How to Create a Winning UX Design Strategy
Let’s put ourselves in the user’s shoes. Imagine entering a website that genuinely interests you and then waiting more than 10 seconds for it to load.
Or, even if the website loads quickly, imagine struggling to find your way around it because you can’t understand how the navigation works.
Does this seem like a website that you’d willingly visit again or recommend to your friends/family? Not really.
This is all due to the poor user experience design. As you witness it yourself, UX means a lot and can differentiate upping and losing sales.
Regardless of the device used to access the site, users will always want a smooth experience.
If your goal is to improve your conversion rate, you have to create a winning user experience design strategy.
Follow the methods listed down below to do exactly that.
Match your design and business goals
Before you venture into the world of UX design and current trends, it’s vital to assess your business goals.
When you know what you want to achieve for your brand, you can set the goals for your UX design plan easier to support your business goals properly.
After all, there are many different web design trends, but trying to follow all of them won’t necessarily work for your company, niche, and target audience.
Invest in a UX design strategy that will enhance your brand’s image and message.
Just like your other marketing strategies support your business, so should this one.
And when you have clear UX design goals to focus on, you’ll automatically set your team in the right direction, maximise their productivity and ultimately end up with a functional, visually appealing, and smooth user experience that boosts ROI.
Refine UX design with target audience research
As the name suggests, user experience should make them stay on your website pleasant, valuable, and informative for the users.
Once you’re done with setting your goals, it’s essential to delve deeper into the questions of who, why, when, what, and how to access your website.
To get the information you need to improve your UX design strategy, gather as much data as possible about your target audience.
Their online behaviour, demographics, likes, dislikes, and so on will all come in handy when building a website that will appeal to them.
Come up with different user scenarios
Now that you have both your goals and research information available, it’s time to create different user scenarios.
The mentioned research results will allow you to pinpoint your target users and develop an ideal user persona for your website and business.
And with the creation of a user persona, the next step in your winning UX design strategy should be to create probable use cases and user scenarios.
This will make room for forming clear user stories that focus on the different needs of different users.
When you have all that information at your disposal, it becomes simpler to evaluate the actual user interaction with your UX design.
Start by sketching out your UX design prototypes
So far, we have dealt with the idea of user experience design that works for your brand and target audience, but now is the time to start actively working on it.
Stick to the old-fashioned pen and paper for this first stage. With the information you have gathered, it would be the most efficient to create a sketch of the most logical design structure.
These sketches will serve as the wireframes of your actual UX designs, especially regarding overall functionality and usability.
There will be much refining from this point on, but you have to start somewhere, and it’s best to have physical prototypes to work on afterwards.
Usability should always come first
True, a website design needs to be eye-catching and support your brand’s visual identity, but it’s even more critical for it to be user-friendly.
If it isn’t, there will be no point and no benefit to it being visually appealing. Therefore, make sure to move to the next stage of your UX design strategy with usability in mind.
Think about how you’re going to arrange different elements on your website and the navigation of it all.
The key here is to make your website accessible and usable so that it keeps the users engaged.
Only once you’re satisfied with the usability should you incorporate the actual visuals.
Stay involved in the design process
There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to website design.
Different businesses and industries can benefit from different design trends, not to mention that every web designer has a unique design style.
Ensure to talk to your design team and keep the communication lines open to deliver the best UX design strategy.
Regardless of whether they’re using a library of UI patterns, style guides and mood boards for inspiration, remember to stay involved and further guide their creative process.
Keep in mind that responsiveness has to be a part of your UX design strategy if you want it to win you more sales and revenue.
Put your UX design through appropriate tests
Once you have your UX design that looks and feels how it would benefit your business and target audience, it’s time to test it.
Testing it will let you see whether everything’s working the way it should.
Aside from the functionality tests, don’t forget about the importance of user testing either.
There are plenty of tools that incorporate A/B testing and surveys so that you can get valuable user feedback that will help you further refine your UX design strategy and meet user expectations better.
Conclusion
To put it simply, UX design is not just about the visual aspect of your website but the perceived user experience as well.
To nail your UX design strategy, you’ll have to pinpoint the gaps, note the user needs and experiment with potential solutions.
You may even fail a couple of times. And that’s fine as long as you always try to create something that will resonate with your target audience and make their UX journey smooth and seamless.
Author Bio: Lindsey Allard is the CEO of PlaybookUX, a video-based user feedback software. After seeing how time-consuming and expensive gathering feedback was, Lindsey made it her goal to create a solution to streamline the user feedback process.
