UX Strategy: 5 steps to create and implement successful UX plans

In today’s digital world, user experience design is no longer a nice-to-have but a unique business differentiator and competitive advantage. Creating exceptional experiences for users without losing focus on business goals is key to long-term success. A solid UX strategy can help you do just that.

UX strategies help create more engaging, coherent experiences at every customer touchpoint. They ensure user needs, business objectives, and capabilities are aligned, giving all team members a clear direction to follow and keeping them focused on solving the right problems.

In this article, we'll walk you through the steps you need to follow to create a UX strategy:

We’ll look at these steps in more detail in a moment. But first, what’s a UX strategy, and why does it matter? To answer these questions, we spoke to Samuel Moreau, VP of Design & Research at Coursera, Penny Spaniel, Employee Experience Service Designer and previous Senior UX Strategist at IBM Consulting, and Anton Sten, User Experience Design Director and former Director Of User Experience at Product Inc.

A UX strategy is a detailed, long-term plan and set of guidelines that aims to combine business objectives, product goals, and user needs into a set of guidelines.

For maximum effectiveness, a UX strategy should be created and put into place prior to design and development stages. The result is a strategy which ultimately ensures your product meets both the user’s needs and your organization’s ideal user experience and company objectives.

A UX strategy is a high-level plan to align every user touchpoint with your vision for the user experience. As Anton Sten points out: “A UX strategy focuses on what the user should feel, think, and in the end, experience when using your product.”

There are many reasons to create a user experience strategy, but for this article, we’ve summed them up into three main benefits:

Designing a digital product without a UX strategy is like going on a road trip without a map. “The benefit of a clear UX strategy is that you know where you are heading and have a plan of getting there,” explains Anton. "A road trip in your car just cruising along a scenic route can be an experience in itself, but if you plan to get from A to B, you’ll see far greater success if you decide in advance where you want to go and plan which road to take.”

The UX strategy gives a clear direction to follow, while leaving the UX and design team flexibility to develop the best way to get there. “Just like getting directions in Google Maps, you’ll likely be presented with multiple paths to take, but it’ll be your decision to pick one, just like it’ll be your decision whether you’ll want to stay on that road for the entire journey or not,” Anton says.

There can be a million ways to create or improve the UX of a digital product. Having a solid UX strategy keeps you focused on solving the right problem for the target users. It helps identify priorities and focus areas based on impact on the overall user experience, what needs the most improvement, current technology, and budget limitations.

"As UX designers and strategists, we’d probably never finish work if given a blank check—there is no perfect product and the work is never really done," says Penny. "Many of us have ideas that haunt us for years after we roll off a project about all we could have done differently. We need a well-defined strategy to avoid scope creep, maintain financial responsibility, and combine the right amount of creativity and result."

A UX strategy ties UX design to business objectives, helping business stakeholders see the value in what you and your team are doing. Having a well-defined strategy before starting the UX design process shows what the team will be working on, how it will impact the company and helps you optimize resources and make better, informed decisions.

Finally, not only does UX strategy lays the foundation for designing extraordinary user experiences, but it also leads to happier and more productive UX teams. Samuel explains: “A clear and strong UX strategy can galvanize and motivate the team to deliver great work. A happy designer is someone who uses their skills to have an impact—the UX strategy is the roadmap for achieving that impact.”

Often, the words “plan” and “strategy” are used interchangeably, but there’s a difference. A plan is typically a list of steps used to achieve a goal. It’s a detailed document that tackles questions like: What tasks need to be done? How? When? By whom?

A strategy describes your current position, where you want to go, and how to get there. Yet it focuses on the bigger picture, not every little thing you'll do along the way. While a strategy focuses on what you want to achieve and why, a plan outlines the practical ways to achieve your desired outcomes.

In her book, UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want, author and UX strategist Jaime Levy introduces four tenets that make up the foundation of UX strategy. Let's explore each of them in more detail:

Now that we’ve clarified why UX strategy is so important and what its key elements are, let’s go over the steps needed to create and implement a winning UX strategy.

To plan out where you need to go and how to get there, you first need to know where you are. Developing a UX strategy starts with understanding the past performance or current state of the product’s user experience. Run user research, competitive analysis, and stakeholder interviews to determine what works well, what could be better, and what opportunities lie ahead.

User research

An effective UX strategy contains plenty of data about your target users, their behaviors, goals, and expectations, the problems they’re facing, and how they’re currently solving them. Combine both qualitative and quantitative research methods to learn what’s relevant for your users and how you can best address their needs.

Stakeholder interviews

The goal of a UX strategist is to design a product that serves both user and business needs. It’s crucial to know the business goals to set the right expectations from the beginning and explore ways to improve the user experience that align with the company's needs. Talk to key stakeholders to understand the business strategy, the company’s constraints and challenges, and how they measure the product's success.

Competitive analysis

A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is, what they're doing, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Competitive research will give you a good sense of what's expected in your industry, what makes your product unique, and how you can deliver a superior user experience.

After you see the big picture, it’s time to define where you want to get to and what you want to achieve. Your UX vision is a high-level and long-term aspirational statement that describes the experience users will have when using your product.

You can create the UX vision by answering the following questions:

Here's an example of a user experience vision: We own and continually improve the design system, enabling product teams to innovate, learn, and deliver with optimal speed and quality.

The UX vision is a highly effective tool to align the team around a common purpose and guide every strategic decision they need to make along the journey. Based on the UX vision, you can start shaping your UX strategy and identify the outcomes and long-term goals that matter the most to your organization.

It’s now time to break the UX vision down into manageable and actionable focus areas and strategic objectives. These highlight your priorities and create a bridge between your vision and the practical plans to achieve it.

Your focus areas determine where you will concentrate your efforts to realize the UX vision and reach your desired destination. An example of a focus area could be improving the user experience of signing up. For each focus area, you can identify strategic objectives—more specific outcomes that you wish to achieve over a specific period of time.

Your UX roadmap describes the practical steps you will need to take to accomplish your goals and execute your strategy.

UX roadmaps outline and prioritize the activities a UX team needs to conduct to solve a defined problem and provide a corresponding timeline for completion. As a UX leader, you can use roadmaps to align everyone involved in the project, prioritize the activities that will deliver the most value, and track your progress towards achieving your UX vision.

Finally, the key to successfully implementing your UX strategy lies in metrics and measurements. Once the planning is done and you start to implement the strategy, it’s vital to keep monitoring the performance of your UX efforts to make sure you’re on track to achieve your goals.

UX KPIs are a great way to measure progress over time, assess the quality of UX design, and identify problem areas. They translate your goals into tangible metrics, helping you make informed decisions and better communicate how your team's work impacts the organization.

Expedia Group is one of the world's largest travel platforms that owns and operates several international online travel brands to make traveling easier, more enjoyable, and more accessible.

"Expedia owns multiple companies, and the idea was to unify them and create a common interface system that allowed them to still feel their own unique brands," says Samuel Moreau, former VP of Global Design and UX at Expedia Group. "It was like redesigning the entire product but also thinking about it as a system that worked across multiple products."

Samuel explains that as the company grew, different parts of the product grew independently. The goal of the UX strategy was to bring these parts together to increase usability, gain consistency, and have reusable components to build better user experiences faster.

As one of the world's premier consulting firms, IBM Consulting takes a human-centered, outcomes-led approach to help businesses understand and adapt to customer needs, define their digital strategy, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, IBM Consulting was contacted by the New York Department of Education (NYDOE) to research and build their brand new remote learning program design.

"It became clear that the nation’s largest school system was going to go remote—and that presented its own challenges," explains Penny Spaniel, former Senior UX Strategist at IBM Consulting. “Think about kids in special education or those who don’t have reliable internet or share a small space with active siblings and only one computer. Suddenly there were several big issues that needed to be solved.”

The UX strategy process began with research to clarify both the problem and opportunity space. "We had a large, brilliant team and so much support from NYDOE—they let us present possibilities and ask lots of questions while supplying us with excellent research on demographics and the needs of students and teachers,” Penny says.

Penny and her team started with data, produced personas representing multiple users and their specific issues, and built user journey and empathy maps to understand the unique challenges kids would face during extended remote learning.

Research played a crucial role in informing strategy and delivery. The team designed mainly for tablets, web, and mobile to feature multiple apps and remote-learning tools. Also, a help desk was introduced to provide readily available technical help and make sure no one was left behind in the transition to remote learning.

Building a user-centered product involves extensive research, planning, testing, and learning. A well-defined UX strategy will guide your efforts and provide a framework for decision-making. As you work through your design, continue to validate your strategy and work. No matter what stage you’re at in the process, with Maze, you can create custom, dynamic tests and surveys to get user input and create better user experiences.