Deciphering and building UX Strategy
For an organisation where UX is quite mature, strategies seem to be intertwined. It’s hard to capture where product strategy and product marketing strategy meet and differ from UX strategy, especially when all areas collaborate well. What’s the best way to define UX directions independently and in context with these other strategies? How do we approach this at Tresorit?
Defining UX strategy
First, let us acknowledge that strategic thinking and envisioning where we want to be in five years can be a vague and daunting task. If you’re not a part of management, it can be hard to get a grasp on the process of building strategy. We don’t want to go into this in details now, my intention is merely to underline the fact that setting up UX strategy is not straightforward either.
A practical approach to UX strategy
To decipher the term UX strategy, we can take two approaches (or ‘schools’ if you will). According to Jamie Levy, acclaimed UX strategist and author, who published her method in the book titled UX Strategy:
UX Strategy is the process that should be started first before the design or development of a digital product begins. It is the vision of a solution that needs to be validated with real potential customers to prove that it is desired in the marketplace.
Levy’s approach is rather practical. She built a toolkit of processes and methods that can test and validate the value proposition and the business model of a company. It’s a compilation of techniques (competitive analysis, storyboarding, wireframing, etc.), that practicing UX professionals are very much familiar with, but Levy highlights how these fit into the big picture and support business strategy.
For years the focal point of UX was ‘getting a seat at the table’ to be part of decision-making. At Tresorit, UX has always played a key role. We’ve defined usability as part of our value offering from the get-go: “Tresorit offers unmatched cloud security with ease of use in mind.” Our practice and organizational setup have always reflected this approach, therefore the strategic position of UX (which Levy’s toolkit aids) has already been ensured.
There’s another approach
As Jamie Levy herself pointed out in a recent online meetup, there’s another approach to UX strategy besides hers — a more generic one, which is more concerned with strategically executing UX.
How can UX be more strategic? What is the strategy for UX in our organization? These questions focus on identifying a separate UX vision/mission/goal/roadmap, much like the way a business or product strategy is built up. Examining UX this way, given our organization maturity, the expectations of our teams, was more fitting for Tresorit. But as with everything in our profession, us designers have not come to this conclusion on our own. We validated it.
Validating Tresorit’s UX strategy
We conducted internal research with two goals in mind. First, we wanted to check the current state of UX: what our strengths and weaknesses are, how the broader Product Team perceives the contribution of UX.
With a short card-sorting exercise, we checked which process steps work efficiently, where we can find improvement opportunities, and what tools we can exclude from our practice. In order to refine where departments meet, we double-checked with the participants who the owners of deliverables are.
The second goal was to build a common understanding. We needed to define what our colleagues and internal stakeholders mean by UX strategy and where they see the intersections with other strategies. For this, we included the below questions in our interviews:
- How would you define UX strategy?
- Where does it match or differ from business or product strategy?
- Given our product strategy, what priorities will UX have according to you?
The outcome proved to be useful. We got feedback on where we stand, identified high-level takeaways about strategy expectations, and captured operational findings on a START/STOP/CONTINUE scale with some low-hanging fruits.
Our research was the first step of building consensus. After communicating the results, we collaboratively defined our UX strategy, following the aforementioned second approach — capturing vision, goals, and detailed roadmap as per NNG’s suggestion. But while doing so, Levy’s line of thought was not dismissed.
The very activity of researching different approaches to UX strategy made us re-evaluate some of our core competencies. For instance, how are our technical solutions in the cloud security market changing mental models, and vice versa? Where do we create added value for our users and for the business? The latter question should always be the bottom line — otherwise strategy, roadmaps, tactics, and toolkits only become buzzwords without purpose.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7bi9iXSW9o
https://userexperiencestrategy.com/
