Advanced Strategic UX Research
An Online Course with Jared Spool
Small Group Coaching
- 8 Hours Live with Jared Spool
- 8 Hours of Recorded Content
Course Topics
Strategic UX Research sets the business’ direction.
Strategic UX Research determines where to invest, and focuses the entire organization’s long-term and short-term objectives on prioritizing improved experiences.
Join our online workshop to make UX a valuable part of the organization’s strategy. During each of this course’s four weeks, you’ll cover two of the eight Strategic UX Research topics. For each topic, you’ll watch a pre-recorded lecture and join Jared in a live small-group coaching session.
The lectures are already recorded, so you can watch them in advance or join an optional “Live Watch” session with your fellow cohort members.
In each coaching session, you’ll work directly with Jared and your fellow cohort members to create a strategic UX Research plan and work through challenges that are specific to your current situation. You’ll hear how others are working through their challenges, and you’ll share what’s worked best for you.
We keep the cohorts small, so you’ll have plenty of time to be coached on how you’ll implement your strategic UX Research.
Topic 1: Win Influence with a Strategic UX Research Approach
Earn your “seat at the table” by providing top-grade user and customer insights.
It’s frustrating to know that your organization could deliver better user experiences. Everything you’ve tried has failed to make the executive stakeholders understand how UX benefits your organization’s success.
We start the week on the most important: Expanding your UX research strategy to win critical influence with your executives and your organization. They’ll now see you as a true UX leader.
- Turn your user research into an essential function that stakeholders won’t arbitrarily cut out of every project.
- Drive organizational success by establishing outcome-driven objectives.
- Build your stakeholders’ expertise and understanding of your users and customers by increasing their exposure.
- Expand the UX research maturity of your organization by upgrading your methods and approaches.
Topic 2: Deliver Better-Designed Products with a Research-Driven Roadmap
The roadmap is the pivotal place to show the value of Strategic UX Research.
All significant strategic decisions originate in your organization’s product roadmap. The roadmap determines the direction of your products and services, which determines your organization's direction. As a UX leader, the roadmap is your opportunity to have the most influence over user experiences.
Your Strategic UX Research will shape significant product decisions when you anticipate what those decisions will be. The roadmap is your essential fortune-telling device, predicting the future of every team’s work. As a result, your entire organization becomes more knowledgeable about what your users need when you read the roadmap and discern what it subtly is telling you.
- Move beyond starting each project from scratch and instead begin with an in-depth knowledge of what your users and customers need.
- Change your organization’s mindset from “we have to build a thing” to “we have to solve a customer’s problem.”
- Construct your long-term research agenda from the UX outcomes of each item currently on the roadmap.
- Add market-leading innovations to the roadmap that come directly from gaps you’ve uncovered in your users’ experiences.
Topic 3: Increase Innovation with Continuous Research
Spark a holistic shared understanding of your users' experiences.
So much of today’s user research efforts are about squeezing what you learn into refining a close-to-done feature or capability. That changes with Strategic UX Research. Now, you’ll uncover the holistic experiences of your users and customers.
Continuous research shifts everyone away from the project-by-project piecemeal nature of conventional tactical approaches. Your new strategy will drive continuous learning, making everyone more knowledgeable as your team grows its comprehension of the problems and challenges your users and customers regularly face.
- Turn every decision-maker into the world’s expert on your users and their challenges.
- Identify the inventive solutions customers will love you for.
- Be brought into the project much earlier when your stakeholders will consider the most significant and critical decisions.
- Become a trusted senior advisor that tackles the organization’s top priorities.
Topic 4: Scale Your Organization’s Research Capabilities
You can’t do this alone. You’ll need more capability across your organization.
Strategic UX Research is more than a skill or a tool to master. It’s a mindset that drives curiosity and shared understanding about your users, customers, and their needs.
You’ll infuse your organization with that mindset (and the skills and tools to make it work) and drive dramatic change. That change will speed the delivery of better-designed products and services to your customers.
- Prioritize increasing your organization's exposure to customers and users.
- Eliminate the lack of confidence caused by stakeholders not genuinely understanding your users.
- Speed up critical business decisions by having solid user research at every decision-maker’s fingertips.
- Empower those in the organization who interact with users and customers to become better researchers.
Topic 5: Convince Stakeholders of the Full Value of UX
Connect your research directly to the organization’s highest priorities.
You shouldn’t spend any more time explaining why research is essential. It’s time for action. Produce insightful results that demonstrate the rich value that Strategic UX Research brings.
You need a direct mapping between your excellent research and your executives’ critical priorities. Get the attention of key stakeholders and executives. Supply them with irrefutable, compelling reasons to sponsor your work and champion your outcomes.
- Move beyond the frustration of “nobody gets UX” when everyone sees its great value.
- Match UX outcomes directly to the language executives use, making their achievement an organizational top priority.
- Translate the key frustrations of users and customers into something executives understand: money.
- Uncover the (often massive) financial implications of delivering poor UX design.
Topic 6: What Executives Need from Strategic UX Research
Raise your influence at the executive-team level.
Every decision your executives make affects the experiences your organization delivers to your customers and users. When they make those decisions without research, they’re taking huge risks. Risks that often don’t pan out the way they’d like.
Your Strategic UX Research can reduce those risks. As you build expertise about users and their needs throughout the organization, you’re making it easier to make informed decisions. Those decisions will prioritize improving your users' and customers' lives.
- Build executive-level expertise in who your users are and what they need from your products and services.
- Become the leader your executives need you to be so they can rely on your insights to drive the organization in the right direction.
- Surface the current experiences of your users and customers so your senior stakeholders prioritize the valuable product innovations.
Topic 7: Establishing Outcome-driven UX Metrics
Integrate Strategic UX Research results into your UX measurement strategy.
For your executives to see your UX team, you must provide your executive team with UX metrics and goals. These UX metrics must show the team’s value and your contribution.
The last thing you want is for your UX team to be invisible to your executives. Fortunately, Strategic UX Research makes it easy to identify the metrics and goals your executives need.
- Connect the dots between great UX and business success when you develop metrics based on critical UX outcomes.
- Establish how great user experiences are for your organization’s success with clear and understandable UX metrics.
- Uncover how residual expenses accumulate from constantly delivering poorly designed products and services.
Topic 8: Crafting a Compelling UX Vision
Use Strategic UX Research to make your organization an innovative market leader.
An experience vision is one of the most powerful tools in your UX leaders’ toolbox. A well-crafted experience vision describes your organization's strategic long-term direction.
The vision shows everyone a crystal-clear picture of how awesome your products and services will become. You’ll demonstrate clear improvements in users' and customers' experiences.
- Use your Strategic UX Research to go beyond what competitors offer and strengthen your organization’s strategic advantage.
- Guide every product release by prioritizing a human-first approach as you move closer to achieving your vision.
- Connect your vision to the organization’s top priorities, and persuade executives to become your champion._
Ready to sign up for the Adv. Strategic UX Research Online Course?
Join one of our upcoming cohorts to dive into these eight influential topics. Jared Spool will walk with you every step of the way.