When you start a new UX project — before you design anything — you need to understand your goals. Two of them, to be specific. Everything you make is based on these two goals and nothing is more important to your success as a UX designer: User goals and business goals.

(If you missed Lesson #1, you might want to read that one first!)

User Goals:



Users always want something, because they are people, and people always want something. Whether they are trying to get laid on a dating site, looking for sneezing pandas on YouTube, or stalking old boyfriends on Facebook, they want something. They might also want to do something productive (or so I am told).

(We will look at methods of user research in upcoming lessons. For now, just assume we know stuff.)

Business Goals:



Every organization has a reason for creating a site or app in the first place. Typically it’s money, but it might be brand awareness, or getting new members for a community, etc.

The specific type of business goal is important. If you want to show more ads your UX strategy will be a lot different than if you want to sell products or promote via social media.

These things are often called “metrics” or “KPI’s” by the business-y folks.

Align the goals:



The real test of a UX designer is how well you can align those goals so the business benefits when the user reaches their goal. (Not the other way around!)

YouTube makes money via ads, and users want to find good videos. Therefore, putting ads in the videos (or on the same page) makes sense. But more than that, making it easy to search for videos and find similar videos will get users to watch more, which makes YouTube more money.

If the goals are not aligned then either users can get what they want without helping the business (lots of users, no success) or the users don’t get what they want (no users, no success). If YouTube made you watch 60 seconds of ads for every 30 seconds of videos, they would die a quick, painful death. Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat. But a few seconds of ads is a small price to pay for those sweet, sweet sneezing pandas…

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Tomorrow we will look at the 5 major aspects of turning good goals into a good UX strategy...