Designing your user experience (UX) to simultaneously cater for your customers and your business objectives can be a tough task. But with this advice you’ll find the process both easy and effective.
Bringing business into a new age.
Digital transformation is about adapting the way you do business to meet the evolving needs of digital users, in a digital age. It can be hard to pin down, as it often means slightly different things to different people. However, when it comes to digital transformation, one thing remains clear — you need to be thinking about it. To not evolve digitally, really is to be left lagging behind your competition.
In my experience, one element that’s absolutely key to digital transformation, is UX. The way you design and implement how your customers interact with your business should be consistent with your digital experience. But creating a UX that meets your customers’ needs, as well as furthering your business objectives, is no simple task. So that’s what I’m setting out to help you with in this blog.
Brand and the user experience.
Your brand is the heart of your business, and key to creating a UX that meets the needs of your customers. By putting brand at the heart of your customer experience, you can create interactions that are meaningful to both your company and your customers.
However, while engaging experiences are paramount in today’s saturated and heavily curated digital world, it’s important that everything you do stems from your business objectives — after all, a strong brand alone doesn’t guarantee commercial success.
Choose brand over business, and you’ll end up investing in a UX that’s fantastic for customers, but doesn’t further your financial goals. But choose to chase the money rather than focus on your company values, and you’ll dilute your brand while disillusioning your customers.
So, how do you balance these competing interests?
You need a strategic plan for how to create the best possible UX, in a way that both builds your brand and meets your business objectives. To do that, there are eight things you need to get right.
Your eight essentials for a better UX.
These eight items can be split into two groups: the ingredients of a good approach, and the steps needed for transformation to take place.
Let’s start with the ingredients:
1. Build everything you do on a strong business case. If you’re a business, your aim is to make money, so make sure you can prove that your investment in UX will pay a return.
2. Develop a vision that’s easily understood by everyone it touches — that way it’s far more likely to inspire and engage.
3. Map your short-, medium- and long-term goals into achievable, bite-sized milestones — and work in an agile fashion to deliver them.
4. Measure success and manage consistency across your organisation — from the marketing team and product owners, through to the operations and finance teams.
Once you’re sure you’ve got these ingredients in the mix, you can start designing your UX.
Here are the steps you should take:
5. Map your existing customer journey. Gain as much knowledge as you can about how your customers experience their interactions with your company.
6. Experience your brand from a customer perspective. Step into the shoes of your customer, and explore your brand as if you were seeing it for the first time.
7. Pinpoint how your business objectives can be aligned with your UX. When you’re clear on what you’re trying to achieve as a business, it shouldn’t be difficult to align those goals with your UX.
8. Ensure the operational side of your business can deliver on the promises made to customers. Make sure your web technologies are aligned, all the way from the customer facing websites and apps, through to back-office systems such as stock management software.
With these steps completed, you’re ready to begin your digital transformation and balance your brand with your business objectives. You should now have a plan for a UX that meets the needs of both your business and your customers… but you need to implement it — and that’s where Newicon can help. So stay tuned for my upcoming blog articles, where I’ll go into how architecture and prototyping can bring your strategy to life, and help you measure your success.
Sound interesting? Head over to our UX design and architecture services pages to find our more on how Newicon could help you.
Mark is the Digital Strategy Director of Newicon. With over 20 years of brand and technology experience (both agency and client side) Mark excels at helping companies communicate and differentiate themselves. Using strong imagery, persuasive messaging, and intuitive user experiences — all backed up by innovative end-to-end technology. — Mark, and Newicon, will transform the way you do business.