Whether you’re a UX designer, UX researcher, or collaborate on a team with either of these professionals, you might be interested in learning more about UX visions and UX missions. This article is the perfect resource for you to understand the differences between these two concepts. We will define UX vision and UX mission, help you write a UX vision statement and UX mission statement, and explain each of their importance to you.
Understanding these two concepts is extremely important in fostering team alignment and evoking a sense of product. This article will teach you the differences between a UX vision and UX mission, while also showing you how they work together to achieve the same final goal.
Key Takeaways:
🙅 A UX vision and UX mission are NOT the same
🔮 UX vision statements are meant to project long-term goals and future direction of your product
📆 UX mission statements are meant to assess your product’s current value and help you plan day-to-day direction to achieve your vision
🤝 Your UX vision and UX mission work together to provide team alignment in order to achieve product success
🐝 You can conduct user testing with UXtweak to guide your UX vision and UX mission statements. Just register for your account and start testing today!
What is a UX vision?
A UX vision defines what the long-term goals are for the user experience of a product; essentially, what you want for the future of your product. The full UX vision is often in the form of a formal document, which can be altered and updated at any time in order to keep up with the product’s evolution and its changing user base. The main purpose of a UX vision is to promote team alignment by ensuring all design team members are on the same page in accomplishing the product’s shared goals.
Some elements that can be a part of the UX vision may include, but are not limited to:
- purpose,
- users,
- key scenarios,
- and success metrics.
Once you define your team’s UX vision, you can write an official UX vision statement. This type of statement is a shortened version of the UX vision; often, it will not be more than a few sentences long and summarizes the UX vision in a way that is easy to be understood by all. Its main purpose is to champion team motivation and ambition.
Some questions that a UX vision statement might answer are related to what the design team wants to accomplish in the future and who they see themselves becoming on the way to accomplish their goals. A short, yet powerful, statement can go a long way!
What is a UX mission?
In contrast to a UX vision, a UX mission looks at the current state of a product. It defines who the team is and what the product is in the present day. It’s used to guide the team to define what value they generate now, whereas a vision is what the team wants the product to become in the future.
Some elements that can contribute to the UX mission may include, but are not limited to:
- users,
- strategy,
- value,
- and core UX philosophies.
Similar to a UX vision statement, a UX mission statement is a summarized version of a team’s UX mission. It captures the essence of the team’s short-term, day-to-day goals. A UX mission statement is helpful for stakeholder buy-in and succinctly explains the team’s main overarching goal; it serves to keep the team focused and driven.
Why are both UX vision and UX mission important?
A team’s UX vision and UX mission are both an extremely important part of the UX design process and enhance your product’s user experience.
A UX vision helps guide the team towards a common goal and determines where they want the product to go several years down the line. A UX mission helps guide the team on a day-to-day focus and allows them to see what is in front of them in the present.
Although they serve different purposes and cover different timelines, a team’s product vision and UX mission complement each other to provide a comprehensive view of product’s goals and development, incorporating both purpose and strategy.
Simply put, a UX vision provides you with a destination for your product and a UX mission helps guide you through each step of the way.
How to create a UX vision statement?
- Gather perspectives: Surveying or interviewing users and stakeholders either about your current product or the product you’re working on, is the first step in creating a UX vision statement. Their collective feedback will allow you to identify long-term goals for your product. Additionally, during this stage you can run website testing (or mobile testing) on the current state of your product to address pain points; if you don’t have a product out yet, then it might be worth it to get a MVP (minimum viable product) up and running, and conduct MVP testing to collect data. Gathering information from different types of sourcing will help you gain a comprehensive view point of your product.
- Envision the future of your product: Brainstorm with your team (and potentially also stakeholders) to decide where you see your product in a certain number of years, ~3-5 years out is often used as a timeline benchmark. This step is meant to be collaborative and incorporate feedback from multiple different perspectives. Oftentimes, this step is carried out in the form of a whiteboarding exercise. This provides an opportunity for team members to share their ideas and vote on statements their teammates have drafted in order to create shared visions.
- Plan and distribute vision: The final step is to define your course of action that will lead you to reach your vision. Creating a roadmap will allow you to start transferring your product from its current state to its future, desired state. Once your plan and timeline has been solidified, it’s important to distribute your plan to your full company, even those outside your UX team, in order to bring on company alignment and shared goals.
How to create a UX mission statement?
- Define mission statements: It’s extremely important to take the initial step in creating your UX mission statement to define what it is and how it differs from a UX vision statement. There’s no harm in reviewing the differences between these two statements– the whole team can benefit from this refresher! This will ensure a unified direction on the team before proceeding further into the development process.
- Review UX vision statement: Take time to reflect on your UX vision statement and brainstorm what steps will allow you to reach your vision. The steps you end up defining will lead you into developing your mission. Think about having your solution first and then needing to fill in the missing pieces of how to get there successfully.
- Identify your value: This is meant to be a collaborative step, where team members will reflect on instances in which they added value to the team or company’s goals. Depending on how new a team is, the stories can either be real or hypothetical situations. Feel free to use as many details in your story as possible, so that you can find key themes among your teammates.
- Clarify users: Make sure to identify the target users for your product so that you can accurately write a mission statement that addresses their wants, needs, and pain points. You might need to conduct some user research to get a better picture of those. Additionally, utilize user-centric language in writing your UX mission statement to ensure you are prioritizing your users’ needs and keep your users at the focus of your mission.
- Draft and refine: With your team, get as many ideas out there as possible. It is often helpful to conduct a brainstorming activity with your team where you set a timer and see how many ideas each person can come up with. After time is up, everyone can share their ideas with the group and collaboratively vote on which one(s) they like. From here, you can mix and match ideas until you find the perfect UX mission statement for your team; make sure to choose something that is particularly motivational and inspirational!
UX vision statement examples
Sometimes seeing successful company’s vision statements can help you craft your own.
Here are some notable ones to inspire yours:
- McDonald’s: “To move with velocity to drive profitable growth and become an even better McDonald’s serving more customers delicious food each day around the world.”
- Netflix: “Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service.”
- Nike: “To do everything possible to expand human potential.”
- Target: “Guided commitments to great value, the community, diversity and the environment.”
- Uber: “To ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion.”
UX mission statement examples
For comparative purposes, the same companies’ mission statements are below.
This will help better illustrate the differences and purposes of UX vision vs UX mission statements:
- McDonald’s: “Our mission is to make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone.”
- Netflix: “To entertain the world.”
- Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”
- Target: “To help all families discover the joy of everyday life.”
- Uber: “To provide transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone.”
UX vision and UX mission: guiding the path forward
Defining your company’s UX vision and UX mission will lead you to success, and an enhanced user experience, for your product. Summarizing your UX vision and UX mission into succinct statements will allow your company to showcase their current value and future direction to their users, stakeholders, and internal team members.
Conduct user research with the help of online tools like UXtweak in order to gather perspectives to define and write your UX vision statement. Once you have a clear vision, fill in the step-by-step process by creating a UX mission statement.
Your UX vision and mission will work together in order to take your goals from vision to fruition!
