The Basics of UX Strategy for Business Success
“Good design is good business.” — Thomas Watson Jr., former IBM CEO
The team behind a leading online instructional resource recently came to Lokion with concerns about their product. The public-facing site didn’t convey the value of the members-only instructional site, which in turn didn’t provide users with a clear picture of their learning progress or the next steps in their journey. Meanwhile, their competitors were offering experiences that were more intuitive, persuasive, and well-designed.
To help our client build a better product quickly and efficiently, we led them through the process of developing an effective User Experience (UX) strategy. When companies like our client invest in UX, they’re not just creating pretty sites, apps, and other products. A well-executed UX strategy leads to:
- Higher customer satisfaction
- Reduced development costs
- Competitive advantage
- Increased revenue
But what does UX strategy entail, and how can your organization integrate it effectively into the development process?
Listen to your users: The role of user research
When Lokion starts working with new clients, we often sit in on meetings where Person A is absolutely certain that users need X, while Person B is equally adamant that users need Y. We’ve found that user research breaks deadlocks by providing hard data and “voice of customer” input. Techniques like interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiries reveal genuine user needs and behaviors. This research informs a smart UX strategy and minimizes assumptions.
User research isn’t a one-time task—it’s ongoing. If you continuously engage with your users, then your UX strategy will evolve alongside changing user needs and expectations.
Understand your users: The power of personas
Once our clients have a research-driven understanding of users and their needs, they often need help to more clearly define and remember all the details and nuances of different user segments. Instead of saying, “This feature would resonate with women ages 25-35 who want quick answers to travel questions,” the team can use personas as shorthand: “This feature would resonate with Teresa Traveler.” That’s because a persona is a “summary” person developed by the team to represent key user segments. Personas help to:
- Keep us user-centered by serving as a reminder and empathy aid throughout our projects.
- Help us frame journey maps to build an even better understanding of users’ actions and needs.
Each persona includes key demographics, behaviors, pain points, and goals. Once you create personas, you can prioritize and update them as often as needed.
Visualize success with journey mapping
Armed with fresh research insights and well-defined personas, we partner with our clients to map out every step of the user journey. Through a journey mapping exercise, we detail those steps for key personas from initial interaction to final conversion.
By uncovering potential pain points and identifying areas for improvement, the journey mapping process aligns your team’s efforts and ensures a seamless and satisfying experience for users.
Evaluate and improve: Heuristic audits and benchmarking
How do our clients’ current experiences measure up to UX best practices? What are peers and competitors up to and how do they address UX challenges? To answer these questions, we often conduct:
- Heuristic audits to evaluate a product’s usability based on established principles, identifying friction points and areas for improvement.
- Benchmarking to measure the product’s UX against peers and competitors, providing insights into industry standards and opportunities to differentiate.
Bring ideas to life with prototyping
With all these UX activities and deliverables in hand, Lokion and our clients have a clear picture of the best possible new conversion path and user interface -- we think! But we need to test our hypotheses and designs with stakeholders and users before devoting big chunks of time and money to a full development effort. That’s where prototyping comes in to visualize and test our understanding. From a simple low-fidelity mockup to a high-fidelity pixel-perfect design, interactive prototypes help identify flaws early and allow for rapid iteration.
Refine your product with usability testing
When Lokion and our clients want to know more about the viability of a product or overall strategy, we conduct usability testing to observe real users as they interact with a current product, or an interactive prototype of a future product. This helps determine if the design is intuitive and effective. Insights from usability tests guide refinements, ensuring the final product meets user expectations.
Consistent usability testing—before, during, and after development—keeps your UX strategy on track by validating that your product meets real user needs at every stage of the process.
Final thought
Lokion worked with our instructional client to develop a thoughtful UX strategy based on user research, personas, journey mapping, heuristic audits, benchmarking, prototyping, and testing. Using this strategy as our guide, Lokion was able to quickly build and deploy a new product for our client that will achieve their business goals while meeting the needs of their users. In the end, the best UX strategy is one that keeps the user at the heart of every decision.
Ready to transform your UX strategy? Learn more about Lokion’s UX services, then connect with us to get started.