Most UX designers are familiar with and can employ frameworks such as Design Thinking and the Double Diamond method.
The Design Council developed the Double Diamond almost 20 years ago. It is a remarkable tool that guides product-development teams along a clear path.
Champion Advertisement
Continue Reading…
As shown in Figure 1, the Design Council’s Double Diamond method starts with Discovery, moves on to product Definition, then Development, and finishes with Deliver.
The Double Diamond comprises smart, structured steps for the development process, as follows:
Discovery—The stage at which we uncover insights
Definition—The stage at which we sharpen our focus.
Development—The stage at which we explore and manifest ideas
Delivery—The stage at which we bring a project home
We begin with big questions, delve into users’ needs by conducting solid research, then build solutions that begin to make sense, layer by layer. The Double Diamond is a proven way of figuring out what matters, then bringing it to life.
UX designers rely on the Double Diamond to ensure that they design the right thing, then design it right. It provides a strong foundation that can guide them from uncertainty to clarity and from what could be to what should be. Twenty years ago, the Double Diamond was revelatory. But now, it’s become foundational knowledge that every UX designer should possess.
Unfortunately, too many UX designers don’t think beyond this foundational process. They deliver wireframes, polished designs, and prototypes; conduct usability testing; follow up testing with iterative redesigns; and finally, hand off their designs to developers. That’s where the design process usually ends. While these deliverables absolutely matter, some UX designers fail to realize that the Double Diamond is a prerequisite, not a means to an end, and should neither be the final goal nor the only approach.
If UX designers are working in an agency setting, the Double Diamond is how they complete their design process. But in an environment in which product maturity is an important driver, this approach can be too limiting. Instead, a broader UX design strategy that extends beyond the narrow execution of deliverables is necessary. But, before diving into the whats and hows of strategic UX design, let’s first explore some cases in which companies have moved beyond these frameworks to drive real-world impacts.
Champion Advertisement
Continue Reading…
How Leading Companies Make Strategic UX Design Decisions That Drive Growth
Let’s consider the stories of a few leading companies.
ASOS
In the UK, ASOS stands tall in the ecommerce space. Their Web site shines with bespoke product imagery, easy-to-use product listing pages, and a checkout process that works well. However, in 2018, the company found that users filled their carts with clothes—a common behavior on sites without a dedicated Saved Items feature—only to abandon them without making a purchase.
A typical design approach might have zeroed in on design tweaks such as shortening checkout forms or clarifying button labels, but when the team pored over their data, they found the real issue: a pattern on which shoppers hesitated to purchase because they didn’t trust the clothing sizes. The result: many wrong guesses about sizes had led to returns that chipped away at profits.
Their solution was the Fit Assistant, which pulled data from past purchases and body details to suggest the perfect fit, giving shoppers the nudge they needed to make their final purchases. ASOS’s breakthrough came from analyzing consumer data to discover insights that traditional UX frameworks might have missed.
Netflix took a different strategic approach, going beyond design execution by identifying a deeper behavioral challenge: consumers were spending too much time browsing to find shows and movies, but too little time watching them. This presented more of a business risk than a simple user-interface design issue. Netflix worried that if users kept hesitating to watch, they might disengage entirely, leading to lower retention rates.
Rather than just optimizing filters or improving UI elements, Netflix tackled the core friction point: indecision. Their solution was Autoplay Previews. Instead of expecting users to select content consciously, they designed a solution that nudged users to make quicker decisions: as users hovered over a title, a short preview would start playing automatically.
Research flagged autoplay as a manipulative design choice that captures users’ attention in ways that they might later regret and diminishes their sense of control. However, while this is a valid concern and remains a subject of debate, capturing users’ attention is precisely what advertisements and marketing campaigns are designed to do. Netflix doubled down on the autoplay feature, establishing it as a core part of the user experience. This approach reduced cognitive load and user indecision, which in turn accelerated user engagement and resulted in immediate increases in viewing time.
Depending on the company’s design culture, mainstream frameworks might have stopped at improving navigation microcopy or refining category labels instead of thinking beyond conventional usability and assessing behavioral influences. This business and data-aligned strategy drove daily watch times up and prolonged user engagement, something that raw engagement data and retention and revenue metrics from Google Analytics might not fully explain.
Spotify
Similar is the case of Spotify, which makes strategic UX design decisions that introduce calculated friction. UX designers are typically trained to eliminate friction and remove all painpoints, while recognizing that certain risk-mitigating frictions are essential—for example, identity verification or displaying modal message boxes a couple of times to confirm transactions in banking apps.
Friction, in and of itself, is a broad concept that can take many forms. But not all friction is harmful. For example, if users experience what I would call “just enough frustration” to prompt a certain action, this often proves beneficial. Spotify did this by introducing controlled limitations for free users—for example, limiting skips, enforcing shuffle play, and interrupting listening with ads—to encourage users to consider upgrading without making the free tier unbearable.
UX designers at Spotify also created calculated discomfort that nudged users toward Premium subscriptions. They identified precisely where friction would be profitable rather than smoothing every interaction. A more conventional and less strategic UX designer might have focused on increasing free-tier flexibility or reducing ad frequency to reduce users’ painpoints.
Guidelines for Becoming a Strategic UX Designer
If UX designers had not been mindfully strategic and had instead confined themselves to conventional frameworks, could ASOS have eliminated decision paralysis by creating the Fit Assistant? Would Netflix have crushed user hesitation with Autoplay Previews? Could Spotify have transformed friction into a conversion engine? Unlikely.
Rather than falling into a redesign mentality, these companies drew upon consumer data and behavioral insights to create strategic friction that drives business impacts. So, exactly how can a UX designer transition from mere design execution to becoming a strategic UX designer? Let’s consider some guidelines that can help UX designers broaden their scope and adopt a more strategic approach.
1. User Experience Is a Business Strategy, Not Just a Design Discipline.
UX designers should definitely enter the field of User Experience with a strong focus on usability, accessibility, and aesthetics and engage in user research, prototyping, and an iterative-design process—all of which are essential pillars of good UX design. Depending on the team and the project, UX design might be an isolated discipline in situations where the designer is given a robust brief and needs to follow its instructions without much leeway. However, the strategic capabilities of UX designers develop when they move beyond design execution. We should see and understand User Experience as a business strategy.
UX designers must shift their mindset away from merely refining designs to shaping outcomes. This requires becoming well-acquainted with one or more business domains that might be part of a given design project. Becoming acquainted not just with usability heuristics, but revenue models, retention metrics, and customer-acquisition costs is necessary to expand one’s influence to product roadmaps, business models, and market positioning despite their perhaps appearing out of scope for the UX designer. This leads us to the next crucial shift in thinking: stakeholders.
2. Design for Stakeholders, Not Just Users.
Most UX designers center their work around users’ needs, frustrations and goals, forgetting that they are part of a business environment in which, despite users being the top priority, they are only one part of the equation. UX designers all too often overlook the need to serve the business stakeholders, including product managers, developers, sales and marketing teams, and executives, who are shaping a product’s direction based on business needs.
While advocating for a product’s user experience over everything else is fine, it is also important to consider the stakeholders’ experience. This is particularly important when the user experience conflicts with business goals. Strategic UX designers understand that they cannot overlook stakeholders’ needs. If UX designers fail to consider a company’s internal priorities, they risk pushing for solutions that, while excellent for users, might be misaligned with business needs.
To ensure strategic alignment, outline stakeholders’ priorities and treat stakeholders as another set of users. UX designers’ solutions must align with broader organizational goals. Users interact with a product to fulfill their own needs, but stakeholders engage with a project to satisfy their respective objectives and priorities that influence product decisions. In summary:
Executives prioritize revenue growth, market expansion, and brand positioning.
Marketers focus on engagement, conversion rates, and retention.
Sales teams require clear value propositions that support lead generation.
Developers prioritize technical feasibility, efficiency, and scalability.
Customer-support teams seek to reduce user complaints and support tickets.
While a UX team might advocate for removing friction from a subscription sign-up process, if the marketing team relies on a free-trial step to nurture leads prior to conversion, eliminating that step could harm the overall business objectives. Spotify’s approach to calculated friction is a perfect example of finding this balance. UX design principles generally eliminate all barriers, but Spotify strategically introduced limitations in its free-tier experience to nudge users toward Premium subscriptions. This wasn’t a purely user-centered decision, but a decision that was aligned with business needs.
UX designers should engage with stakeholders just as they would with users, by conducting research and identifying painpoints, concerns, and priorities. This approach benefits both users and stakeholders by enabling the following:
understanding of business metrics—Knowing how the user experience impacts revenues, customer retention, and customer lifetime value.
alignment with product strategy—Ensuring UX design decisions support key organizational objectives.
facilitating collaboration—Bridging competing priorities such as user needs versus technical constraints.
3. Explore Questions, Not Just Solutions.
Understandably, jumping straight into design solutions can lead to superficial fixes that fail to address the real problems. However, diving into discovery without adequate direction can be just as ineffective—wasting time, resulting in misaligned efforts, and generating insights that don’t translate into actionable decisions. So it is important for UX designers to balance exploration and focus, asking the right questions to discover meaningful insights without getting lost in unnecessary research.
One way of achieving this focus is to use the Five Whys technique—an effective way of discovering root causes by repeatedly asking why until you reveal the underlying issue. Taking the example of ASOS and its high cart-abandonment rate, we could apply this technique by starting with the most obvious issue—cart abandonment—in the first question, then drill down to uncover deeper causes, as follows:
Why are users abandoning their cart? Because they are hesitant to complete a purchase.
Why are users hesitant? Because they are unsure about product sizing.
Why are they unsure about sizing? Because the size guide is unclear.
Why is the size guide unclear? Because it lacks personalization and context.
Why does it lack personalization? Because the system does not factor in past purchases or body measurements.
Another way to structure these questions would be by grouping them into themes, enabling a more targeted approach to evaluating usability concerns, business impacts, and cross-functional alignment. Let’s explore these three themes.
User-centric questions:
What are the key frustrations that users face?
What assumptions are we making about users’ behavior?
How does context influence users’ decision-making?
Business-aligned questions:
How would a design change impact revenues, retention, or growth?
What are the key business risks of implementing or not implementing this change?
Are there internal constraints—whether technical, financial, or operational—that we need to consider?
Stakeholder-driven questions:
What are the top priorities for product managers, marketers, and developers?
How can the UX team contribute to cross-team objectives?
What trade-offs would be necessary to balance the user experience with business success?
While these questions could be a starting point, the real value of this approach comes from pushing further by breaking down each question and asking why until the deeper issues come to light. Rather than stopping with surface-level insights, rely on the depth of your inquiry to clarify the strategic picture. In this way, you can go beyond being a UX designer who merely focuses on execution to become a strategic UX designer who is a discerning thinker and can make strategic business and product decisions as well as UX design decisions.
Conclusion
The Double Diamond is undoubtedly an excellent framework. Acknowledging its effectiveness is just as important as recognizing its limitations, using it properly and knowing when to go beyond this approach. ASOS, Netflix, and Spotify focused on critical business challenges, addressing them in tandem with UX-driven design strategies rather than relying solely on simple design refinements.
To start to take a more strategic approach to UX design, focus on the following:
Thinking beyond execution and focusing on outcomes.
Designing for stakeholders, not just users.
Asking critical questions before seeking solutions.
At its core, strategic UX design is a lot more about the basis of design decisions than what we design. Inclusivity is essential. Consider people, their opinions, priorities, and perspectives. But strategic UX design also requires looking beyond its limits rather than confining one’s mindset by saying, “Thinking beyond design is not my job” or “My role is not to influence business decisions.” Fundamentally, a UX designer is responsible for deeply understanding users, their behaviors, and the factors that shape their decisions. Considering users’ behaviors and decisions is how you can gradually progress toward becoming strategic.
Anamol is a UX Specialist with an MSc in User Experience Engineering from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Baymard Certified UX Professional. He has worked as a UX designer, product designer, researcher, and digital designer for companies such as Nourish Care, Buster + Punch, and Goldsmiths, leading UX and product design initiatives that have driven significant business impact, including an ecommerce campaign that generated more than £3 million in revenue in 2024. His research-driven approach combines empirical evidence, in-depth analysis, and user-centered design to optimize digital experiences. Beyond User Experience, he has collaborated with global clients, including brands with millions of followers, delivering creative and digital solutions that enhanced engagement and business growth. Read More
