UX strategy and management

Creating a UX strategy for your projects and organizations

A good UX Strategy will serve as a guideline for your business activities and impact how your website is developed, the amount of sales it generates, and many other factors. Not every organization needs a full-time UX Manager, but can still benefit greatly from adapting user-centric principles by bringing in external UX management. You can hire me and ensure that, like every effective organization operating online, yours will have the following:

• UX strategy - In short, an overall concept about how your organization deals with user-centric design and research, existing both as a general document and a set of guidelines. Don't think about it only as a static document, though - a good UX Strategy, as delivered by an experienced UX Manager - is an effort in stakeholder management. Key elements need to be tailored to the particular groups and teams, with presentations tailored for each. By hiring me, you ensure key stakeholders in your company receive not only an overall idea about the strategy they need to follow in regards to user experience, but also that it's delivered in a form best suited for them - a UX strategy will mean something different for your IT team, but it'll at the same time mean something else your marketing department. Let me help you in ensuring that your strategy is comprehensive and delivered efficiently to everyone that benefits from it.
• User journeys are flows that show how users perform the tasks they want or need to perform on your website, the goals they need to achieve, metrics associated with measuring how well these goals have been achieved, emotions that people feel at a given journey stage and potential improvements. While this is a basic outline, note that every organization should have a unique user journey map, with custom metrics. While you can create a hypothetical user journey you'll strive your users to go through, ideally, with the help of user research - a service I also provide - it needs to be user-driven and based on real-life examples.
• Personas - in an ideal world, to have the best grounding for your design decisions, you'd need one hundred percent of information about every user, one hundred percent of the time. Since that's impossible, and quantitative research alone is expensive and time-intensive, personas are additionally used. These qualitative profiles (based both on assumptions and facts) represent major user groups, and their associated goals and behaviors. As with User journeys, these should be made mostly based on user research, but an initial set can be prepared based on your future plans, capabilities, goals and assumptions. Want to know more? I can also train your organization on this topic!
• Jobs-to-be-done - often considered to be mutually exclusive with personas, jobs-to-be-done offer an alternative approach to creating templates of people's behaviors. Ideally, every organization should invest in both jobs-to-be-done, and personas. A good list of jobs that people perform or need to perform for you on your website serves as an excellent guideline for both ongoing design work and research - both qualitative and quantitative. Good UX Managers will help you in not only creating a strong list of jobs-to-be-done, but also ensuring they're communicated and executed properly within your organization.
• Design systems and pattern libraries - having a set of design elements in the form of a library and associated guidelines on using them reduces costs and time spent on future design work. As organizations mature, with personnel turnovers, certain knowledge and assets disappear. Instead of training every new developer and designer from scratch, you can depend on a pattern library - a toolbox, if you will - that contain the building blocks of your website. Paired with a design system - an instruction on how to use the elements of the pattern library together - you will increase your organization's design efficiency. I will help you in identifying what sort of a design system and pattern library your organization needs and create it for you.
• Metrics and research strategy - as your UX Manager, I will support you in identifying the qualitative and quantitative metrics your organization needs to monitor to know what design decision to take next. There are multiple quantitative metrics you can follow, but having a suite of indicators custom-tailored to your organization is the only way to make sense of the noise. Additionally, on the qualitative front - UX research - your organization should follow a research cycle that reflects your product's and development cycle's level of complexity. You should also make sure your projects benefit from proper feedback gathering methods - something I will help you with, too.
• Project management - sometimes connecting UX to other teams and activities feels like pushing a square peg through a round hole. Good UX Managers will not only bat for their teams and represent designers' work to key stakeholders, but will ensure the design and research teams themselves follow ceremonies and work methodologies based on Agile principles, that guarantee efficiency and quality. Work with a UX Manager who has seen multiple projects through as a UX project manager, with multiple and varied teams.

Why I'm good at UX strategy and management!

I've worked in the area of user experience for over a decade, and been on a journey starting in UX design, through UX research, all the way to project management focused on user experience. I've worked in multiple countries, for organization both big and small, with audiences ranging from global to local. I'm passionate about UX and now offer my services as a freelancer. Get in touch with me and let's talk!

Various considerations about hiring a freelance UX Manager

The list above is a general description of the multiple areas that an experienced UX Manager such as myself can help you with. It isn't, however, exclusive and should be considered to be a conversation starter. User experience has many facets, and every industry is characterized by unique considerations stemming from both the type of business and audience. Remember to get in touch and we'll figure out together what you need exactly to benefit best.

Further reading about UX Management

Just what is a UX manager?