Develop a user experience strategy that both bosses and users will love

A user experience (UX) strategy is a detailed plan that outlines how to achieve a client’s specific vision User experience.

Regardless, this is part of your user experience strategy. The second part is ensuring the user experience is consistent with your brand and using it to help achieve business goals.

Both aspects of a user experience strategy are critical. Many teams make the mistake of developing a one-sided user experience strategy that only focuses on the needs of the end user. When this is a single focus, there is no way to connect these needs to the needs and goals of the organization.

As a result, the actions you take to improve your user experience won’t translate into improvements for your business. Ouch!

The good news is that you can create a user experience strategy that does both. AKA, one that meets user needs and Your organization’s business goals. This approach not only appeases users, but also appeases your boss. A win-win situation.

Here’s how to build a user experience strategy that makes everyone happy.

How to create a user experience strategy that both bosses and users will love

A user experience strategy has three components: imagine, Targetand plan.

The key to creating a user experience strategy that works for everyone is to ensure that each component is approached from two perspectives:

• client. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and see everything from their perspective.
• Business side. Put on your boss’s shiny, expensive shoes and think about every detail That view.

We’ll guide you through the process of creating a successful user experience strategy centered on these two important perspectives.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Define your vision

This step is the definition Where What you want to follow your user experience strategy and why you want to do it.

Here, think big. For example, let’s say you’re tasked with building an app that connects teachers, school staff, and parents.

Your first task is to imagine all the wonderful things your app can do for your users.

What problems need to be solved on the user side?

We used an educational app as an example, but you can apply these steps to any type of app, website, or product.

First, check if something similar is already available on the market. There may be. But your app might also go further or do more than existing apps.

Take education-related apps as an example. Yes, there are already apps that connect schools and parents, but are there? one The app that does everything?

No. At least, not one that I know of. As a parent of primary school students, I must pay attention to:

• Dojo-like For communicating with your child’s teacher
• Picmid Used to set daily dismissal instructions for my child
• Parent audio-visual Used to let me know if my child will be absent/late and to check their grades
• Google Classroom for homework
• Facebook Get the latest news from the school’s parent communication group and Official page
• Google Sheets Sign up for class dinners/arrange food for parent-teacher conferences
• e-mail Newsletters and communications for school administration

This is very typical. And there are a lot of them.

Granted, a lot of the content is cross-posted on multiple platforms because not every parent uses (insert name of app/email feature/social media platform here).

But there are too many different app logins/updates/features to keep track of. To make things even more exciting, schools may change from one app or communication method to another at any time.

Oh, have you just gotten used to managing school dismissal and attendance on the excellent School Dismissal Manager app? they will say.

Let’s switch to Pikmykid where you can only Develop termination procedures. For attendance, head to ParentVue, the app you already use to check your child’s grades!

That’s okay, marking your child as late or absent on ParentVue is nearly impossible. It turned out to be So simple On the School After School Manager app! You find yourself longing for the old days, but according to the school, they’re gone forever.

Listen to the sigh.

So, if you were to build an app that replaced all or most of these features, your vision for users might be to build an app that:

• Let teachers share grades with parents and older students
• Conveniently arrange parent-teacher meetings
• Track homework for both parents and students
• Maintain attendance records for administrators, teachers and parents
• Managing the dismissal process from a parent’s perspective
• Keep the community informed of the latest events through built-in social updates such as Facebook
• Allows secure messaging between any group of adults (teachers and parents, teachers and teachers, administrators and teachers, administrators and parents, etc.)
• Comes with built-in functionality to share beautiful and informative newsletters with your school community

Most importantly, you want users to easily navigate your product, find what they’re looking for, and return frequently to get the content and resources they need.

Come up with your own dream list of functions and features for users of your app or product.

Then, think about them from a business perspective.

What problems should be solved in business?

From a business perspective, your boss will want to know how the app will delight users and make money.

Your job is to figure out how to create a product that’s user-friendly, clean, sustainable, and profitable.

Start by identifying the market need and the differentiators your app will have. Research your competitors to see what gaps your app can fill, such as:

• Combine multiple functions into one platform
• Provide better usability
• Provide the best customer support ever
• all of the above

For example, in our pretend education app, we could highlight how we combined 8 features into one app that no other product could.

Next, focus on developing a good monetization strategy. This means deciding whether the app will use a subscription model, a one-time purchase, or a freemium structure.

Pricing is calculated to balance the two most important factors: affordability of the school and profitability of the company.

Consider offering additional features, partnerships, or integrations to create additional revenue streams. This is what ClassDojo does. Whenever I try to mark a message as “Urgent” or view my child’s “Memories” from a previous school year, ClassDojo reminds me that I need to upgrade to a monthly paid plan to access the content.

Because I really don’t need I haven’t registered for these functions yet. I also really want or need any other features like online tutoring for my kids that I can get after upgrading. So if you go this route, make sure the features strike a balance between limiting what your app can do and delivering what users really want.

Next, plan for scalability. Your app should meet the needs of small schools and large districts, with flexible pricing tiers and features. Scalability also means ensuring that the application’s technical infrastructure can handle growth, including a strong backend and strong, reliable customer support.

Your marketing and sales strategies are equally important. Outline a marketing plan you can present to your boss:

• Highlight your app’s unique features
• Show how you will send targeted marketing campaigns to engage users (i.e. schools, administrators and parents we pretend to be on the app)
• Demonstrate the value of your application by demonstrating your team’s ability to build relationships with decision makers through demos, testimonials, and case studies

Step 2: Outline your goals

Now that you have a vision, you need to break it down into specific goals to show that you are achieving what you set out to achieve.

Here are things to consider from a user and business perspective.

What problems need to be solved on the user side?

For user experience, you need to identify 2-3 actionable goals and attach them to key performance indicators (KPIs) about the UX vision you want to achieve.

In our pretend education management app, your goal + KPI combination might be:

• Reduce the time it takes parents and teachers to report absences by 30% By creating one-click attendance reporting functionality integrated with school records.
• Increase job completion rates by 15% By introducing a feature to track assignments, deadlines and missed work from an intuitive dashboard.

If you are building a user experience strategy for an existing product, you can choose from the following goals and KPIs:

• Reduce error rate to less than 10% By discovering and fixing technical issues that cause mission failure (and costly frustration!) on the client side.
• Reduce the time it takes users to complete tasks by 20% By simplifying navigation and eliminating (or combining) any redundant steps.
• Get your user satisfaction score to 85% or higher Identify common problems and resolve them by combing through user feedback.

Now it’s time to turn to the business perspective.

What problems should be solved in business?

Once your user experience goals are clear, you can align them with your business goals.

Each user experience goal should help achieve measurable business results.

For example, for our imitation new education app, the goals might be:

• Off to a strong start with 40% customer retention rate Provide schools with a personalized onboarding experience and dedicated support to help them get the most out of the app.

Existing applications, products or services may focus on:

• Subscription revenue increased by 20% By introducing an advanced layer with advanced capabilities such as analytics and integration.
• Daily active users (DAU) increased by 25% Make your app fun to use by using push notifications, a reward system, or gamified interactions.
• Increase your market share by 10% By targeting new demographics.

That’s our final step: Make a plan, get down to earth, and turn your goals (and your vision) into reality.

Step 3: Plan your approach

Planning is planning the actions you and your team will take to achieve the goals you set in step 2. If your vision, goals and plans may need adjustments.

What problems need to be solved on the user side?

Making a plan is easy. All you need to do is look at your goals and KPI portfolio and identify the tools that will help you achieve your goals.

For example, one of the goal/KPI combinations for our simulation education app is to reduce the time it takes teachers to report absences by 30%.

We can do this by running usability tests on existing, clunky competitor apps (looking at you, ParentVue!) and comparing those results to our app or prototype. If our app doesn’t improve significantly for users, we can redesign and retest it until it improves.

Likewise, if we wanted to reduce the error rate of an existing application to less than 10%, we could implement a tool like sentinel or error barrier Detect, monitor and analyze errors in real time.

Tools like this can give us a detailed understanding of where errors occur, why they occur, and how they impact the user experience.

With this information, we can fix errors and reduce error rates.

What problems should be solved in business?

For this step, review the business goals you identified in Step 2.

We pretended that the goal of the app was to be successful from the get-go—a 40% customer retention rate.

How do we achieve this goal?

Ensure we have an IT-savvy customer service team ready to provide training and fast, efficient assistance when users need it.

For more general goals that apply to any app or service (such as increasing daily active users by 25%), we can make sure we hire a UX designer and director with a track record that aligns with our goals.