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Blogs · Dev and Design · UX
Align Your UX Design with Business Strategy Using 3 Tips
UX or user experience design is the process of creating products that provide relevant and meaningful experiences to users. Previously known as user interface design, now it has come to refer to a design of a full range of digital touchpoints. It mediates the relationship between an individual user and the company’s products and services. Therefore, it’s important for you to know how to align your UX design with your business strategy.
It is very important to ask yourself a question like “how does your company make money?”. Yes, the answer is quite simple, your company makes money by selling products and services. But, let’s talk about what are the specific business specialties that enable your company to win out over competitors? And how can UX design impact them? If these questions are difficult to answer, then probably you haven’t been creating the best UX design align with your business strategy yet.
Finding out what makes your business unique and incorporating in into your UX design are the essence of UX strategy. It is true that a product’s UX impacts the bottom line. However, the UX team will not be able to purposefully and repeatedly make design decisions that support your company’s success unless they become aware of how exactly their designs impact your business results. They just shoot from the hip and sometimes succeed instead.
So, begin with truly understand how your company succeeds or fails. How? Ask yourself some related questions like “how are your products and services positioned in the marketplace?”, “What are your operating cost?”, “how does your pricing work?”, “what variables impact your margins?”, and many more. In addition, you also need to think about your business need’ mechanics before you can begin asking questions of more direct relevance to UX.
Another key to aligning the UX design with business strategy is by understanding your company’s business strategy. It’s best for your UX team design to incorporate the company’s business strategy into its UX design. The question “how do you start aligning UX with your company’s business direction?” is needed to be answered.
Fortunately, this answer can be found in a variety of business documents, which may include annual operating plan, marketing plan, competitive strategies, supply-chain management plan, value-chain management plan, industry analysis, to new product plans. You have to get your hands on these documents if you want to have a detailed understanding of your company’s business. Initially, these documents’ owners may resist giving them to you but this problem is worth solving.
Try to explain to the document owners that you would like to make their work count for something in UX design. You can mention how it will increase their influence across the company. You will get ongoing access to relevant documents. Yes, it won’t be easy to draw connections between business priorities and UX design decision, but you can make a connection with someone in business strategy to help you get started.
You may have known that one of the biggest problems in today’s business is how corporations seem to neglect their customers. The action to organize in a way that makes it difficult to understand and respond to customer needs and expectations worsen the problem. That’s why you need to understand your customer’s needs.
Moreover, because of the rapid growth of new social and mobile technologies, the customer’s behavior is shifting quite significantly. In-depth customer research is necessary to fully understand customers’ changing purchase behavior. However, it’s quite difficult to know how customers’ digital behavior may change in the near future. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a customer research program that looks not only at usability but also to examine the fundamental contexts.
For your information, the most common approach for representing knowledge about customers in an easy to remember format is through the creation of user archetypes, personas, or user profiles. To accommodate each of the key segments is possible by taking into account UX designers and strategies differentiating attributes. Make sure to update your personas (typically every one or two years) to get the best result.
Those are the three keys to align your UX design with your business strategies. Since business leaders begin to view UX as a key to long-term competitive advantage, it is very important for you to consider and take these three keys into action. Good luck!
