UX strategy: key to a successful product
What is a UX strategy?
Let’s break up the words and try to understand them individually. User Experience is crafting a product or a service in such a manner that infuses it with the meaning and enriches the experience for the users. Strategy is a general plan of action that focusses on the overall aim. So, a UX strategy essentially is managing the choreography of all UX activities across the wider business framework that supports the underlying product goal.
How is it different from UX architecture?
UX strategy is often related with UX architecture because they both embrace the gestalt factor: designers look through a user focused lens and connect all the dots in a way that the users perceive the interface naturally. There are 6 gestalt principles and they are basically emphasized on the fact that humans tend to organize and simplify complex designs which in turn allow several patterns to emerge.
However, UX strategy operates at a macro level as compared to UX architecture.
UX architecture establishes a model for a UX design process whereas UX strategy outlines value to both the customer and the business by ensuring that the digital experience has followed the design process successfully.
To understand it in a better way, let’s take a look at the two types of UX approaches:
- UX focused approach — User experience strategy forms a part of the overall business strategy, just like other departments: marketing, IT, operations and customer experience.
- UX integrated approach — User experience forms the glue that binds corporate and business strategies together and ensure both business and consumer value is given equal importance. These organizations will apply UX across the whole business.
Nowadays, companies prefer viable UX strategies that mix into the business strategy and strongly connects back to the corporate strategy. Hence, it’s quite obvious that UX strategy has a much broader boundary than UX architecture.
On what factors do we measure a UX strategy?
UX strategy spreads across a product’s life cycle seamlessly. Sometimes, it has clear boundaries and sometimes it doesn’t. But UX strategy’s ultimate goal is directly aimed towards a product’s vision. The success criteria of a product are dependent on many factors.
The interesting fact is that the UX strategy plays its role in each of these factors.
In simple words, UX strategy helps to make an understanding between designers and the business’s objectives. Here are some of the advantages of a UX strategy:
- It brings balance to both business value and customer value.
- It is a discipline that requires innovation and profound business sharpness.
- The more prominent the degree of UX maturity accomplished, the more noteworthy an organization’s ability to act strategically through the use of tools & UX thinking.
- The key is to understand how business needs, user needs and technical abilities fit together.
How does a business handle digital diversity and ensure great user experience? In future, if companies struggle with this question, the answer can be uncovered through a UX strategy.
Where does UX writing lie in a UX strategy?
UX strategy encompasses many components but UX writing is one of the top design trends these days and is extremely crucial. It is a part of UX design. This implies that a UX designer should not just create smooth navigation and eye-pleasing visuals but additionally should be able to compose all the accompanying text for a complete interactive interface. Any words that help a product communicate with a user — regardless of whether in composed or spoken structure — are the consequence of a UX writer. The words that we hear from voice assistant technologies like Alexa, Siri, Cortana are a product of UX writing.
Upgrading from Lorem Ipsum
Here are some of the responsibilities that a UX writer accomplishes in his/her day-to-day work:
- Navigation tips
- Pop-up messages
- Form-filling instructions and hints
- Error and success messages
- Button texts
- Placeholders
- Loading screen messages
- Titles and tag lines
- Call-to-action (CTAs)
I think that being a UX writer is really challenging considering the trickiness in choosing words. One must have an open as well as a wise mindset in order to achieve perfection in those tiny messages. Often these tiny messages are referred to as microcopy.
Precisely, UX writing demands efficiency in words while designing an interface to ensure a clear and consistent content strategy.
Summary
To summarize, UX strategy is about the process, not product. There can be different job titles in the field of UX like UX strategist, UX architect, Content strategist, UX writer but all should have just one focus: a great UX strategy because that is what is needed for a good business.
