Discovering your own UX strategy framework

Each UX team or UX professional has their own way of doing a UX strategy. As long as you can understand the needs of your client, organization and user by keeping in mind related parts that can be connected with them, you will be able to create your own UX strategy framework.

The best example of this topic is The four tenets of UX strategy, which was created by Jaime Levy in 2015:

Her formula for the UX strategy is based on the following four tenets:

• Business strategy
• Value-innovation
• Validated user research
• Killer UX design

Business strategy is the top-line vision of the company; this is why the company exists in the first place. It's a way of defining the strategy for creating company profit or generating profit by a specific product that they have. We discussed this topic in more detail in the previous pages, where we explained different ways of understanding the business and its importance to the UX strategy.

Value-innovation is the part where the difference for a digital product is happening. After a lot of research and data collection, you will bring to the market an amazing product that people will enjoy using since it provides something that your competitors don't, or some features that were missing in products already available in the market. Value-innovation can usually happen on existing products.

Validated user research confirms the assumptions that you have made about the design. You try to track whether your product is on the right path and validate every time that you are providing value to the users. Drawing from experience, when dealing with senior management with outlandish product/feature recommendations, validating user research is key to focusing on the right problems and making decisions. A useful way to do this is to bring the various stakeholders to user research and testing sessions. This way, everyone involved can see for themselves how a product/feature performs in front of real users. This collaboration will help organically build agreement on the value innovation and any changes that follow.

In the Killer UX design tenet, the designers try to provide value by taking the following actions:

• Working collaboratively with stakeholders and teammates during the idea's inception
• Determining the key features that are critical to your product
• Learning everything about the existing market space to identify UX opportunities that can be exploited
• Speaking directly with potential and existing power users to discover and validate the product's primary utility
• Weaving the UX through all touch points–online and offline–to enable an experience that is frictionless

As I was saying at the beginning of this section, everyone has their own way or process for doing the UX strategy right. In this section, I tried to help you understand it better through the example of the four tenets of UX strategy by Jaime Levy, which shows us how to create our own UX strategy framework.

I usually go with the first approach, by trying to understand the three components mentioned at the beginning of UX strategy: understanding the business, the competitors, and the users. Through this strategy, I am able to define my own framework for doing a proper UX strategy.

Before moving to the next phase of the UX process, keep in mind that the UX strategy is a way of thinking. It doesn't mean creating a perfect plan, it is more about researching what is out there in our market category, analyzing opportunities, running different test cases or case studies, failing, and then learning. The best way to learn something is by failing smartly, learning from the mistakes, and moving your team in the right direction.