Understanding UX Strategy from a UX Strategist
In my current job at Marketade, I have the title UX Strategist. At first, it made me chuckle because I thought the job title UX Strategist really meant “someone who has been doing UX-related work for for a long time (aka is of an older generation).” And while that all might be true, I know UX Strategy means a little more than that! I am proud of the work we do to champion UX research in experience design. It is really important. And developing a UX Strategy is one tool for design teams to regularly engage with users in order to develop and really improve a product roadmap.
Why Is UX Strategy Important?
When I first started practicing user-centered design (which was in the early 1990s, before there was the term “UX”), we would explain the key to being able to practice user-centered design was to understand the Users’ Needs. This was important because product innovation was a three-legged stool consisting of Business Goals, Technical Opportunities, and Users’ Needs. Business teams were pretty good at defining Business Goals, even back in the 1990s, and as technology evolved, tech teams got strong with defining Technical Opportunities. But the Users’ Needs were often guesses by a well-meaning product lead or product manager. How exactly could we stabilize this 3-legged stool? Since the sweet spot (where innovation was most probable) was where these three overlapped, understanding Users’ Needs became paramount.
Fast forward to today, and this three-legged stool still needs to stand. There are a few more ways to understand users’ needs through analytics and metrics, but there is no substitute for early and ongoing UX research that can be the core focus of a UX Strategy. And these touchpoints are essential for product teams to develop empathy for the users.
Keys to Setting a UX Strategy
Here are the 3 key steps I recommend for creating a UX strategy on your product design team. These can be pretty simple steps for smaller products or features. But each step involves opportunities to interact with users. And that is the secret sauce.
1. Ask the right questions at the beginning. Who, what, who else?
When a product lead talks about his or her product’s users, many people give a long list of user attributes, characteristics, and maybe even needs. But if they have never met a user or two or twelve and observed them in their own environment interacting with a product, then they are fooling themselves. This is not understanding. The key to understanding is to observe. Observe users in order to learn what they cannot tell you. Resist the urge to tell users your ideas. Don’t ask, listen. Don’t show, watch. Then identify primary, secondary, and tertiary user groups based on importance to the product goals and get input from each group on the pain points, areas of confusion, and places where people compensate for gaps.
That should tell you who and what. But another key part of UX Strategy is to see who else is similar to you in the marketplace and do UX research on your competitors. Recruit their customers, account holders, and advocates and watch them use a product similar to yours. You will see the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors through the eyes of the users. The gaps and opportunities will become clear and will be great insights for your product design.
2. Design? Go for broke! Look at many different solutions.
Once your team has spent some time understanding users and seeing, maybe even feeling their pain and problems, it is time to move into ideation. But many teams start right in with the visual design, technical requirements or even implementation plans. UX Strategy lets you build ideas around the user’s observed problems. This is where tools like personas, journey mapping and “How Might We…” notes come in handy. Have your artifacts from your user research handy and build ideas around them. Lots of ideas, lots of options, little constraints — but all from the user’s vantage point.
3. Prototype. Test, Refine. Repeat.
The prototyping phase is where a UX Strategy separates the wheat from the chaff. Prototype low fidelity concepts. Take a few of the team’s top ideas and prototype them, then test, then choose one, then refine it, then repeat the process. Ideally, the strategy has informed the design schedule so there are a few phases for iterative testing and redesign. By the end of a few cycles, the team will have confidence that the user feedback will be positive because the design has the user’s input all along the way.
Of course, we do not live in a perfect world, and strategies are not carved in stone. But the key to a UX Strategy is to give the user a voice at the table all along the way — from discovery through implementation. UX Strategy does not have to be complex or take a lot of time to evolve. Try it on one project and then look to making more systemic changes.
So I guess I really am a UX Strategist. At the end of the day, learning from users is what excites me more than anything.
