What is user experience strategy?

Strategy. A word we all love, even though we treat it so bad.

There is a lot of confusion around the word strategy used in the context of user experience. Many people use the phrase ‘UX strategy’ when they actually mean ‘design plan’. (The approach you take to develop the user experience of a single product or interface is a design plan. If that’s what you’re after, there’s some good stuff about this over in user-centred design.)

We define User Experience Strategy as:

A long-term plan to align every customer touchpoint with your vision for user experience, and achieve a measurable increase in commercial yield.

The component parts of a UX strategy are:

• A very clear qualitative and quantitative understanding of your current user experience
• A vision for the user experience you are trying to create
• A model of the commercial outcomes resulting from realising the vision, and the costs of doing it
• A prioritised roadmap of what needs to happen to get you from where you are today to where you want to be
• A set of regular measurements to monitor progress and success
• A plan for developing the capabilities and culture of your organisation to do all of this

In other words, it is a holistic business strategy and requires understanding, support and action right across your organisation.

Ambitious stuff, right? But why can’t we just carry on as we are, enjoying the tactical benefits of UX and developing the user experience bit by bit? We explore this in the next section: Why do we need strategy?