User experience design is of the utmost importance to companies. It can help boost their website or application’s conversion rate by attracting the ideal target audience towards their brand. As you may already know, a lot goes hand in hand to create stellar products that people will love. It’s not an easy feat. A lot of well-crafted planning goes into the creation of amazing products. UX designers have to make use of tried and tested User experience design strategies and other business tactics to make sure customers as well as the company stakeholders are satisfied.
Designers utilize a lot of UX strategies to deliver successful products. A User experience design strategy involves 4 basic components that include a business strategy, value innovation, validated user research, and killer user experience design.
Let’s look at each User experience design Design Strategy.
Business Strategy
These include all of the business objectives, how they can tap into the market to achieve competitive advantage and their revenue streams.
Value Innovation
This is achieved by ensuring that customers receive value while at the same time ensuring that costs are reduced for the company.
Validated User Research
Instead of assuming what customers value and desire, it is important to get valuable feedback from your target audience to get a deeper insight into their needs and wants.
This will help you create exactly what the user wants rather than wasting time, money, and resources on a product that isn’t desired by them.
User Experience Design
Once all of the other components are in place, it’s time to build an exceptional user experience that focuses on the key features of the product. This would add value for the customer.
The Importance of User experience design Strategy
Before moving on to how to build a UX strategy, it’s good to take into consideration why companies need it and how it can help them propel their products towards success.
- First of all, it helps build a good rapport with the higher ups of the company. Since a UX strategy is closely linked to the business objectives of the company, it helps the management and stakeholders see the value you are providing for the company.
- It also enables strong collaboration between business goals, the needs of the user as well as the company’s technological capabilities. This helps prioritize time and resources for the design process.
- It also helps give clear metrics to determine the success rate of your design projects. It will give you a clearer picture of how to measure success from the very beginning. This will help you carefully impact the effectiveness of your design decisions so that your product is heading in the right direction.
- Conducting validated user research would help UX designers understand the needs and wants of the user, and gain deeper awareness of their pain points so that they can design products accordingly.
- It helps connect with all touchpoints as UX strategy encourages designers and companies to take a closer look at how users interact with the brand as well as the product.
Steps To Create a Solid UX Design Strategy
1) Define Your Goals
The first step in creating an effective UX Design strategy is to clearly define the objectives of what you and the design team are aiming to achieve. After that is defined you have to make sure that these goals are aligned with the goals and objectives of the company.
Once all your objectives are set and ready, you can then start conducting research and the different methods you will use to reach your goals.
2) Conducting Research
A lot of research goes into designing a new product. When creating your UX strategy for an effective user experience design, your main areas of focus should be on Users, Stakeholders and the Competition.
Users
You need to learn about your users, and how you need to work towards getting deeper insights into their needs, wants, demographics and preferences.
This is the kind of information that will help you make your product a success.
To get this information, you need to figure out which crucial information you already have and how you can go about finding other pieces of information that can give you a better idea into your user’s likes, dislikes and preferences. Will you be conducting interviews, questionnaires or surveys to gather information about users? That is entirely up to you.
You will also need to decide how you plan on summarizing this data, making use of user personas or user stories.
Stakeholders
Your stakeholders are the higher ups of the company who have a major role in either funding the project or making decisions about the direction in which the product is supposed to go.
You need to do research about their expectations from the product, and the metrics they use to determine the success of the product.
Competition
Here you research competitors who have products that are similar to yours. Make sure to dive deep into the kinds of services they have, their product functionalities and user engagement.
Research different companies that are directly in competition with your own products as it will give you a greater insight into what users would want to expect.
3) Brainstorm & Outline
Once you have a deep understanding of what your users need, you can then start brainstorming and drafting different designs.
In this stage, you can brainstorm what methods your team will use to come up with preliminary designs. You can also decide what wireframing and prototyping tools your team intends on using.
You also need to create a strategy of how you can keep your user’s needs at the forefront when designing the products. You need to clearly define which features, elements and content must be incorporated to satisfy the end user and create stellar user experience design.
4) Testing & Evaluation Methods
Now that you have a solid idea of how you’ll create your designs, you will need to plan what methods you will use to test your designs and how you will evaluate your results.
Some important things that you can consider are if the tests will be moderated or not, the kind of data that you will gather, and the metrics that you will use to test the success of your products. When you know for sure how to do tests and then evaluate, you can then decide how to use this data to make improvements to your products.
5) Iteration
Your UX strategy is not complete before thinking of how you can improve your designs based on valuable user feedback. Products go through different stages of the design process and are always being tested and revised even when they’re released on the market.
Technology and user experience design trends are ever changing and evolving, and the most successful design teams also keep updating their products accordingly. Your UX strategy must include the important data you collected during testing to enhance the user experience and to design it according to the needs of the end user.