As part of my current role as the Lead UX/UI Designer, I created this strategy as a guide for the new UX Team (a new department within the company) to use for establishing UX best practices and principles. The strategy ensures a human-centred design practice that can be followed across all projects no matter how big or small and puts the end user at the centre of every design decision. In addition, the strategy became part of the 'voice of UX' across the business and was utilised as a way of promoting the UX ways of working throughout the immediate Business Change Team and throughout the company. 

The UX/UI Strategy comprises of six key stages: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test & Iterate and Quality Control & Measure. Each stage has been created following UX/UI industry standards and best practices, whilst ensuring that the business’s core values were considered throughout. Each stage has been carefully designed and specifically defined to work in tandem with the business’s ways of working model to provide a groundwork where we are focused on solving the key objective for any given design problem. 

The strategy establishes a “compare and contrast” and “empathise and research” agile and DMAIC (Lean Six Sigma) approach to make sure we are always referring to the original objective and measurable metric that keeps the team on course to solving the problem at hand.

The UX/UI strategy model puts the user at the centre of the entire process, which feeds into the first and most important stage, Empathise. The empathise stage is where we carry out all our research into any given objective and where we ‘get into the minds’ of our users so that we can understand their thoughts, pain points and successes. It ensures that we can fully understand their business motivations, goals, and values so we can draw on creating user-centric digital solutions.

This is where we start to refine the research carried out at the empathise stage by delving into and investigating our users’ needs and pain points in detail. We start to shape and form a clear picture of the primary objective and uncover problems, or opportunities associated with pain points of the users end goal. 

It is important to remember to have a ‘we are in this together’ mindset, which will help us to continually empathise with the user so that we can expertly define potential opportunities that could work towards solving the primary objective. To help us stay on track and always in the mind of the end user, we like to use a discovery process called Opportunity Solution Trees (OST), which gives us a structured agile approach to define and reach a desired outcome.

Here we progress to focusing on the most reliable opportunity that will work towards solving the primary objective and positively influence the metric. The benefit of targeting one opportunity at a time is that it enables us to brainstorm in-depth and thus generating innovative, detailed ideas allowing for deeper, more effective solutions. 

This method is far more favourable than investigating all ideas across the tree at once because by doing this, you are not reaching ‘innovative idea generation’ resulting in shallow, less meaningful solutions – depth of idea generation not breath! Any ideas not investigated in depth at this stage are not necessarily bad ideas, it just means that they will remain in the UX/UI backlog, or ‘ice-box’ for future sprints. 

It is important to remember that at the ideate stage, we are not creating high fidelity designs, but generating innovative design solutions through design thinking practices and principles.

So far, we have been focussing on solving the User Experience of the primary objective. The prototyping stage is where we venture into looking at the User Interface. We start to bring ideas to life by refining design solutions and prototyping working visuals in design software packages, such as Figma. This means following the UX research we’ve done so far and giving it a look and feel. We do this by pulling the business’s brand into designed assets and components that go together to create refined, structured pages ‘on top’ of the user flow created during the ideate stage. 

The purpose of UI is to populate and polish the UX with content and on-brand components using relevant wording, typographical hierarchy, navigation, buttons, menus, widgets, and meaningful colour to give structure and provide a refined user experience. 

During this stage we are continually validating ideas through experimentation and practice and promote empathising with the end user to work towards ensuring high-fidelity design solutions meet the desired outcomes.

This stage is vital to help eliminate any potential issues or roadblocks, identify design flaws and usability problems and ensure designs deliver the right outcomes before the development phase. 

Presenting the prototype to a wider audience, to include the end user, product owners and any other testing candidates, and asking them to use the product or feature helps the UX/UI Team to understand if the solution has in fact, solved the primary objective. It's imperative that this is done before handing over to the Development Team so we make sure that we can iterate any changes at this stage before commencing the build.

In the first instance, the UX/UI Team will carry out a quality control (QC) across the product or feature to ensure what has been built adheres to the agreed prototype and liaise with the Development and Testing Teams to rectify any issues that may arise. Secondly, the Team will measure the solution to the user outcomes post go-live against the original primary outcome and metric based on actual analytical data of the product. 

This helps us to determine the impact of the solution on the end user and if we have successfully influenced the metric associated to the results of solving the primary objective. There is no limit to this stage, as we are always looking for ways to improve our clients’ experience. We will always loop back around to the research phase when measuring outcomes to ensure solutions solve the users’ problems surrounding the primary objective.