UX Strategy: What is it and How to Create One
UX professionals often focus on mastering practical skills such as UI design, user research, and usability testing. While these skills are essential, for UX to influence at a higher level, UX professionals must also grow their strategic skills. That’s why UX strategy is a crucial skill any seasoned UX professional should master.
What is UX strategy
UX strategy is a plan of action that allows the organization to reach a higher state of user experience over a certain period of time. It lies at the intersection of product design and business strategy and serves as a guide for prioritizing and executing UX work over time. A strong UX strategy ensures that user-centered principles and insights are integrated with the business strategy.
Components of UX strategy
UX strategy has three main components:
- Vision statement of intent. In order to create a plan of action for getting somewhere, you first have to know where you’re going and why. Think of your vision statement as a summary of your product experience in its ideal form and of the value product provides.
- Goals and measures. Once you know where you’re going and why, you need to set specific goals and find a way to measure your progress. Goals, metrics, and key performance indicators should connect UX improvements with business objectives.
- Plan of action. Finally, you need to have a plan where each goal is broken down into multiple objectives. Objectives describe the actions or steps to take to reach the goal over time.
UX strategy blueprint
The UX Strategy Blueprint created by Jim Kalbach is a simple tool to help you define a UX strategy.
Where to start with UX strategy
To get started with UX strategy, ask the following questions:
- Why do we need a UX strategy in the first place?
- Who are our users? What needs/wants do they have?
- Who are our competitors? What are their strong/weak sides?
- What are our business objectives? What actions will bring the highest business value?
- Who needs to be involved in UX strategy design?
- How will we know when we’re successful? How will we measure success?
Books about UX strategy
UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions by Jaime Levy
This hands-on guide introduces lightweight product strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team devise innovative digital solutions that people want.
Building Design Strategy: Using Design to Achieve Key Business Objectives by Thomas Lockwood and Thomas Walton
This book explores the full range of tops including developing tangible design strategies, using design to convey ideas, choosing worthwhile projects to help business growth, and using design to create fiercely loyal customers.
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder
The book explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. It features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization.
This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases by Marc Stickdorn
This book outlines service design thinking along five basic principles. It also describes a variety of tools and methods used in Service Design Thinking and offers vivid examples for the introduced fundamentals with real-life case studies from 5 companies that did inspiring projects within the field of Service Design. At the end, a one-page “Customer Journey Canvas” is included, which can be used to quickly sketch any service on a single sheet of paper.
The Connected Company by Dave Gray
To keep pace with today’s connected customers, your company must become a connected company. That means deeply engaging with workers, partners, and customers, changing how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. It requires a new way of thinking about your company: less like a machine to be controlled, and more like a complex, dynamic system that can learn and adapt over time.
Want To Master UX Strategy skills ?
Try Interaction Design Foundation. It offers a comprehensive UX management course that covers strategy and tactics, including how to make the business case for UX and establish a UX Roadmap and design process.
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