UX Strategy: What It Is and Why It Matters

[shammis606]

The success of a website depends on its users. But with over 400 million active websites online at any given time, it’s difficult to implement the right user experience (UX) strategy to grab users’ attention, let alone keep them interested enough to increase sales conversions.

With UX being a design priority, it is now critical to reducing friction and frustration for users when they land on a site. While early UX efforts focused primarily on website and page loading speeds, the discipline has expanded in recent years. Sites now need full-fledged UX strategies to maximize the impact of content and site effectiveness and keep users coming back.

Let's look at the evolving concept of UX strategy, why it matters, the benefits of using our teacher database and look at some examples of quality strategy in action.

What is UX strategy?
The better the user experience, the more likely you are to engage them and increase conversions. The problem? Given the scale of each potential website problem and the balancing of multiple users with different priorities, trying to create a one-size-fits-all UX often backfires.

A UX strategy helps address this issue by identifying which features impact the overall user experience, which features need the most improvement, and how current technology and budget constraints impact these needs.

In practice, UX strategy combines the business mission with IT capabilities and the needs of key users to ensure you are solving the right problems with the right resources.

Components of a UX Strategy
Now let's look at the components of a good UX strategy.

Long-term vision
This step is simple. Before you can develop a strategy, you need to know your end goal. It all comes down to knowing your target user and what you want to provide them. With this knowledge, you can decide which sections of your site to focus on.

Innovation
A good UX strategy always evolves in line with new technologies and customer needs. It should focus on innovation and never rest on its laurels.

Customer research
The great thing about UX strategy is that you can get real-time feedback by having a support service. By analyzing the most common problems that customers face, you can always be aware of the problem areas.

Design
The design should be useful to the customer, visually pleasing, and complement your product. This involves focusing on choosing the right color scheme, layout, fonts, and product images.

More than two-thirds of digital professionals believe that UX has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Additionally, 62% believe that it improves brand perception.

For business owners, the message is clear: While page speed helps attract users to your site, it's not enough to keep them. If pages don't load properly, navigation is difficult, and ads are overwhelming, the reputation built on fast loading times disappears almost instantly.

Combined with rapidly changing consumer behaviors such as the shift to mobile and the desire for seamless customer service across multiple channels, customer experience is becoming a determining factor in a website’s success. If you want to increase sales and build customer loyalty, you need an effective UX strategy.

Why UX Strategy Is Important
A UX strategy helps business leaders understand the value of UX design. It drives alignment across the company. It provides a clear measure of success. It creates a user-first mindset within the company. It connects all the dots between the brand promise and the customer experience.

1. It helps business leaders understand the value of UX design.

A UX strategy shows how design plays a role in achieving business goals, from increasing customer loyalty to increasing market share and giving a business a competitive advantage over companies that don’t prioritize design. It helps business leaders, clients, and stakeholders understand the value of what the UX team does.

With a great UX strategy in place, management will know exactly what the UX team is working on, how their work impacts the business's bottom line, and how implementing good design now can help the business save resources on fixing mistakes in the future.

2. It promotes alignment across the company.

A UX strategy aligns business goals, user needs/expectations, and the business’s technology stack. It represents the overarching vision that each team should strive to achieve. Using this strategy as a guide for the team ensures that everyone is aligned and making decisions with the same goal in mind. Not only does this facilitate internal collaboration, it also saves time and resources in the design process and provides customers with a cohesive brand experience.

3. It provides a clear indicator of success.

Developing a UX strategy requires setting clear UX goals before starting a project. Knowing what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it, and how to measure your progress allows you to avoid wasting time, energy, and resources on useless design methods and failed attempts.

Instead, you'll be able to measure the impact of your decisions on customer service and keep your product moving in the right direction.

4. This creates a user-centric atmosphere in the company.

The primary goal of a UX designer is to create products that solve the right problems for the right people. This is in contrast to C-level executives who are more concerned with ROI, profit margins, and annual revenue.

A good UX strategy includes analysis of user research results that helps everyone, including designers, marketers, customer service representatives, and CEOs, better understand end users, including their goals and pain points.

5. It connects all the touchpoints between the brand promise and the customer experience.

When a brand's promises don't match the actual experience customers get from the product, they're likely to turn to another, more reputable brand.

UX strategy ensures that what a business promises matches what users feel when they use the product. It also shows how to align brand promises with customer experience, which ultimately increases brand trust and customer loyalty.

UX Strategy Examples
So, what does a good UX strategy look like? Let's look at some examples.

1. google

The Google search page is a marvel. It’s simple and works exactly as expected. While there are options to access Gmail, Google Images, or a Google account, most of the web page is filled with white space. Clean lines and minimal clutter make the central search bar the focal point, and users aren’t confused about how the search function works.

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s onboarding process is a great example of how UX helps users improve their experience. New users are given specific tasks to help them “get the most out of LinkedIn,” with each task broken down into simple steps that can be completed with a single click.

3. rover service

Rover, a company that provides a great user experience from the moment users land on the homepage, finds a simple form that asks what they want – boarding, pet sitting, dog walking, etc. The form then asks where they live, when they need care, and what size dog or cat they have.

Armed with this information, rover can quickly generate relevant search results, reducing the time users spend searching for care information that doesn't apply to their circumstances.

How to Improve Your UX Strategy
So how can you ensure that your UX strategy will actually deliver the results you want? Get started with these three steps.

1. Analyze current conditions.

This starts with assessing the current UX efforts on the website. The goal is to determine what is working, what is not, and what changes are a priority.

While customer feedback is valuable, collecting consistent data from a large user base can be challenging. Employees, meanwhile, are a great and easily accessible source of information—it’s worth encouraging them to engage with feedback. This process can help identify common and recurring complaints and inform the next step of your UX strategy.

2. Define specific goals.

The next step is to identify specific goals. Prioritize a specific interaction and its resolution before moving on to other actions.

3. Map out the route.

Once you’ve identified your key UX challenges, you need a step-by-step plan to solve them. By planning your UX journey before you begin, you can reduce the risk of potential mistakes and improve the quality of your final results.

Key Experience Indicators
Metrics matter. But how do you measure the effectiveness of your UX efforts and the results of your UX strategy? Start with these key experience metrics.

1. General traffic data.

By analyzing traffic data on specific pages before and after implementing a UX strategy, you can generally assess whether your efforts are paying off.

2. Number of users in social networks

An increase in the number of views on social media posts can also indicate increased user satisfaction due to improved UX, especially if they comment on, share, and like posts. This is because social media activities require effort on the part of users – effort they won’t make if the website discourages them the moment they arrive.

3. Registration by email

If your email newsletter and marketing email subscribers are growing, your UX strategy is likely working.

4. Consumer opinion

It’s also worth conducting regular customer surveys to find out what they think about the current UX. While participation rates are typically low—usually 30% or less—this metric helps gauge user attitudes rather than behavior, which can provide more nuanced insight into your UX strategy.

UX Strategy Solution
The world of UX is constantly changing, and it is impossible to completely “solve” a UX strategy problem on an ongoing basis. However, the right approach to UX can lead a business to sustainable improvements in service quality over time.

By regularly assessing current conditions and implementing step-by-step solutions, you can optimize your site activities, reduce user frustration, and increase overall engagement to increase your overall ROI.