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Strategic UX
| 2023 - 2024
Strategic UX: Transforming Experiences, Elevating Value
The efforts of UX designers have often focused on tactical methods, resulting in limited outcomes. However, strategic UX involves a continuous examination of the entire user experience. This approach emphasizes cross-functional collaboration to gain a deep understanding of our customers' current experiences. Ultimately, it aims to develop metrics that transform poor experiences into exceptional ones. These exceptional experiences not only benefit customers but also enhance the value of the business's products.
More customer feedback, from more places, happening and being shared more often = INCREASED VALUE
Understanding UX Maturity
It’s essential to understand where an organization stands on the UX maturity scale. Is UX functioning as a graphic design or pixel-pushing role, taking tasks on an as-needed basis? Or is it integrated within a trifecta of UX, product, and engineering leadership? This distinction is critical. While UX has been part of the trifecta, it has often lacked the ability to conduct continuous research, being limited to tactical research. Tactical research focuses on specific aspects, like usability, whereas strategic research looks at the entire user experience to gain a holistic understanding.
Gathering Comprehensive Feedback
As I started managing feedback from every touchpoint across the organization, it became clear that the feedback we collected offered only a small glimpse into our customers’ pain points. Only through deep, ongoing discussions and direct observations could we truly help our customers. Collaborating closely with customer success, product support, sales, and marketing was essential. The first step was to get to know individual contributors and build a relationship of trust.
Research was being doing across the company before I came but it wasn't being used strategically
Diagram of feedback sources, cross department collaborator and success metrics for collecting the feedback
Building Trust and Collecting Insights
Over time, I gained the trust of many in customer success, allowing them to share deep insights collected from customers and to involve me in their research. Simultaneously, I worked with stakeholders from various customer touchpoints, such as onsite visits, events, paid reviews, and product support feedback. All the data began to flow into our Dovetail research repository. We created our first customer feedback report, helping leadership clearly see where customers faced challenges and what actions to take in subsequent quarters.
Relationship building questions for increased collaboration success
Either for the better or the worse, how might you and your work be affected by the work of someone in my role?
From your perspective, what 1-3 things could a person in my role do that would be most helpful for you?
What kind of contact or communication from me(both form and frequency)might be helpful to you going forward?
Stronger interdepartmental relationships = faster and better UX throughout the company.
The circled questions to the right are listed above. I used these with leaders and individual contributors which increased our ability to do more effective research TOGETHER.
Increasing Exposure and Refining Research
Recently, the UX manager and I developed a plan to increase exposure time for the entire product organization. One by one, we paired UX, PMs, and customer success team members together to join specific calls where research was already occurring. By modifying some conversations to inquire about the customers’ current experiences, we could collect data on poor to great experiences and pin those to specific parts of a new customer journey map. We refined our questions to pinpoint specific measurements like pain level, time, and money, helping us prioritize what teams should focus on. As we release updates and continue to measure the current customer experience, we expect to see poor experiences turn into great ones, improving pain levels, time, and money spent, thereby increasing customer value. During this continuous feedback loop, we can also identify latent needs and significant improvement opportunities.
Wrapping up
So far, we have seen increased customer feedback from more touchpoint happening more often, and a greater willingness to share and learn from our customers. Our experience shows that as shared exposure time for the product organization increases, so does the user experience and the value of the products and services we create. The ongoing journey of strategic UX is about fostering these collaborations and continuously improving the experiences we deliver to our customers.
By embracing strategic UX, we can ensure that our efforts are not only effective in the short term but also build a foundation for long-lasting, exceptional user experiences that drive business success.
Credits
This project couldn’t exist without these wonderful people I collaborated with over the course of the project:
Landon Clegg
Director of Customer Success @ Vasion
Kent Besaw
VP of Customer Success @ Vasion
Dallin Bird
Director of UX @ Vasion
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