How Creating a UX Design Strategy Can Elevate Your Customer Journey

To ensure your user experience (UX) and business goals are in line with each other, you must create a UX design strategy that brings all the disparate parts together. This approach will facilitate prioritizing the right tasks and allow non-essential areas to fade into the background so they don’t hinder progress.

Without a coherent strategy, it becomes difficult to create a product that delivers on UX within the expected timeframe and on budget. Proper planning ensures the customer journey is always kept in focus throughout a project to provide the best results for you and your clients.

Defining your UX design strategy

There are two potential positions you might find yourself in when you’re thinking about defining a UX design strategy. The first is creating a website, system or app from scratch, while the second is to undertake a redesign of a product that has become outdated or isn’t performing as well as it should.

Both of these situations represent a large undertaking and require discipline and clarity throughout in order to be a success. You need to clearly define the business goals, user needs and communication style of your brand from the beginning. This will ensure these elements don’t get lost as your strategy evolves.

While a visually appealing design has its merits, aesthetics shouldn’t be prioritized over building a positive user experience. If you design elements to solve specific problems that users face and keep them in line with your business goals, you’ll find the approval stage easy, as stakeholders see the intrinsic value in what you’ve designed.

Making informed design choices

The key decisions that shape your strategy should be based on research, covering a variety of areas:

• UX research should provide a deeper understanding of your users’ expectations and how this will influence their behaviors
• Reporting on industry trends and approaches adopted by competitors
• A detailed picture of the current performance of the product or service, which can be compared to the ideal outcome
• An appropriate set of metrics to measure success, which is agreed upon from the start

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The steps to create an effective UX design strategy

Once you’re convinced you need a UX design strategy, it’s time to put your learnings into practice and outline the process. The following steps will ensure you do so in a coherent and efficient manner to ensure success.

1. Create user stories, scenarios and user flows

With the information you’ve already gathered about your users, start creating stories, scenarios and user flows to demonstrate how they’ll interact with your product. Just as you’ll have multiple personas within your marketing strategy, you can expect to have a number of differing stories in your UX design strategy.

2. Explore creative ideas

Developing creative ideas is a vital part of being a UX designer and, depending on the size of the organization, this process may involve a few individuals or a larger team. Everyone works differently, with some creatives preferring to explore ideas on paper, while others find online tools intuitive. There needs to be a system in place for collaboration so that ideas with potential can be discussed further.