Creating A UX Strategy Your Boss and Users Both Love

A user experience (UX) strategy is a detailed plan that outlines how you can achieve a specific vision for your customers’ user experience. 

That’s one part of a UX strategy, anyway. The second part is making sure to align that user experience with your brand and use it to help achieve business goals. 

Both sides of a UX strategy are critically important. Many teams make the mistake of creating a one-sided UX strategy that’s all about the end user’s needs. When this is the singular focus, there’s a failure to connect those needs with the needs and goals of your organization.

As a result, the actions you take to improve UX don’t translate to progress in the business. Ouch! 

The good news is that you can create a UX strategy that does both. AKA, one that meets the users’ needs and your organization’s business goals. This approach appeases both users and your boss. Win-win.

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

How to Create a UX Strategy That Your Boss and Users Will Both Love

A UX strategy has three components: Vision, Goals, and Plan. 

The key to creating a UX strategy that suits everyone is to make sure you address each component from two perspectives: 

• The user side. Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and view everything from their perspective.
• The business side. Step into your boss’s shiny, expensive shoes and think about every detail from that perspective. 

We’ll walk you through the process of creating a winning UX strategy with both these important perspectives in central focus. 

Let’s get started! 

Step 1: Define Your Vision

This step is all about defining where you want to go with your UX strategy, and why you want to go there. 

Think big, here. For example, let’s say you’re tasked with creating an app that connects teachers, school staff, and parents.

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

What to Address on the User Side

We’re using an education app as an example, but you can apply these steps to any type of app, website, or product. 

First, check to see if there’s already something similar on the market. There probably is. But it’s also probably likely that your app could go further or do more than what’s already out there. 

Take education-related apps, for example. Yes, there are already apps out there that connect schools and parents, but is there one app that does everything?

There is not. At least, not one that I know of. As a parent of an elementary school student, I must stay on top of: 

• ClassDojo for communication with my child’s teachers
• Pikmykid for setting my kid’s daily dismissal instructions
• ParentVue for saying whether my kid will be absent/tardy and for looking up their grades
• Google Classroom for homework assignments
• Facebook for updates on the school’s parent-communication group and official page
• Google Sheets for signing up to bring food on class potlucks/scheduling slots for parent-teacher conferences
• Email for newsletters and communication from the school administration

This is pretty typical. And it’s also a lot.

Granted, a lot of stuff is crossposted on multiple platforms because not every parent uses [insert name of app/email function/social media platform here]. 

But these are too many different app logins/updates/idiosyncracies to keep track of. To make things even more exciting, the school might change from one app or communication method to another at any point. 

Oh, you just got used to managing dismissals and attendance on the good ol’ School Dismissal Manager app? they’ll say. 

Let’s switch to Pikmykid, where you can only set dismissal procedures. For attendance, head over to ParentVue, the app you’re already using to check your kid’s grades!  

Never mind that it’s almost impossible to mark your kid as tardy or absent on ParentVue. It was so easy on the School Dismissal Manager app! You find yourself longing for the old days, but according to the school, they’re gone forever. 

Cue the sighs. 

So if you were creating an app to replace all or most of these functions, your vision for users could be to build an app that:

• Lets teachers share grades with parents and older students
• Facilitates easy scheduling of parent-teacher conferences
• Tracks homework assignments from both the parent and student side
• Maintains attendance records from the admin, teacher, and parent side
• Manages dismissal procedures from the parent side
• Keeps the community updated about events with a built-in social feed á la Facebook
• Allows secure messaging between any group of adults—teachers and parents, teachers and teachers, admin and teachers, admin and parents, and so on
• Comes with a built-in function to share aesthetically pleasing and informative newsletters with the school community

To top it all off, you want users to navigate the product easily, find what they’re looking for, and return often for the content and resources they need.

For your app or product, come up with your own list of dream capabilities and features for users.

Then, consider them from the business side.

What to Address on the Business Side 

From the business perspective, your boss will want to know how the app will please users and earn money. 

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

Start by identifying the market demand and any differentiators your app will have. Research the competition to see which gaps your app can fill, like:

• Combining multiple functionalities into one platform
• Offering better usability
• Delivering the best-ever customer support
• All of the above

In our pretend educational app, for instance, we could highlight how we’re combining 8 functions into one app—something no other product does. 

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

Calculate the pricing to balance the two most important factors: affordability for schools vs. profitability for your company. 

Think about offering additional features, partnerships, or integrations to create additional revenue streams. This is what ClassDojo does. Every time I try to mark a message as “urgent” or see my child’s “memories” from previous school years, ClassDojo reminds me that I need to upgrade to a paid monthly plan to access those.

Since I don’t really need those features, I have yet to sign up. I don’t really want or need any of the other features either, like the online tutoring for my kid I could get if I upgraded. So if you go this route, make sure the features strike a balance between limiting the app’s functionality and offering features your users actually want.

Next, plan for scalability. Your app should accommodate the needs of small schools as well as large districts, with flexible pricing tiers and features. Scalability also means making sure the app’s technical infrastructure can handle growth, including a robust backend and strong, reliable customer support.

Your marketing and sales strategy is equally important. Outline a marketing plan you can show to your boss that: 

• Highlights your app’s unique features 
• Shows how you’ll send targeted campaigns to attract users (ie, schools, administrators, and parents for our pretend app) 
• Demonstrates your team’s ability to build relationships with decision-makers through demos, testimonials, and case studies that demonstrate the app’s value

Step 2: Outline Your Goals 

Now that you have a vision, you need to break it down into specific goals that illustrate you’re achieving what you set out to do. 

Here’s what to consider from the user and business perspectives. 

What to Address on the User Side

For the user experience, you’ll want 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 combos might be to:

• Lessen the time it takes parents and teachers to report absences by 30% by creating a one-tap attendance reporting feature that integrates with school records.
• Drive homework completion rates up by 15% by introducing a feature for tracking assignments, due dates, and missed work from one intuitive dashboard.

If you’re building a UX strategy for a product that already exists, you might choose these goals and KPIs:

• Lower the error rate to less than 10% by spotting and fixing technical issues that are causing task failures (and costly frustrations!) on the user end.
• Shorten the time it takes for users to complete tasks by 20% by simplifying navigation and getting rid of (or combining) any superfluous steps.
• Get your user satisfaction scores to 85% or higher by combing through user feedback, identifying common frustrations, and fixing them. 

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

What to Address on the Business Side

Once your UX goals are clear, it’s time to align them with business objectives. 

Each UX goal should contribute to measurable business outcomes. 

For example, for our faux new education app, an objective could be to:

• Start off strong with a customer retention rate of 40% by offering schools a personalized onboarding experience and dedicated support to help them fully use all the app’s features.

An existing app, product, or service might focus on:

• Increasing subscription revenue by 20% by introducing a premium tier that has advanced features, like analytics and integrations.
• Bringing in 25% more daily active users (DAU) by using push notifications, rewards systems, or gamified interactions to make your app fun to use.
• Expanding your market share by 10% by targeting new demographics.

This brings us to our final step: making a plan to get your feet on the ground and turn your goals—and therefore your vision—into reality.

Step 3: Plan Your Approach

Planning is all about mapping out the actions you and your team will take to achieve the goals you set up in Step 2. When these goals are achieved, you’ll be able to measure them against your vision to see if they stack up—or if your vision, goals, and planning might need adjusting. 

What to Address on the User Side

Setting up a plan is pretty simple. All you need to do is look at your goal and KPI combos and identify tools to help you make them happen. 

For example, one of the goal/KPI combos for our mock educational app is to lessen the time it takes teachers to report absences by 30%. 

We could make this goal happen by conducting usability testing with existing, clunky competitor apps (looking at you, ParentVue!) and comparing those results to our app or prototype. If our app isn’t significantly better for users, we could rework it and retest it until it is. 

In the same vein, if we wanted to lower the error rate on an existing app to less than 10%, we could implement a tool like Sentry or BugSnag to detect, monitor, and analyze errors in real-time.

Tools like these tools would give us detailed insights into where errors occur, what causes them, and how they impact the user experience. 

With that information, we could fix the errors and lower our error rate. 

What to Address on the Business Side

For this step, look at the business goals you identified in Step 2. Then ask yourself this: “What actions do I need to take internally to support building the ideal UX and achieving my business’s goals?”

An objective for our pretend app was to start off with a bang—a customer retention rate of 40%. 

How would we achieve this? 

By making sure we have an IT-savvy customer service team ready to offer training and fast, efficient help if our users need it. 

For a more general goal that could apply to any app or service—like bringing in 25% more daily active users—we could make sure to hire a UX designer and director with a track record that lines up with our goals.