UX Strategy

I was lucky enough to take a graduate school course taught by Jaime Levy (see Acknowledgments), the author of UX Strategy (pictured below). In this course, I learned the following:

• Lean startup: I learned to start with a problem statement and an initial value proposition and use customer discovery interviews and competitive market research to validate customer personas.

• Customer discovery interviews: I walked around bars (it was a Happy Hour app) and interviewed people about their usage patterns and needs to determine whether I was targeting the right market with the right product.

• Competitive analysis and “Blue Ocean Strategy”: I used Google Adwords to identify competitors in the market and Crunchbase Pro to evaluate their success. I identified both direct and indirect competitors, and used a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis to determine the color of the ocean (blue = wide open and ready for your product, red = uphill battle against competitors with similar value propositions) and opportunities for innovation.

• UX design: I used Adobe XD and Sketch to create clickable app prototypes and used Unbounce to create a landing page.

• User research and prototype testing: I recruited participants to get feedback about a prototype for my mobile app. This was in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, so I conducted the interviews via Zoom and send participants a link to my clickable prototype. I prepared interview questions to test the usability of the prototype as well as the usefulness of key actions.

• Ad campaign: I ran an ad campaign on Facebook for my mobile app and measured how many times the ad was clicked. Once a user clicked on my ad, they were brought to a landing page and I measured the conversion rate (# times users attempted to download the app/# visits to the landing page). I ran split testing in two major metropolitan areas to determine the best location to launch my app.