Back in 2020, Slack announced one of its major design overhauls. By prioritizing user feedback and collaboration, they transformed a complex interface into a streamlined, intuitive experience.
In the official blog, they highlighted the importance of:
Slack's approach offers valuable insights for organizations aiming to enhance user experience and drive business value by prioritising UX strategy.
A UX strategy is a comprehensive roadmap that guides an organization in delivering exceptional user experiences. It aligns business goals with user needs, creating a clear path for product development and design. Rooted in deep user research and a profound understanding of the target audience, a robust UX strategy establishes a shared vision and actionable steps to achieve it.
A well-defined UX strategy is instrumental in driving business success. By placing the user at the center of every decision, organizations can:
Peter Morville, a pioneer in information architecture and user experience, best describes the pillars or facets of UX design using a honeycomb structure.
WRAP, an NGO specializing in waste management, aimed to enhance its global image and website usability. In preparation for their website redesign in July 2024, WRAP decided to use a data-driven approach with an expert UX audit.
Axelerant partnered with WRAP to conduct the UX audit to ensure the redesign and rebranding aligned with WRAP's evolving global focus. The detailed insights from the audit served as the foundation for the website redesign, making it a global hub for circular living.
WRAP faced significant challenges in its goal to inspire audiences, encourage change, attract investments, and articulate the organization’s mission effectively. These challenges included:
Axelerant conducted a thorough UX audit to lay the foundation for a seamless user experience for WRAP’s diverse, global audience.
The process included:
The audit provided WRAP with a clear roadmap for website enhancement, ensuring the upcoming redesign project was well-informed and strategically aligned. Despite a tight deadline, Axelerant completed the project on time through close collaboration with the client. The impact included:
At Axelerant, there's a simplified three-step approach followed for creating a stellar UX strategy:
To create a successful product, it's essential to deeply understand both the people who will use it and the business goals it aims to achieve. Clearly defining user needs and business objectives lays the groundwork for a great digital product.
Research is key to uncovering hidden opportunities and refining the product vision. There are many ways to learn about user behavior. In-depth conversations with potential users can offer rich insights into their hopes, needs, and expectations. Talking to stakeholders also helps align the product with business goals.
Understanding how people naturally categorize information (through card sorting) and gathering both detailed and broad feedback (through user surveys and interviews) provides a comprehensive view. These early discoveries can be used to create detailed user profiles and kickstart the design process.
The next step is to outline clear goals and a strategic plan to reach them. These goals should be specific, measurable, and aligned with both user needs and business objectives. It's important to avoid conflicts between these elements.
With the goals in place, the team can develop a clear roadmap including setting milestones, key actions, and deadlines.
A successful UX strategy includes proper documentation. It needs constant attention and improvement. To achieve this, ongoing collaboration and open communication are essential. By regularly gathering user feedback and making changes based on these insights, the strategy can stay relevant and effective as both the product and market evolve.
Crafting a user experience strategy can be complex, with many hidden perils. To ensure a spotless strategy, make sure to avoid these common mistakes:
Avoid focusing too much on the design details. Instead, focus on the big picture and always have in mind your UX vision.
Avoid the common trap of basing the development of the product on hunches and intuition. Allocate time to gather user insights through thorough user research.
Ensure your user experience strategy is aligned with the business objectives to avoid creating strategies disconnected from the wider business goals.
Don’t create rigid UX strategies with an overcomplicated plan that cannot be adapted. Be flexible to adapt to the ever-changing needs of today’s market.
Promote collaboration between product teams and stakeholders to ensure transparency and alignment, avoiding the creation of silos.
Document your strategy and update the strategy document with every iteration to avoid confusion and create a shared vision across the board.
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