As UX design becomes ever more per­va­sive in the course of run­ning a kick-ass web­site, you need to con­tin­u­al­ly gauge just how well your UX design serves your customer’s needs. A sim­ple test is to ask three basic ques­tions: What’s your UX strat­e­gy? What spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ences are you try­ing to achieve? Just how does your UI design achieve the desired expe­ri­ences?

If your design­er can’t answer the fol­low­ing three basic ques­tions about your site design, then there’s prob­a­bly plen­ty of room for improve­ment.

What’s Your UX Strategy?

Yes, you should have a well-defined UX strat­e­gy. To be hon­est, though, it’s not real­ly a UX strat­e­gy so much as it is a design strat­e­gy.

What does a good strat­e­gy look like? It’s a defin­i­tive state­ment about what the design is intend­ed to achieve, and “to delight the user” is not a strat­e­gy. If some­one tells you his or her design objec­tive is to “delight the user,” find anoth­er design­er. Seri­ous­ly, no kid­ding.

With ProFlow­ers, our user research and analy­sis deter­mined that users didn’t want to buy spe­cif­ic flow­ers, they just need­ed the right bou­quet for a spe­cif­ic occa­sion. The design strat­e­gy for ProFlow­ers was, there­fore, defined as “ProFlow­ers doesn’t sell flow­ers, they sell occa­sions.”

Anoth­er strat­e­gy we devel­oped addressed the FedEx Online Print­ing redesign prob­lem. Soon after FedEx bought Kinko’s it became appar­ent­ly obvi­ous that the two busi­ness mod­els col­lid­ed with each oth­er. FedEx is the mod­el of stan­dard­iza­tion while Kinko’s was known as a mod­el of cus­tomiza­tion, with the mot­to of “Yes, we can.” The strat­e­gy was defined as “empow­er users to cre­ate their own print jobs.”

Those design strate­gies led to iden­ti­fy­ing spe­cif­ic user expe­ri­ence objec­tives and guid­ed all of the sub­se­quent design deci­sions. A good design strat­e­gy not only sug­gests spe­cif­ic design direc­tions, but also helps avoid adding fea­tures and func­tions that don’t fit the design strat­e­gy.

What Experience Are You Trying To Achieve?

Once you have a strat­e­gy, you need to define the spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ences or behav­iors you want to elic­it from your web­site. These will not be glob­al or gen­er­al, such as “to delight the user,” but will be more spe­cif­ic and focus on indi­vid­ual tasks.

One good expe­ri­ence to design for is to make the user feel like they found just the right prod­uct for their needs – “to remove doubt.” Such an expe­ri­ence objec­tive is focused more on the prod­uct selec­tion task, and not so much on the pur­chase task, which will have a sep­a­rate expe­ri­ence objec­tive.

In order to iden­ti­fy the cor­rect tar­get expe­ri­ences, you must first con­duct a user and task analy­sis of the var­i­ous key tasks and sub­tasks that your web­site is intend­ed to sup­port. This will enable you to iden­ti­fy spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ence objec­tives for each user type and their tasks. You can’t accu­rate­ly iden­ti­fy the desired user expe­ri­ences with­out con­duct­ing this user and task analy­sis.

How Does Your UI Achieve The Desired Experience?

Users have expe­ri­ences shaped by the world with which they inter­act. We can’t design expe­ri­ences, but we can design the user’s world to elic­it spe­cif­ic, desired expe­ri­ences.

UX design is real­ly more about elic­it­ing spe­cif­ic user behav­iors through the con­trolled pre­sen­ta­tion of inter­ac­tion objects and con­tent. Accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ing how your users will react to this man­u­fac­tured world to achieve spe­cif­ic results is the hall­mark of a good UX design­er.

For instance, a design­er might sug­gest that a spe­cif­ic set of nav­i­ga­tion and con­trols will incite users to com­plete the prod­uct selec­tion process. They should be able to cite why a left nav­i­ga­tion inter­ac­tion mod­el will prove more suc­cess­ful than a cas­cad­ed menu approach. If usabil­i­ty test­ing proves that to be the case, then the design is a suc­cess.

Summary

This approach isn’t just for UX design. These are the same kinds of ques­tions pret­ty much any oth­er design­er (mechan­i­cal engi­neer, archi­tect, etc.) would ask and answer.

• What should the design do?
• How should it do it?
• How do the design ele­ments work togeth­er, specif­i­cal­ly, to achieve the desired objec­tives?

These have been mod­i­fied to bet­ter reflect the con­cerns and objec­tives of the user expe­ri­ence design envi­ron­ment. Look at your site and ask those three ques­tions, and see where it takes you.

Is your design serv­ing your customer’s needs?