I once had a client—a mid-sized WooCommerce shop owner—who came to me with a set of “revolutionary” mockups. They looked like something straight out of a Dribbble showcase. Clean, minimal, the works. He wanted me to build it immediately. I looked at the Figma files and asked one simple question: “How does this solve the 45% drop-off at your shipping selection?” He didn’t have an answer. He had a goal (a redesign), but he had zero UX strategy components to back it up.
For years, I used to think a “UX strategy” was just a fancy term for a roadmap or a “vision” document. I was wrong. To be honest, my first instinct with that client was to just take the check and code it. It would have been easy money. But I knew that six months later, when his revenue didn’t budge, I’d be the one getting the frustrated phone calls. Real strategy isn’t about how things look; it’s the journey that connects where your product is today with where it needs to be to win.
Why Your Plan Isn’t a Strategy
We often mix up strategy, goals, and plans. In the WordPress world, this happens constantly. A goal is “I want faster checkouts.” A plan is “I’m going to install this checkout plugin and change the CSS.” But the strategy? That’s the high-level solution to the actual problem. It answers the “what” and the “why.” If you’re conducting UX research, you’ll quickly realize that a strategy requires making tough decisions about what you will not do.
UX strategy doesn’t live in a vacuum. It has to support your business strategy (differentiation) and your product strategy (positioning). If your UX doesn’t provide a unique perceived value, you’re just another commodity site fighting for crumbs. This is exactly what distinguishes UX from product strategy—one focuses on the user’s interaction while the other focuses on the business broad strokes.
The 6 Vital UX Strategy Components
When I’m auditing a messy project, I look for these six things. If they’re missing, we stop everything and define them first:
- Target Goal: The actual improved future state. Not “better UX,” but “zero friction during guest checkout.”
- User Segments: You can’t design for everyone. Narrow it down to the primary users who move the needle.
- Priorities: What are we ignoring? If we focus on speed, we might deprioritize fancy animations.
- High-Value Actions: The specific steps that drive value for both the user and the business.
- Feasibility: Can we actually build this with the current legacy database constraints? Total reality check.
- Risks: Bottlenecks, legacy code, and technical debt.
Here’s a practical way to track one of those high-value actions using a simple WordPress hook. Let’s say we want to measure how long it takes a “power user” to complete a specific workflow in the admin dashboard:
/**
* Simple helper to log high-value action duration for UX analysis.
* We use this to identify "high-friction" workflows.
*/
function bbioon_log_workflow_efficiency( $user_id, $workflow_name, $duration_seconds ) {
// In a real scenario, you'd send this to an analytics endpoint or a custom log table.
$log_entry = sprintf(
"User %d completed %s in %d seconds.",
absint( $user_id ),
sanitize_text_field( $workflow_name ),
absint( $duration_seconds )
);
error_log( '[UX Strategy Log] ' . $log_entry );
}
// Example usage: trigger this when a specific AJAX action finishes.
add_action( 'wp_ajax_bbioon_save_advanced_settings', function() {
$start_time = isset( $_POST['start_ts'] ) ? intval( $_POST['start_ts'] ) : time();
$duration = time() - $start_time;
bbioon_log_workflow_efficiency( get_current_user_id(), 'Advanced Settings Save', $duration );
// Continue with standard processing...
} );Focusing on Differentiation
The best strategy focuses on differentiation. It’s not about being “different” for the sake of it; it’s about the value users perceive. A frictionless, fast experience is a massive competitive advantage. If you stop guessing and measure feature impact correctly, you’ll see that “workflow accelerators” often beat UI refinements every time.
As the Nielsen Norman Group points out, a strong strategy is about choice. If you’re trying to build a site for “everybody,” you’re designing for nobody. I’ve seen huge enterprise projects sink because they were too afraid to define their primary user segment. Total nightmare.
The Bottom Line
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, but tactics without strategy are just the noise before defeat. If your UX work doesn’t speak the language of business—OKRs, revenue, and costs—senior leadership won’t listen. For more depth on this, check out Jaime Levy’s work on the subject; it’s a staple in my library.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work based on a real roadmap, drop me a line. I’ve probably seen it before.
Are you building based on a strategy, or are you just checking off a list of “cool features”?
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