This is Part 2 of the complete UI/UX Playbook. With the foundational principles in place, the next focus area is strategy: the activities carried out to understand and validate the expectations and behaviours of users and user groups. A simple truth anchors this entire part — UX without user research isn’t UX.
The Components of a UX Strategy
A UX strategy is the action plan an organisation designs to move its user experience to a better future state over a defined period. It has three core components.
- Vision. To plan how to reach a goal, you first have to know where you’re going and why. Quantitative and qualitative analysis methods can be used to gain the insights that inform the vision. A strategic intent and positioning is the result of solving a few core problems for many users, or meeting the broad needs of many customers within a narrow area of activity.
- KPIs. Once you know where and why you’re going, you need a way to measure progress. Metrics and key performance indicators tie UX improvements directly to the business plan.
- Plan. Reaching goals requires a plan. Each goal sits under its own heading and is made of smaller plans that address it. Plans should describe, not prescribe — they include the path you’ll follow, how you’ll know if you’re making progress, and what level the UX should reach in future, where, and why.
A plan should also account for the focus areas in the user experience, approximate timing, preconditions and dependencies, and the components that might be included. (This structure draws on the Nielsen Norman Group’s work on UX strategy.)
Defining Your MVP
The purpose of a Minimum Viable Product is to create the highest return from a product while minimising risk. Critically, this does not mean falling behind on design and scope to produce a low-quality application. As the saying goes — quoted in the original playbook from Peter Lewis of the NY Times — “Easy is Hard.” Genuine simplicity takes real effort.
An MVP is an opportunity to engage with real target users and start building a user community. This approach removes the individual point of view from the process and creates opportunities for continuous improvement — you develop with users, which raises your chance of success. To define an MVP’s features, it’s essential to understand the target user’s triggering motivations, the actions they want to take, what they feel through the technology, and the outcomes they perceive as rewards.
Practical tips for building an MVP: establish a mission and vision and a roadmap to align the team; prefer working in small categorised groups over large ones; define the product’s core features and design a user flow around them; separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves; don’t get lost in detail or inflate features — stay simple; build and test simple prototypes of the most basic features; and define a QA system to make sure it works well.
Understanding the User
It’s important to understand the contrast between “what people say” and “what people do,” measured across a spectrum of qualitative (descriptive) and quantitative (statistical) data. Different types of user research produce rich contextual information that lets us genuinely “stand in the user’s shoes.” (The Nielsen Norman Group’s framework on which UX research methods to use is the classic reference here.)
The key benefits of user research: you identify user needs not yet encountered; you test market demand for products that don’t yet exist; you look at the problem space holistically; and you uncover opportunities for competitive differentiation. Typical outputs include personas, journey mapping, user stories, and user flows & DoGo maps — all covered in detail in Part 5 of the playbook.
Content Strategy
“Speak the user’s language.” Plan a content strategy for the creation, publishing, and management of useful, usable content. Everything that carries meaning is content — it’s a combination of visuals, language, and data, not just copywriting. A good user experience can only be achieved with a good content strategy.
There’s an important relationship with information architecture: IA is the organisational side of where content exists, while content strategy plans when and how it exists. Content strategy defines workflows and tasks — including permissions and approvals — for how users should create content day to day, and it shapes the tone of communication while setting content policy and standardisation.
A simple example from the original playbook: deciding what belongs on a school website’s homepage — the school’s full name, a virtual tour, alumni news, the principal’s message, campus events, online course information, announcements, department numbers, the campus address, application forms, the academic calendar, course listings and fees, transport and parking information, a campus map, a campus photo slideshow. Content strategy is the discipline of deciding what users actually need to see, then planning how and when it appears.
Usability Testing
Usability testing methods span a spectrum from finding the right users to drawing conclusions from large data sets.
- Finding and screening the right users. Identify the different user groups that use the system and make sure your testers represent them — testers should resemble your user personas. Include internal staff only if they’re familiar with the project and represent a target audience. Repeated tests should use fresh groups and users each time.
- Qualitative tests (a few representative users). Build a prototype and test with a community of 5–20 users to gather insights for rapid improvement: usability testing in a lab, remote usability testing, interviews and focus groups, eye tracking, ethnography, concept testing.
- Quantitative tests (many users). Tests with 100+ users, analysing metrics like click behaviour, feedback forms, A/B testing, and user flows: card sorting and navigation testing, virtual click testing, feedback forms, heat maps and analytics, A/B testing, surveys.
- Analysing the findings. Results are captured and analysed across all users, accounting for different user biases and characteristics — producing insights, analysis, and recommendations.
Strategy Summary
Keep your MVP simple and at its most basic scale — aim to skateboard before you design a car. Use the most appropriate research and testing methodologies to understand users, and mix qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the gap between what users say and do. Pay attention to the experience the user desires, and listen to users often to define the product. Validate the experience early and frequently with target user groups. And don’t leave content strategy until later — plan it as early as possible, together with the right information architecture.
Previous: ← Part 1 — UX Principles · Next: Part 3 — UI Tactics →
Part of the complete UI/UX Playbook, developed and authored by Gökhan Meriç. Get in touch.