideline for the design process and help to evaluate the success of a UX strategy.

UX goals should be measurable, relevant, and aligned with both the user’s needs and the UX vision.

Plan

The plan outlines the UX initiatives that will help you achieve your goals.

Often presented as a UX roadmap, it provides the details of the user needs and problems to address, solutions, and their interdependencies with other product elements, for example, specific features.

It also includes information on the estimated timelines and key milestones, as well as who is responsible for their realization.

People

Developing and implementing a UX strategy involves cross-functional collaboration.

The specific team structure may vary depending on the size and nature of the project and the maturity of the organization, but here are key roles commonly involved in the UX strategy process:

• UX designer – responsible for defining the overall UX strategy, aligning it with the business goals, conducting user research, creating user personas, and guiding the design process.
• UX researchers – in larger organizations, they conduct in-depth research to understand user behaviors, preferences, and pain points.
• Information architects – they create sitemaps, define navigational structures, and ensure that information is logically organized and easily accessible inside the product.
• Interaction designers – responsible for designing the way users interact with the product; they design user flows and the overall UI structure to ensure a frictionless and intuitive experience.
• Graphic designers – focusing on the aesthetics of the product, they work to create visually appealing and consistent UIs that align with product branding.
• Product manager – coordinates the work of the design and product team to ensure that the UX strategy is aligned with the overall product strategy and vision.
• Developers/engineers – help to validate the technical viability of the UX strategy and implement it.

Process and guidelines

Finally, a UX strategy defines processes essential for its effective implementation.

Here are a few examples:

• User research (techniques, frequency, analysis, tools)
• User journey mapping (tools)
• Feature prioritization (techniques, criteria)
• Testing and iteration (testing methods, protocols, frequency)

How to create a successful UX design strategy?

Ready to build your own UX strategy?

Here’s how to do it, step-by-step.

Define your business objectives

It all starts with clarifying the business goals.

The odds are that it’s not the UX designer or product manager who is responsible for company-level goals but senior leadership.

Interview them to find out what their high-level objectives are and how they measure success. If they’re somehow vague, use a goal-setting framework like SMART or OKR to crystalize them.

Identifying business goals at this stage is essential as it guides the rest of the process and enables UX designers to ensure there’s alignment between the company strategy, the UX strategy, and user needs.

Conduct research to analyze user needs and wants

Market and customer research is necessary for two main reasons.

First, it allows you to assess user needs and expectations. It’s close to impossible to deliver value and create outstanding user experiences if you don’t know what your customers want or what bothers them.

Second, it gives insights into the competitive landscape. It shows you what your competitors are already doing – well and not so well, and enables you to develop a differentiation strategy.

Common UX research techniques include:

• User interviews and focus groups (best for gathering qualitative insights)
• Surveys (in-app and email ones, to collect user feedback and requests)
• Product analytics (to track user behavior at different stages of the user journey)
• Interviews with customer-facing colleagues (for anecdotal data from interactions with users)
• Support ticket and bug report analysis
• Social listening (social media posts, forum mentions, reviews)

Develop the vision of your UX strategy

With business strategy and research insights in mind, draw up your UX vision statement.

Your vision should provide information on:

• What the solution is
• Who it is for
• What problem it solves
• How it’s different from competitors

For example, your UX vision statement could be

‘To create a task-management solution that will enable professionals who value productivity and efficiency to seamlessly and intuitively automate task prioritization by leveraging cutting-edge AI technology.‘

When crafting the vision statement, get the whole team together. This will increase alignment and allow you to see different perspectives.

Tell them to imagine that they have traveled into the future and their ideal solution already exists. Ask them to describe what it’s like and how it works.

Break down the UX vision into goals and set success metrics

Once you have the UX vision, break it down into actionable objectives that will help you realize it.

Look at your goals from two perspectives: the user and business needs. How will each of them benefit if you achieve the goal?

For example, your goal may be to optimize the signup process to enable more users to access the product in less time and boost new user acquisition.

Make your goals specific and measurable, so ‘increase signup flow completion by 27%’ rather than ‘make sign-up easier.’

Finally, choose corresponding metrics to track. In our example, that’s ‘signup completion rate.’

Create a UX roadmap to streamline the work of UX designers

Now that you have your goals defined, it’s time to prioritize them and add them to the UX roadmap.

Don’t have a UX roadmap yet?

Use a product or project management tool like Asana and Roadmunk to create one.

Make your roadmap flexible and focus on outcomes rather than specific features or updates. In this way, you give the design and development teams the space to be creative and innovative.

Moreover, avoid the temptation to set a very detailed timeline – it creates unnecessary pressure. And what if have to change the plan and you don’t hit the deadlines? You’ll be dealing with dissatisfied stakeholders.

Instead, use wide brackets, like Q1 or Now, next, future, future+, future++.

Iterate and optimize your UX strategy

UX strategy or roadmap shouldn’t be set in stone.

As you start implementing them, continue to validate both the strategy and the actual design, and be ready to adjust your course or even pivot completely if you’re not making the desired impact.

To make informed decisions, collect customer feedback, gather insights from behavioral analytics, and run experiments.

For example, if your goal is to remove friction from the onboarding flow to increase activation, you can run an A/B or multivariate test to compare how effective different versions are at bringing users to the activation point.

Make it an ongoing process.

Example of a solid UX strategy

From an internal communication tool, Slack has grown into one of the most popular business communication platforms supporting different sectors and use cases. This can be greatly attributed to its user-centric UX strategy.

Here’s what makes the strategy so effective:

• By providing users with an effective tool for communication, file sharing, and workflow management, Slack solves genuine user problems. It helps them improve efficiency and save time wasted on emails and unnecessary meetings.
• Slack’s UX strategy involves iterative innovation based on user feedback. By maintaining strong feedback loops with users, the platform is constantly improving its usability and features.
• Its frictionless user onboarding enables users to set up the platform for their teams and projects and start realizing its value in no time.
• Through strategic integrations with 3rd party applications, Slack allows its users to streamline their workflows and access essential tools without leaving Slack.
• Slack’s strategy prioritizes customization, which enables users to personalize their workspace to their unique needs.
• Slack has recognized the importance of intuitive search and navigation and has heavily invested in improving these UX aspects.

Conclusion

A robust UX strategy is as important as any other aspect of product development.

That’s because, without excellent UX, users won’t be able to capitalize on the functionality your product offers. Instead of helping them achieve their goals, products with poor UX hamper their progress and are a source of frustration.

If you want to see how Userpilot can help you create and implement your UX strategy, book the demo!