Guide
UX investment quick start guide: 4 foundational strategies to start today
- Learn four practical strategies to quickly build UX capabilities, improve customer experiences, and demonstrate measurable business value without a large budget.
Investing in exceptional user experience (UX) is no longer an option – it’s a strategic priority. Customers now expect every digital interaction to be seamless, intuitive, and delightful, whether they are streaming a show at home or using software at work. The stakes are high when these expectations are not met: 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.1
of customers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience1
The business case for UX is clear. A well-implemented UX strategy can increase conversion and retention rates, improve customer satisfaction, boost productivity, and reduce operational costs. Studies show that 8 in 10 customers are willing to pay more for a better user experience.1 Conversely, bad UX can be costly: a poorly designed internal tool caused an employee error that cost Citi $500 million.
In 6 Reasons to Invest in UX for Business Success, I outlined why UX is a strategic lever for growth, differentiation, and resilience. Once you’re convinced of its value, the next question is: Where do you start?
You don’t need a massive budget or a full design team to get started. In this article, I’ll share four practical and scalable strategies that your team can start implementing tomorrow. These foundational steps will help you build UX competency, gather early ROI data, and lay the groundwork for a more formal, user-centered practice.
1. Get to know your users
The first step in building the right product is making sure it solves the right problem for the right people. That starts with listening to your users to understand their behaviors, motivations, and pain points. This will help you make informed, evidence-based decisions early in the product lifecycle to ensure your team is solving real problems, not just building features.
What to start with:
- User research
Conduct 1:1 interviews or focus groups to explore their experiences in depth. If direct access is limited, leverage internal customer success teams with first-hand interaction with users as proxies. Complement with usability testing to uncover friction points and unmet needs as the user interacts with your product. - Personas
Synthesize your user research into 2–4 personas, which are semi-fictional representations of your users that are memorable, actionable, and distinct from one another. Each persona should include demographic details, goals and motivations, pain points, and behavioral traits. Personas help your team stay grounded in the user’s perspective and make more empathetic, aligned decisions. - User journey mapping
Map the user’s end-to-end experience to accomplish a goal. A journey map features the persona, scenario, key phases (e.g., Awareness, Consideration, Purchase), actions, thoughts, touchpoints, and pain points. This visualization is a powerful tool for aligning cross-functional teams around gaps, frustrations, and improvement opportunities.
Pro tip
Don’t wait for perfect data. Start with what you have and evolve your understanding over time. Create proto-personas based on assumptions and lightweight journey maps to align your team, then refine as you gather more data. These artifacts are not one-and-done. They are living artifacts that guide decision-making and foster shared empathy across your organization.
2. Audit your current digital experience
A UX audit helps identify usability problems, friction points, and missed opportunities in your product. It offers a quick, cost-effective way to boost your UX efforts, especially when performance is lagging but the root cause is unclear. It can help you prioritize quick wins and make a case for more substantial UX investments.
What to start with:
- Heuristic evaluation
Existing frameworks, like Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, provide established principles for assessing a product’s usability. Ideally, a UX expert conducts this process to quickly identify “low-hanging fruit” in design issues. If your team lacks in-house UX resources, the Nielsen Norman Group offers free worksheets to help you get started. - Analytics review
Use analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to monitor how users interact with your product. Look for high drop-off points, low engagement areas, or long task completion times. Combine this with user research, reviews, or support tickets for deeper insights into friction points. - Accessibility review
Inclusive design is good design. Conduct an accessibility audit using tools like WAVE or Axe to verify compliance with WCAG standards. Issues like poor color contrast, missing alt text, or navigation issues affect users with disabilities and can also have legal implications.
Pro tip
For a well-rounded audit, combine qualitative insights from heuristics evaluations with quantitative data from analytics tools to deepen your understanding of what is impacting the performance of your product and why.
3. Involve a cross-functional team in a Design Thinking workshop
You’ve gathered insights, mapped journeys, and identified usability gaps. Now it’s time to turn that knowledge into action. Organize a design thinking workshop with cross-functional teams to collaboratively explore opportunities, reframe problems, and co-create solutions that are both user-centered and aligned with business goals. Not only is this a great way to break down silos across teams and help non-design teams understand the value of UX, but it is also one of the most effective ways to build momentum from insight to action.
What to start with:
- Set a clear objective and problem statement
Start with a focused goal and a well-defined challenge. A clear objective will help participants understand the problem space and expected outcomes upfront to ensure the session stays purposeful. Frame the problem in a way that sparks curiosity but remains open-ended enough to channel their creativity towards meaningful outcomes. - Curate a diverse group of participants
Think of UX as a team effort, not just the design team’s job. Involve participants from different functional groups: business stakeholders, product teams, engineering, customer support, and, potentially, actual users. Leverage their diverse backgrounds and experiences to foster shared understanding and encourage out-of-the-box thinking. - Design an interactive, user-centered agenda
Use the five phases of design thinking—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test—as your guide. Start with user insights and journey maps, then guide the group through structured activities like “How Might We” statements, brainstorming, and rapid sketching. Keep the session interactive, time-boxed, and purpose-driven.
Pro tip
Focus on building momentum. The goal of a design thinking workshop isn’t to solve every problem or craft the final solution in one session, but to align teams on the right problems to solve and generate actionable ideas.
4. Start small with a pilot UX project
You don’t need to undertake a full-scale transformation to prove the value of UX. Focusing on applying your UX best practices to a single area of your product in a pilot allows you to experiment with minimal time and resources while gathering early results. This enables you to validate and improve your approach, show measurable results to your stakeholders, and build support to scale UX across your organization over time.
What to start with:
- Select a high-impact, low-complexity area
Identify a known area of improvement that has high user value but is manageable in scope. This may be a specific feature, like a dashboard, or a workflow, like onboarding or checkout. Your design thinking workshop may uncover prioritized areas to start. - Apply UX best practices
Leverage the insights from your user research, personas, journey mapping, and UX audit to guide your design decisions. Prototype your ideas and test with users to validate and refine your UX approach. - Define and measure outcomes
Establish clear success metrics upfront. Google’s HEART framework offers five dimensions to evaluate user experience, including task success, adoption, engagement, and user satisfaction. This will help you demonstrate the business value of investing in UX.
Pro tip
Frame your pilot as an experiment. Whether or not you succeed, you will gain valuable learnings to adjust your next approach, data to inform future investments, and exposure within the organization to build internal advocacy.
These four foundational strategies can help you develop insights and plans to start operationalizing UX in a way that is practical, measurable, and aligned with your business goals. Additionally, these tactics provide the building blocks to introduce a more empathetic, user-centered mindset that shifts your team from assumptions to insights, from silos to shared understanding, and from reactive fixes to proactive innovation.
UX maturity doesn’t happen overnight, but it does start with intention. Where will you begin?
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