How To Build a UX Strategy That Keeps Your Customers Happy

Fenty Beauty offers more than 50 shades of its skin tints and foundations. But with so many options, finding the perfect match can feel overwhelming—especially for first-time customers. To reduce friction, Fenty Beauty’s user experience strategy guides customers with an AI-driven Foundation Shade Finder. Desktop users simply scan a QR code with their phones. From there, they use their phone camera to submit a selfie that AI analyzes to recommend a foundation. It’s elegant and intuitive, reduces decision fatigue, and removes purchase barriers.

“The purpose of UX strategy is to serve business goals by creating an experience that builds confidence and makes it easy for the visitor to accomplish your mutual goal,” says Kellie Kowalski, head of UX design at Fuel Made—an ecommerce agency that helps brands improve conversion rate, average order value, and customer lifetime value through custom Shopify design, development, and marketing.

Below, Kellie and web dev expert Mark Lewis of Netalico explain why user experience strategy matters and provide steps to build an effective UX strategy that achieves your business goals.

What is UX strategy?

UX strategy is the design direction for a website that creates an optimal experience for users and customers. It’s a comprehensive plan that blends strategic goals with design principles to ensure user needs are met. An online store’s UX should give visitors a smooth, frictionless experience—ideally guiding them to make a purchase.

“A strong UX strategy balances aesthetics with functionality, increases customer satisfaction, and ultimately boosts sales,” says Mark Lewis, founder and CEO of Netalico, an ecommerce agency that helps businesses grow through website development and design.

For example, a company looking to improve its conversion rate might implement a UX strategy that streamlines the buying process with one-click checkout and multiple payment options. Meanwhile, a business targeting a younger audience might employ a UX strategy prioritizing mobile-first design and interactivity.

4 reasons UX strategy matters

1. Improves return on investment
2. Aligns business goals with aesthetics
3. Prioritizes the user
4. Helps you scale your business

A strong UX strategy turns visitors into customers and can be crucial for small businesses with limited marketing budgets or resources. Here are four key benefits:

1. Improves return on investment

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures what you can expect to pay to acquire a new customer. You spend money on advertising to bring visitors to your online store and hope that once they get there, they buy something. The amount you spend to acquire that new customer varies dramatically. The average CAC ranges from $21 to $377, depending on the industry and business model.

“A strong UX turns that investment in getting a visitor into a return on that investment in the form of a sale,” says Kellie. So, after your advertising efforts bring visitors to your site, good UX takes the reins and converts them into customers.

2. Aligns business goals with aesthetics

“A great-looking site is important, but it’s only part of the equation. The real goal is to design a store that looks visually appealing and drives conversions,” Mark says. This is where strategy comes into play, helping you strike the right balance between aesthetics and functionality. Putting clarity over perfect design makes for easy, hassle-free shopping experiences, encouraging repeat customers.

If you’re redesigning your online clothing store’s product page, for example, you can make sizing charts and product descriptions instantly visible and easy to access. But rather than treating these elements as separate functional components, integrate them into the design and align them with your overall aesthetic vision.

3. Prioritizes the user

Kellie says a common mistake businesses make when developing a UX strategy is getting too clever with their design or designing for themselves. For example, let’s say you own a pickleball accessory store. You might want to lead with a video on your homepage about your brand story, because you spent a lot of time and money producing it. But you discover that it distracts visitors from your core offerings—affordable pickleball paddles and bags.

Instead, a good UX strategy prioritizes the user’s needs through a constant feedback loop. In asking friends and family to visit your pickleball store, you hear again and again that the video takes up so much space, they can’t figure out where to go to view the products. With this advice in mind, you iterate until the design is intuitive and visitors can easily get where they need to go. This builds confidence in the visitor that buying from you is safe, predictable, and straightforward.

4. Helps you scale your business

A good UX strategy ensures your design can grow with your business, whether through an expanded customer base or new products and services. This means you don’t need to constantly redesign your site to accommodate new offerings or other changes—instead, your site can seamlessly adapt to changing demands and business priorities.

For example, a modular website design lets you easily add new sections and features without disrupting the user experience, making it easier to scale as your business grows.

How to build a UX strategy

1. Do your research
2. Set clear goals
3. Audit the current user experience
4. Map the customer journey
5. Prioritize the mobile experience
6. Test and iterate
7. Avoid common mistakes

Kellie says a successful UX strategy combines business goals with user data, content strategy, and visual design. Here are seven steps to create yours:

1. Do your research

Research your audience to understand what drives their behavior. Audience analysis goes beyond identifying your target users—it digs into their needs, values, pain points, and buying motivations. Gather these insights through qualitative customer feedback, like surveys and focus groups, or quantitative data, like sales and website analytics.

Next, create buyer personas—semi-fictional characterizations of your ideal audience. Personas can include the following distinguishing traits:

• Name and stock photo
• Demographic details like age, gender, marital status, etc.
• Job role and industry
• Goals and challenges
• Buying motivations
• Favorite brands
• Favorite social media platforms

These buyer personas can help you design an impactful experience that speaks directly to your target customers. Making your ideal customer feel like a real person can help you keep their perspective top of mind as you iterate on your design.

You may also want to conduct competitive research to find out what your competitors are doing and identify opportunities that could differentiate your website and your brand.

2. Set clear goals

Consider your business priorities, like generating new leads, improving customer loyalty, or strengthening brand identity. Consider how you position your products or services. Are your customers price-conscious, and therefore need to see prices upfront? Or do you offer high-touch services (like legal advice) and want potential clients to reach out to you as quickly as possible for info without getting bogged down by pricing details? With your core customer in mind, you can determine how you’ll measure success.

Create objectives and key results for your UX strategy, like improving your conversion rate or repeat purchase rate. Set SMART goals to track progress. For example, your goal might be to increase your conversion rate by 30% over the next six months or to boost customer retention by 20% in the same timeframe.

3. Audit the current user experience

To improve, you need a clear baseline. Test the website experience yourself and identify any friction points—or, better yet, have someone unfamiliar with your site, like a friend or family member, walk through it and share their thoughts.

Tools like heat maps and session recordings can also reveal user behavior, such as where they click and how far they scroll, providing valuable insights into areas that are confusing or frustrating for users, and a solid starting point for comparison.

4. Map the customer journey

The customer journey is the complete path from initial brand awareness to post-purchase interactions. To understand this journey, map out the four stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, retention, highlighting your critical touchpoints at each stage. For example:

• Awareness. Content marketing, social media posts, paid search.
• Consideration. Website visits, reading reviews, engaging with comparison charts.
• Conversion. Add to carts, promo code use, completing the checkout process.
• Retention. Post-purchase follow-ups, loyalty program, new product recommendations.

By visualizing this map, you can better understand the entire experience from the perspective of potential customers and identify gaps in the journey. Do customers need more information before making a purchase? Are they having a hard time finding where to plug in their discount codes? Use a visualization tool like Miro or FigJam, to create a clear map.

5. Prioritize the mobile experience

Kellie points out that one often overlooked UX factor is mobile design. “Consider mobile UX when designing key pages, and make sure features like call-to-action buttons, navigation menus, and the cart are easy to use on mobile,” she says.

Google prioritizes mobile-first websites, so designing for mobile also ensures you secure top rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). “Your site should be optimized to all devices, looking and functioning like it was made for them,” Mark says.

6. Test and iterate

“A successful UX strategy should be fluid,” Kellie says. “Continuously iterating upon your strategy based on real-time data, testing, and customer service insights is the only way to ensure you continue to offer your customers a compelling reason to keep coming back.” 

Before rolling out major changes, test your designs with users to gauge their response. This could be done through A/B testing or asking for direct feedback on changes. Mark says to use data and customer feedback to identify design adjustments that drive higher conversions. By aligning design changes with the key performance metrics you established at the beginning of your strategy, you can refine your UX to better support your business goals.

“Every design choice should aim to make the shopping experience smoother and contribute directly to your bottom line,” Mark adds.

7. Avoid common mistakes

When visitors find your site naturally easy to use, conversion follows. Both Kellie and Mark identify common mistakes businesses make with their UX strategy. These include:

• User-neglected design. Build for your customers’ needs, not yours. Good UX is intuitive for shoppers, from features and functionality to site content.
• Non-intuitive design. Use common ecommerce design patterns, keep your language simple, and focus on design that supports the user’s goals on your site.
• Cluttered navigation. Use the “highway sign test.” Ask yourself if a label is as simple and clear as a sign designed for someone to read and understand in a split second.
• Confusing product pages. Present key details in a simple layout, prioritizing clarity above all.