3 Keys to Aligning UX with Business Strategy

2. Understand the competition.

For UX professionals, the work of competitive benchmarking is relatively easy. The user experiences of competitors’ products are publicly available and easily tracked. As soon as one company makes an innovation, others can choose whether to follow suit.

For example, my company, Retail UX, produces a quarterly UX Audit for Retailers. (A light version is available for free on our Web site.) Each audit reviews the UX features of between 30 and 100 retail Web sites. This report quickly gives UX managers and teams a window into the current state of interaction design for the retail industry.

But, alas, the real world of competition is neither that simple nor that tidy. There are two factors that make it difficult to impossible to form a complete picture of the current competitive landscape—even for a field as consistent as retail:

1. While you may know what UX features and interactions other companies have already released in their products, you are unlikely to have a clear picture of what their financial results were for any particular UX innovation.
2. It’s not always easy to know who your real competitors are. Competitive offerings can reach your customers from any company, anywhere in the world.

For example, in our last UX audit, we focused on large apparel retailers, including Nordstrom, Macy’s, Forever 21, Anthropologie, Charlotte Russe, Target, Sears, Saks, and many others. These are all well-known companies. However, while interviewing Millennial females about their favorite apparel ecommerce user experiences, we discovered some sites with which we weren’t yet familiar—such as Haute Look and Sabo Skirt and Gilt—that our interview participants had typically discovered through friends or Pinterest. Tracking the user experiences of traditional competitors is time consuming, though straightforward. But in an ever-changing market, tracking the full range of competition is a challenge that requires constant vigilance.

Of course, other UX contexts are quite different from ecommerce. Nevertheless, it is usually quite apparent what competitors offer in terms of feature sets and UX innovations. Tracking competitors’ UX innovations gives you a perspective on what to ask for in terms of resources and a rationale for asking for it. It also gives you insights into an important aspect of the playing field on which your company competes.

3. Understand the customer.

During a recent discussion in the UX Strategy and Planning group on LinkedIn, Tom Wood, founding partner of the UX consulting agency Foolproof in the UK, wrote, “The biggest problem in business today is that corporations have lost sight of their customers. They often are organised in a way that makes it difficult to understand and respond to customer needs and expectations.”

Tom is right on the money. However, just as understanding where a company’s competitors are in their UX evolution requires vigilance, so does understanding a company’s customers. Many companies have done some customer research early in their digital history, but cling to their early personas or user profiles as though they would never change. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Because of the introduction of new social and mobile technologies, customer behavior is shifting dramatically. And I expect it to change even more substantially as Millennials—people now between the ages of 18 and 29—begin their careers in large numbers, giving them money to spend.

Some companies have continued to do the in-depth customer research that is necessary to fully understand their customers’ changing purchase behaviors. However, no company knows how their customers’ digital behavior may change in the very near future—for example, the next three years. For this reason, it is imperative to develop a customer research program that looks not only at usability, but also examines the fundamental contexts and mechanics of the purchasing process, as seen through the eyes of a company’s customers. Obviously, such a research program needs to take into account the new options that continually emerge into customer awareness.

One approach to understanding new usage patterns that I’ve used—and previously written about for UXmatters—is the video diary. Video diaries are a particularly useful method of gaining an in-depth understanding of the rapidly evolving ways in which consumers use multiple, related technologies to achieve their goals.

Ethnographic research is another useful method of getting a very personal window into the life contexts and purchasing-decision processes of customers. Most companies don’t have in-house ethnographic research skills—particularly not resources who can do this research in a way that enables the research to drive UX strategy. But as companies increasingly recognize the growing need to keep up with changing customer behavior that is mediated by technology and UX design, ethnographic research skills will be in greater demand and more agencies will offer them.

If this year’s budget won’t allow you to do video diaries or ethnographic studies, the next best method of discovering new behavioral trends is doing in-depth customer interviews. If possible, interview customers in the contexts where they use the technology—whether in their homes, their offices, or in public places. If not, bring them into your company’s offices for interviews. The types of questions and exercises you should use in conducting such interviews depends on the focus of your research and the specific design problems you are trying to solve. Topics that I have found to be relevant across many UX research projects include the following:

• participant characterization
• contexts of use
• emotions and motivations
• formation of the consideration set
• barriers and opportunities
• case histories
• prioritization of features and content
• description of the ideal experience
• participatory design

Doing research using these methods should enable UX team members to become familiar with their company’s customers—in terms of their top-priority needs, their behaviors, and the traits that differentiate one market segment from another. Without this deep familiarity with customer characteristics, it would be difficult for UX teams to formulate user scenarios and experience maps that realistically portray the multichannel options and decision criteria that customers increasingly use in their day-to-day life contexts.

The most common approach for representing knowledge about customers in an easy to remember format is through the creation of personas, user archetypes, or user profiles. These represent a form of behavioral segmentation, using key user attributes or dimensions as a basis for differentiation. UX designers and strategists can accommodate each of the key segments by taking into account their differentiating attributes. Whenever customer behavior changes noticeably—typically, every one or two years—you should update your personas. And all of the various departments in a company should base their work on the same personas, so efforts to meet customer needs are in alignment across the entire business.

Conclusion

A UX team can greatly extend its impact on the company it serves by developing a deeper understanding of the company’s business strategy, what its competitors are releasing in terms of user experience, and what behaviors are characteristic of its customers. The effort that it takes for a UX team to gain this understanding pays off when business leaders begin to view user experience as a key to long-term competitive advantage rather than a cost center.