The UX strategy

Let me start this part of the chapter with a real-life story. Almost 10 years ago, I joined a company that was working on creating a new mobile application. The idea behind that product belonged to the company's owner. He'd been facing a problem for a long time and had found a way to solve it. He wanted to try to help other people with the same problem through this application. He was so enthusiastic about his idea and was sure that people would need his mobile application and would love using it.

By the time I joined, the product was almost finished and the owner had spent a lot of time and money developing the product. The only things remaining were some enhancements on design and working on the marketing campaign. After the product went live, nobody was actually interested in his product and those who tried it only did so for a short period of time before they deleted the app. So, in other words, nobody was interested in his service and application.

The difficulty was that the owner solved a problem that he was facing and thought that others would need to, too. However, that was the wrong approach. It doesn't matter how good his idea was, he never did the research to check whether other people were facing the same problem and whether they needed that solution, and why his way of solving the problem seems better than what users were already doing.

So, that is where the UX strategy takes place. Before you start building any kind of digital or physical product, you will need to have a strategy first, a plan for your product to succeed.

In the UX process for building a digital product, the strategy begins at the discovery phase. This is where our teams perform deep research related to the idea that was provided by a client to create the idea that we want to build for ourselves.

The UX strategy is the process that we start immediately after we are done with the discovery and planning stages for a project. So, by this, it is clear that we start the UX strategy process before the design or development of the digital product.

We know that UX design covers different disciplines. The UX strategy also stands inside the UX design process, but usually a part of it is also aligned with business strategy. In other words, it can be said that UX strategy is a plan of action for how to find out whether the user experience of a product is aligned with business goals or objectives, as can be seen in the following diagram:

In the UX strategy process, we will need to include all the pieces of data that we have collected from the first phase of the UX process by also adding the business and product goals on it. So, we create the UX strategy as documentation for guidelines and rules that will outline how the design team will try to achieve the business and product goals.

However, we have to understand that the UX strategy itself depends on a number of different factors, such as:

• Understanding our client's business
• Understanding our competitors
• Understanding our users