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Designing a web project, whether it’s e-commerce or not, there is a concept to follow. The solid UX strategy is what can help you to take into consideration the user needs, building in all the features, options, elements, tools overall usability. Anyway, you’d understand that only the right UX strategy chosen for your digital product (site or app) will work.
UX strategy: What Is It?
The abbreviation UX for UX strategy is short for user experience. It means how users feel and/or react, interacting with your digital product like the site or web app. Creating a positive user experience leads to a positive brand experience in total.
UX strategy is a document of rules and guidelines that outline how the designers are meant to achieve the organization/business/product/feature objectives. It’s how you can check if your business targets go along with the user experience of your web project. Herewith, the UX design handles usability, interaction, and content, when the UX strategy is a plan-of-action to successfully carry out the business aims thinking about the customers.
Importance of UX Strategy for Your Web Project
According to the statistics, 57% of the users won’t recommend the website/application if it’s poorly designed. That is the very reason to invest in the user experience strategy. It is a way to avoid the mistakes and create an intuitive, easy to navigate design of your digital product. That makes the UX strategy highly important for the business and e-commerce. It's because a well planned and correctly chosen UX strategy can increase sales, revenue, trust to your brand.
Key Steps to Creating a Solid UX Strategy
When you know what UX is and why you should pay attention to it, it’s time to act. Anyway, before you start your web development, it’s better to build the right UX strategy. Here are key steps to take to create a solid UX strategy that also meets your business demands and goals.
Do Rigorous Research
The research is the first thing to do when it’s about a well designed UX strategy that will work. Only the data-driven research is needed to get a clear idea of “who, what, why, when, how” and get a clear image of the things, user preferences, find pain points to answer, etc. That's crucial for your UX strategy to make it successful. There are 2 (two) methods to gather the data:
- Quantitative to answer “why” and “what”;
- Qualitative to answer “how” to do that.
Though today there is a host of ways to do the research, the next three methods are the most popular and provide you with the most useful data:
- Creating personas;
- Offering user surveys by means of the interviews;
- Arranging focus groups.
That was the first part of the research that is focused on learning the project requirements, users’ needs and end targets. The next part is an evaluation of the data gathered to improve the usability, define the directions, priorities, milestones, goals.
Plan User Stories and Scenarios
Having analyzed the data obtained and got the results of the research, it’s essential to create user personas to finalize the requirements of the digital product. It’s a way to create user stories, scenarios, flows:
- Stories to highlight the customers’ needs;
- Scenarios to elaborate the stories;
- Flows that are based on the stories and scenarios.
It’s a method to understand what features, tools, design and what solutions are a must to implement for your web project and make it a really user-centered.
Think About Accessibility and Usability
Your digital product is to have intuitive and easy-to-navigate design not to annoy the users and bring positive experience only. The content is king. It’s an important part of the web project that drives users to your website or web app while design enhances that content. That’s why you are to think about accessibility and usability carefully. Implement the website and app with intuitive menu bars, search engine, sitemaps, etc. to make sure that your digital product is a user-friendly and open ground for your targeted audience.
Outline Visual Design
As soon as you have estimated the expectations and requirements of the users to your digital product (website or application), you can start to sketch out the visual design. Mapping the path of the user experience through the digital product, you will make it more user-friendly, intuitive and engageable. You are to measure the outcomes - you can do that by means of the metrics set. Use the stories, scenarios and flows defined earlier.
Test Your UX Product
You shouldn’t neglect the testing of your UX product. Launching a beta version of the site, you can reveal the bugs, get feedback from the real users, test usability, etc. Besides, if the website or web app is labeled as on the testing stage, it can temper the users’ expectation. The planning for a specific timeline and collecting data is a must in the period. A/B testing, feature requests, use log, analytics, etc. is a way to learn the audience, improve the product and create the best experience.
Benefits of UX Strategy for Web Development
Now it’s obvious that the UX strategy is not fun, but science. It requires knowledge, time, skills, and investments. It is essential that you would like to be aware of the real benefits of the approach for your web product before investing money in it. Here are a few of the benefits of UX strategy for web development to get.
Validating Concepts
The proper user experience strategy can save your business money. That’s because there is a capacity to validate product and design concepts before the time- and money-consuming coding. The approach gives you an opportunity to test the digital product and receive feedback from the real users. In such a way, you can improve the design concepts, implementing and releasing the changes prior to the building the website or web application.
Clarifying Vision
The user-centered approach provides a clear vision of what feature/option/tool to build next. Creating the user experience strategy, a clear visual representation of the product vision, considering the users’ perspectives, is possible. Therefore, it’ll ease all the next decisions, moves, directions.
Reducing Development Costs
The UX strategy consists of several stages. Comprehensive user research, evaluation of the data, information architecture design, prototyping, testing, and deploying - all that is the time that costs you money. And that’s without mentioning the expenses needed for debugging, redesigning, polishing the digital project to satisfy the needs of end users. The UX strategies can predict and eliminate a lot of the problems that can occur on the stage of the development reducing the costs by times.
Higher Number of Successful Customer Interactions
Thanks to the UX strategy used, the site and/or web app become intuitive to navigate. Thus, the process of interaction between the user and the brand becomes as clear and simple as possible. In such a way, your users can find the needed information, buy the product or complete any other task he/she came for fast and seamlessly.
Improved User Trust
The aim of the UX strategy is to cater to the needs of the users, and remove their pain points. Therefore, you satisfy the users and their wants and needs. The positive experience make them think about the product positively as well. It’s the way to improve the customers’ trust in your brand and product. Thus, users will be engaged with your product and recommend it to others.
Increased Sales
Satisfied consumers are a reason for increasing sales. It’s essential and well-known fact. If you try to stimulate sales by using the advertising only, then you should consider that the user is 475.28 times more likely to survive a plane crash than clicks on a banner ad (source: businessinsider.com): that’s why you’d better focus on organic user engagement. That can be achieved thanks to the polished UX strategy that will make users move to the next steps more easily.
Bottom Line
Summarizing, here you have found strong facts why user experience comes first for any site - e-commerce or not. Only by making the users’ needs the priority can you create a trusted brand and increase sales. Reduce the costs, boost revenue, improve the design of your digital product - all that can be achieved by means of the UX strategy on the stage before the design and development of the digital product.
