Creating a UX roadmap for your A-Team

The A-Team’s John “Hannibal” Smith said it best with his catchphrase, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

You should love a good plan too, especially when it comes to your product’s UX Roadmap. A great UX Roadmap will help ensure that you accomplish your research and design goals on time, on budget, and with buy-in from stakeholders.

What is a UX roadmap?

A UX Roadmap is a game plan to achieve your product or site goals. It starts with your desired result of a seamless and delightful user experience and takes into account all of the UX research required to achieve it. Think of it as a blueprint for your research that includes a strategic overview, the different kinds of studies needed to satisfy research goals, a proposed timeline of UX deliverables and other key elements that enable your success.

What are the benefits of creating a UX roadmap?

The main benefits of a UX Roadmap revolve around being in control of your research at every step. A UX Roadmap delivers a design and development schedule that can take into account your proposed releases for new products and designs as well as ongoing optimization of existing sites and products. This allows design and iteration to happen hand in hand, making your research more agile and cost efficient.

With a defined list of research goals reflecting various methods and utilizing the most effective strategies, you can put a timeline in place to achieve your research goals. Having a definitive timeline and detailed research plans in hand makes it easier to achieve stakeholder buy-in.

A quality UX Roadmap can also help you plan and allocate your budget efficiently. If your research plan involves using an agency, a UX Roadmap will help you evaluate the cost of agency work versus doing it in-house with your research team by using software tools to optimize research efficiency.

Don’t have a UX roadmap? I pity the fool!

A UX Roadmap should be the first step in planning your research strategy. By defining your requirements and implementing systematic steps to achieve your goals, you can be sure that your efforts will be successful and prove that you are truly the A-Team in your organization.