UX strategy: what is it, examples and principles

How a well-thought-out UX strategy can help you attract more customers and boost your business revenue? Learn the principles of working out a successful e-commerce development plan to give your brand a second life below.

What is a UX strategy, in simple words?

UX strategy – is a detailed plan of UX/UI improvements based on an understanding of customer behavior and requirements. UX strategy is important because it helps to add to the web product’s value and present it to customers while ensuring a good user experience.

It is usually the first step of the website development process, during which you define all the usability features the future product must have. As you may already understand, creating a UX strategy requires a deep understanding of business processes, analytics, and market peculiarities. 

A UX strategy documentation gives business owners the answers to the following questions:

1. Who are your users?

You will learn about the demographic and behavioral peculiarities of your target audience, including their age, marital status, profession, and average income, as well as their expectations and requirements from e-commerce. You will also learn the factors that negatively affect their user experience, goals, and motivation.

2. What devices and platforms do your users utilize?

Specific devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) and platforms (iOS, Android, web) often dominate user usage patterns. During UX strategy development, you will get to know the most popular devices among your target audience to integrate your web product with cross-platform capabilities.

3. What are your competitors doing?

One of the main objectives of the UX strategy is to give your website or app an advantage over your competitors by engaging a wider audience. That’s why, during this phase, you can learn from their successes and failures.

4. How does your UX align with business goals?

While developing a UX strategy, specialists will consider your business objectives, which must be supported by the product’s UX to drive business conversion, retention, and other business metrics.

5. How do you measure success in UX?

How will you understand that the chosen UX plan is good for your business? Identifying key metrics such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and NPS is crucial for assessing UX effectiveness. Thanks to regular evaluation and iterative improvements based on user feedback and data, you will be able to maintain your business's UX success. 

Why UX design strategy is important or reasons to use that

Now you know what is a UX strategy. UX strategy is important and comprehensive plan that requires quite a lot of time and effort from the developers and business owners. But is it really worth doing? If you want to get a client-oriented web product with high conversion, the answer is definitely yes.

^{“People ignore design that ignores people.” Frank Chimero, Designer}

Intuition and gut feeling are valuable assets, but not when it comes to UX/UI design. To ensure high-quality customer service, you need a long-term plan of action based on data-backed insights.

Since a well-developed UX design strategy focuses on understanding user needs and preferences, it will allow you:

• Boost user loyalty and satisfaction
• Reduce bounce rate
• Develop easily scalable UX design
• Gain advantage over competitors
• Get the solution for meeting your business goals.

In other words, by investing in a UX strategy, you can increase your business revenue and make it lead the market.

UX strategy example overview

A UX development plan is crucial for further business scaling and conversion increase, especially for startups. For example, while working on the NFTrends project, Turum-burum had to design an innovative and seamless system from scratch and present complicated things in a way people without specific knowledge would understand.

So, our team was responsible for:

• Developing brand identity, including stylistics and tone of voice;
• Working out personal panel design for 4 types of users;
• Creating a website that will present the brand’s services to the target audience and make them engaged with the company’s services.

To cope with these tasks, we had to develop a UX strategy that usually consists of only a few stages: research, hypothesis building, validation, and strategy definition. However, it is important to ask the right questions at each stage. Below, you will learn about the UX plan development process in detail. 

Phase #1: Investigation

During this stage you have to answer two main questions:

1. How are the business matters now?
2. What business goals do you want to achieve?

The answers to these questions will give you insights into how much the current state differs from the desired one and help you define the criteria for further evaluating the UX strategy's success.

We build the research step by step to identify, analyze, and take into account both the rational side of the business and the emotional perception of the user. To make it as objective as possible, UX strategy designers:

• Conduct an interview with you as a business owner to get to know your key requirements and expectations;
• Work out a target audience persona portrait;
• Create the value proposition canvas — the best tool for understanding how well your product or service meets the user's needs.

Phase #2: Defining UX hypothesis

During this step you need to answer the following:

• What do we need to implement to get to the goal you defined during the first phase?
• Which UX features from the current website version should be preserved?

The stage focuses on the development of a smooth customer experience and includes:

• Empathy mapping
• Customer journey

• User flows mapping

When all the connection points between the customer and the website are found, the UX specialist works out a list of essential interface features to boost customer experience.

Phase #3: UX strategy implementation

In this phase, we're putting our user experience plan into action. Since our aim is to create a smooth, intuitive experience for customers, we design the best UX/UI decisions for the project that must be included in the development plan.

During this stage we may apply A/B testing, check the UX/UI hypothesis to find the best ones. All these things are done in close cooperation with the stakeholder to ensure the chosen strategy aligns with the client’s vision.

UX strategy document as a final step

After the prototype is tested and corrected, it is time to put all the work done on paper. So why is it essential to document the strategy? 

Firstly, thanks to the UX strategy document, you, as a business owner, will be able to learn the product’s development plan and decide whether to approve it.

Secondly, it ensures all team members who will work on the product in the next stages are on the same wave and understand the final goal of the project, including:

• UI team
• graphic designers
• development team
• marketers

The UX strategy is important for forming a common vision of the product in a cross-functional team at all stages and levels of its development.

There are two options of UX strategy document you can apply for:

• a strategic document that defines the overall goal and ways to achieve it (when? how? what?)
• blueprint of the strategy

In any way, you will get a comprehensive business development plan with the product’s prototypes and UX scenarios based on in-depth consumer research and testing.

Why does your business need UX strategy consulting?

UX strategy consulting involves helping organizations develop a comprehensive plan to improve the overall user experience of their products or services. This involves understanding users' needs and behaviors, identifying business goals, and aligning these with the product or service's design and functionality.

As you may already see, it is a complicated process that requires the involvement of different specialists. That’s why UX strategy consultants work closely with stakeholders to define the user experience vision, goals, and priorities.

Based on the research and analysis, UX strategy consultants develop a roadmap that outlines the steps needed to improve the user experience. This roadmap may include recommendations for design changes, new features, or other enhancements to better meet user needs and business goals.

After this, all these recommendations will be approved (or not approved) by a business owner. And only then the process of strategy implementation will begin.

Drawing the line

The main life principle says: that if you want to achieve something, you should devise a step-by-step plan on how to do it. Want to build up muscles? Follow the workout strategy! Want to earn a million? Work out a good investment plan! 

The same principle applies to any kind of business, especially e-commerce, where the competition is extremely severe. That’s why, every dollar invested in building a UX strategy and usability improvements will pay you off with a high conversion rate, customer loyalty, and brand recognition.

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