Original post: https://medium.com/@Chia_Tea/what-i-learn-in-the-progress-of-creating-ux-strategy-fb74e9676d21

This is my 2nd story on Medium and mainly I want to share with you how I finally came up with UX strategy document. For now I only have structure and this article is for entry level UX designer such as me.

Couple weeks ago, I got a task assigned to me for creating UX strategy. To be honest, it was very abstract for me. My background is actually more like a visual designer, I had some experiences on create wireframe, prototype and of course, usability testing. As everyone will do, I went on google and search keyword with “UX strategy”+ “template”+”method”+”how to”…etc. I even went on slideshare to see others’ examples. There was at least 3 days of just searching other people’s idea, methodology. After all these, I kinda get the idea, but how, I was not so sure.

I started breakdown few buckets from what I read and found, here is the chart. I love using chart or diagram, it really helps you form the ideas to a plan.

As shown above, there are 7 main buckets we should look at.
The company. You as UX designer, should have deep understanding of the company. What are the goal for this product, how do company represent themselves in the market.
The User. I don’t need to mention much for this buckets, because it’s the main core.
The Product. This bucket should contain all strategy of making this product along with what you found from the users. It should also include some technical part such as information architecture, experience map…etc.
The Market. This is not just analyze what your competitor do, we should also consider what indirect competitor handle certain situation. If someone is doing amazing job, we should follow the direction.
The Activities. Such as interview users, research users, stakeholder interview…etc. We should include brief approach on how to handle these activities.

I will skip about the rest of 2 buckets for now. After I drafted down this chart and our awesome development director gave me some great inputs. One of points has said it all; UX Strategy is to summarizes how we are going to get there. From this point, my understood is UX strategy basically outline high-level of information about how do you approach those sub-tasks and document it. It should include things like, if you need to do wireframes or prototypes, how will you do it? What’s your workflow among of all these items?

It’s also very important to share this document with your dev. team so everyone has clear picture, you should consider this document is central information hub of creating the product for Users.

However, I might be wrong and I’m still learning. Since I spent lots of time looking for how other people will do, and if there is template out there. My director also helped me to search more info. I’d like to share what the document tree looks like at this point. I’m sure that I will need to update from time to time, but I hope you will find this helpful.

Oh, I forgot to mention “The Design” , this is again just summarize what’s your workflow and document the necessary items such as style guide, patterns…etc.

If you have any question regarding the document, please write your question in the comment. I hope you find this article useful.

Thanks for reading!