Understanding the client's business

We touched upon understanding the client's business in the first phase of the UX process. This is essential for the UX strategy; we have to understand how our design can impact our client's business results.

To do that, we should obtain answers to questions such as:

• Where is the client positioned on the marketplace?
• Where will their product be positioned on the marketplace?
• What is the cost of operating? What can impact their product?
• What is the competitor doing, more or less, that is different than us? What does the customer value in our competitors' products?
• What changes are we going to make with this product, and how will this help our customers?
• How can we achieve a steady rise in customers?

Also, we should obtain answers to the technical side of the questions, as follows:

• How do the technologies that we will use to create this digital product drive our customers' attention?
• How will our design of this digital product grab the attention of customers?
• What can we design better, or which feature can we add to make life easier for our customers in comparison with our competitors' products?
• What kind of promotional approach can our marketing team use for our product?

In many cases, if the UX leaders do not have answers to these kinds of questions, or, even worse, they don't ask these kinds of questions at the beginning of project, then we have a problem–not just us as a UX team but also the product itself can get stuck in an endless cycle of creating one user interface design after another, for which they will provide the design by guesswork without having done the proper research.

When this happens, you can refer to the story that I mentioned in the preceding section–in the end, he failed because he didn't have a product strategy and didn't do research to check whether his idea was worth his time.

So, the question now is, how do we align the UX design with our company's or client's company's business strategy?

Well first we will need to have some kind of information, or, better, documents that will help us to have a clear understanding of the company business strategy:

• Annual operating plan
• Marketing plan
• New product plans
• Strategic-gap analysis
• Sales projections
• Supply-management plan and value-management plan
• Competitive analysis and strategies
• Industry analysis

The hardest part is getting access to all these documents. The owners of these documents will complain or may resist giving you or any UX team access to them, and they will have more questions regarding the use of these documents for the UX of the product. However, these are good resources for a problem that is worth solving. We, as UX professionals, have to explain to them that having access to these kinds of document will help us to improve our UX process and in producing the final product.

Usually, this part is hard at the beginning, but once the owner gets involved with us by meeting several times, they start to understand the value that they are providing and later may start inviting you to participate with them as a collaborator rather than just a consumer of the information. When you arrive at this stage, you can be sure that you have arrived really close to the goal of aligning the UX design with the business strategy.

After achieving the alignment of the UX design with the business strategy, for us as a UX team, the company vision will be really clear. The next step for us is to convert the resources that we collected and that company vision that we understood into a reality.

Now that we have made the connection between the business strategy and our UX road map, it will be easy for us to get people's attention and our UX strategy plan will be clearer.