How to develop the Best User Experience Strategy

By Luca Longo from the blog of CourseUX.com

Most people tell you that the secret of the best Product User Experience is confined to sketching beautiful interfaces.

Are they right?

Well, to be honest with you… no.

Here’s the deal:

I’ll be the first to tell you that UX is nothing about “painting pretty pictures”.

It’s a process that — ideally — starts at the strategy level and affects the whole lifecycle of a project. UX design begins by learning about the business model, doing user research and understanding how a service can fit into the users’ perspective.

It’s a very important part in defining the business strategy and it doesn’t end with the User Interface design, it’s also about testing people, supporting development, and making ongoing adjustments even after the launch.

So, how can you develop the best Product User Experience Strategy?

There are six different steps in the UX process. In this article you will learn three of those:

1 — User Experience (UX) Research & Analysis

Here you need to understand the context for the product, identify the market and the stakeholders for your new product development.

Understanding the company strategy is important from the outset because it articulates the brand, the vision and the guiding principles of the organisation. The strategy underpinning a UX project will shape the goals of the project:

• what the organisation is hoping to achieve with the project;
• how its success should be measured;
• what priority it should have in the grand scheme of things.

One of the hardest things in a product UX is not the work itself, but a good relationship with stakeholders who say:

“We don’t need UX right now…”

“You are the UX Specialist, I know… but could you make the menu bigger and the site…