User Experience Strategy

The experience design process.

Establishing an experience design process enables a targeted focus on addressing challenges, rather than grappling with the approach itself.

As human behavior evolves, maintaining alignment with strategic goals requires an ongoing effort to identify issues and uncover opportunities. The experience design process consists of structured steps that facilitate observation, inquiry, and insight through data, testing, and experimentation. The following outline is not exhaustive but is intended to provide a high-level understanding of a systematic approach to design problem-solving.

Strategy

The foundation of any effective experience design process is a well-defined strategy. Developing this strategy begins with identifying and analyzing business opportunities. Through investigation and discovery, you thoroughly assess challenges before formulating a research approach or conceptualizing design solutions or prototypes.

In the strategy phase, you address essential questions such as:

  • What problem(s) are we aiming to solve?

  • Who is our target audience?

  • What outcomes do we want to drive?

  • What is the desired end state?

This strategic process establishes a structured framework for the project, grounded in business alignment, data insights, audience validation, and defined success metrics.

  • Workshops

    Workshops, conducted either in-person or virtually, facilitate in-depth discussions with key stakeholders on business and audience objectives, goals, and challenges. These sessions enable the documentation of essential features and requirements for a minimum viable product.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Business and Audience Insights
    • Goals, Objectives, and KPIs
    • Initial Requirements

  • Experience Audit

    The audit process leverages experience design expertise, industry best practices, data, and insights to analyze key factors impacting product value. This includes evaluating how users discover your brand, their perceptions, and their overall experience within your system.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Brand, UX/UI, Content, and SEO Audit
    • Content Inventory and Strategy
    • Competitive Analysis

  • Stakeholder Interviews

    Focused discussions or research sessions with internal and external client stakeholders, as well as sample users, are often essential to clarify and define product objectives, goals, and requirements.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Surveys, Focus Groups, Interviews
    • Card Sorting, Tree Testing
    • Usability Testing

  • Personas and Journeys

    These foundational artifacts are invaluable for both design teams and client stakeholders, providing a clear visualization of target audiences and illustrating how users might interact with your product to accomplish tasks.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • User Personas
    • Customer Experience Mapping
    • User Journey Mapping

  • Requirements

    Project requirements are meticulously documented, outlining critical details necessary to achieve the project’s goals (e.g., specific features and functionalities such as video player capabilities). Each requirement is prioritized, assessed for complexity, and organized into distinct phases for project implementation.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Final Goals, Objectives, and KPIs
    • User and Technical Backlog
    • Finalized Technical Approach

Design

The design phase involves structuring content and translating concepts into visual elements. Whether for a website or an app, thorough documentation, management, and migration of content are essential for success. Every component—from blog articles to app microcopy—contributes to a cohesive system that demands careful attention. This phase is also an ideal opportunity to test concepts for architecture, user flows, and designs. Early and frequent testing, even internally, leads to significantly improved outcomes.

Additionally, no large-scale site or app can be developed without a well-organized and documented design system to ensure consistency and scalability.

  • Content Design

    Content strategists leverage data and insights about target audiences to deliver relevant information at the right time and in expected formats. Effective content is crucial, often determining the success of the entire experience.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Content Outlines
    • Content Attributes, Types, and Modeling
    • Taxonomy Documentation

  • Architecture

    I develop structured sketches that bridge a product’s information architecture with its visual design, illustrating page pathways, content placement, and the integration of intended functionalities within the interface.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Rough Blocking
    • Wireframes
    • Desktop and Mobile Templates
    • Mobile Design

  • Prototype and Testing

    Early-stage prototyping enables design teams to validate concepts and ideas with stakeholders prior to initiating visual design and development, ensuring alignment and reducing potential revisions.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • High-Fidelity Prototype Concepts
    • Remote User Testing
    • One-on-One Moderated Testing

  •  UX Content Design

    UX Writers craft precise microcopy that guides user interactions within digital products, while Content Writers produce engaging short- and long-form content that meets audience needs and motivates action.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Copy Editing and Content Creation
    • Brand Voice and Tone, Writing Style Samples
    • Documentation, Articles, Blogs, White Papers, FAQs

  • Visual Design (UI)

    Our design team develops a digital product and brand experience that is distinctive yet intuitive, ensuring accessibility, consistency, and predictability to empower users to complete tasks seamlessly and efficiently.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Art Direction
    • Digital Asset Creation
    • Detailed Interface Design Compositions

  • Design Systems

    A cohesive, interconnected framework of interactive components and guidelines, serving as a single source of truth that enables design teams to operate effectively at scale.

    Actions and Deliverables
    • Tokens and Guidelines
    • Atomic Components
    • Patterns and Templates

Build

As the experience transitions to the build phase, the experience designer’s role shifts to a supportive capacity. During this phase, we focus on organizing design assets for scrum processes, coordinating closely with development teams, performing Visual Quality Assurance (VQA), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), content migration, and comprehensive platform functionality testing (QA). While the intensity of design work may decrease, continued involvement is essential to ensure alignment and quality throughout the build process.

  • Digital Style System

    A centralized repository for components, design patterns, coding standards, and documentation that automatically updates as the codebase evolves. This ensures that design and development teams have access to current site components, enhancing consistency and overall product quality.

  • Authoring Guide

    For scalable platforms, a comprehensive authoring guide is essential for content creation and management. This guide defines user roles, provides system navigation guidance, and outlines best practices for the content creation process.

  • UAT and QA

    In this phase, we conduct a thorough audit of all site functionality against established requirements, encompassing development, design, and SEO quality assurance across both mobile and desktop devices. This stage involves rigorous testing to identify any issues, intentionally “stress-testing” the site to ensure robustness and reliability.

  • Content Migration

    Each product build introduces new content and refines existing material. In this phase, a comprehensive content migration and authoring plan is developed to ensure all pages are constructed as intended, preserving page integrity throughout any moving, migrating, or modification processes.

Growth

In the growth phase, we continuously assess performance metrics and enhance features and functionality to advance strategic goals. Known as “growth design,” this stage leverages design as a driver for business and product expansion. It requires a deeper integration of experience design with business strategy, moving beyond the individual project or product to evaluate the broader ecosystem. Before initiating any design enhancements, we rigorously consider:

  • Do we have clear customer insights that confirm the problem and desired outcomes?

  • Is there sufficient potential to drive business value?

  • Have we identified the critical factors that will influence success?

  • Is there a validation strategy in place to test our assumptions?

  • Are success metrics clearly defined, with a plan to monitor and track progress?

  • A/B and Multivariate Testing

    Driving incremental value post-launch relies on structured hypothesis development followed by rigorous testing and validation of ideas. Our team supports the fullxtesting lifecycle, from ideation to analysis and implementation of successful variants, ensuring continuous optimization of the user experience.

  • Experience Enhancements

    As your strategic partner, we will create a content management plan designed to optimize the user experience in alignment with your objectives. This includes identifying opportunities to refresh, update, or remove content in response to shifts in user behavior, the business landscape, or new product and service launches.

  • Site Monitoring and Intercepts

    Continuous monitoring of system health and maintenance is essential for sustaining a high-performance, seamless user experience. Tools such as Checkly, FullStory, and UserTesting not only track uptime but also provide deeper insights through larger sample-size studies, allowing for the discovery of valuable user insights and validation of learnings. This ongoing process is critical to delivering user value and ensuring that the system functions as intended.