What is UX Strategy?
A dive into what this current hot topic is all about and how it fits with the general UX process
An emerging hot topic in the user experience space, UX strategy has been on the scene for a good 10 years now (if not more). Yet, it isn’t something part of the core UX syllabus taught at universities or bootcamps, likely because of the skill and experience required. If this seems like a daunting topic, hopefully this article will make it easy for you to wrap your head around it.
UX Strategy, simply put, is a combination of business strategy, value innovation, validated user research and a frictionless user experience. The strategy portion revolves around how to organize these four factors to ensure you get a product with great buy-in. UX Strategy is important because it marries the customer’s needs with business strategy, and provides room to validate a product plan, to ensure a product is successful with it’s customer base. What is important to note however, is that the strategy you go with depends on the maturity of your product. So, for a new product, the strategy might be focused on getting a good market fit, but for a more mature product, it could be about product growth.
Great! How do we go about this?
🔍Step 1: Identify your primary customer segment
What demographic does your product cater to? While at this, be mindful and take note of the other stakeholder groups that are at play. A useful tool to use to map this out is a business model canvas.
❓Step 2: Start with a problem statement
A problem statement is a concise statement of an issue that the customer faces which you would like to address, or a market need from the customer’s perspective.
🧑🏼🦰Step 3: Create provisional personas
Create provisional personas for both your customer and user if they are different. Not sure what the difference between the two are? Here’s a good guide explaining it.
Now if you’re wondering what a provisional persona is , it’s a persona that you create based on your assumptions which you then validate and correct based on user research you conduct with your target population.
✅Step 4: Validation through research
Conduct research to validate your assumptions, personas and the problem space. Speak to people who meet your customer segment to understand their perspective around the problem space.
📝Step 5: Research your competitors
Look at who your direct and indirect competitors are. Direct competitors have the same value proposition as your product, and indirect competitors have a different value proposition, but are still used as a solution by your customer segment. Identify what will set your product apart from the rest and what is working for your competitors.
📊Step 6: Perform a SWOT analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. For each of your competitors list what is working for them, what isn’t, areas where you can capitalize on the market and any competitive edge your competitors currently have.
At this point, you will have the information to understand if you value proposition is worth pursuing. The risks involved in going ahead with the product and if it truly is viable should be clear. If it isn’t a viable idea, you could pivot and try going through the process again. However, if it is a viable idea with potential risks, try to see if there are ways to de-risk it.
Once you have a viable value proposition that has been sufficiently de-risked, you can now start trying to identify what the key features of your product could be. Focus your features on addressing current workarounds your users employ to address the problem at hand, or features that would bring joy or make them love your product, as discovered during the user research phase. If there were opportunities you identified during your SWOT analysis, try seeing if these can be incorporated as features into your product. Try storyboarding the user journey to see how the various features would play in with each other.
Test your feature ideas
Prioritize testing feature ideas that are key to your value proposition. Remember that the purpose of testing these features is to get measurable feedback on what features work versus what don’t. In order to do this, make use of prototypes and start with a hypothesis you want to test. Some key pieces of information you would want to uncover in this phase are:
- Does this feature target a major pain point uncovered during research?
- Does this feature provide any value to the user?
- Can this feature provide business value through monetization?
Once you have your prototypes ready and your hypotheses to test, conduct usability testing sessions to evaluate your features. Decide on what your minimum success criteria would be, that is, the percentage of participants that would need to agree with each of your hypothesis for your features to be considered viable. Remember to ask pointed questions around your hypotheses during the sessions as this will help with the analysis and the decision of whether a feature is viable or not.
Uncover insights from your evaluation sessions
Analyze the data you collected over your usability testing sessions to identify the percentage of participants that agreed with your hypotheses and if this met your minimum success criteria. Asking pointed questions during these sessions should help with providing you with the quantitative data for this (and will be handy should you need to present this to stakeholders!). Also keep an eye out for additional findings that might have come up during these sessions such as requests for alternate features that can double up as next steps.
Where do we go from here?
And just like that you now have a good idea of what features to include into your product that would address the customer’s concerns and which can help you capitalize on the market. From here, you could conduct a landing page experiment to further measure product/feature buy-in.
So that was a quick step-by-step guide on building and validating a UX strategy, while incorporating various UX practices into the process, resulting in a rich feature set that is built on customer satisfaction. I would love to know if there were any specific areas that you would like me to cover in greater detail in future articles and what your views are on this topic.
Moreover, for anyone interested in a deep dive, I would highly recommend Jaime Levy’s book UX Strategy, which is a cornerstone in this area.
