Experience design - a new way to engage customers
88% of customers will never visit a website again after a bad user experience. Experience design blends several complementary design disciplines to focus on the customer, and design relevant solutions to solve meaningful problems. Conducted correctly, it can also be invaluable to informing business decisions, technology choices, delivery approaches and operational improvements essential to digital transformation.
At Profound Digital, we help you improve user engagement and boost online performance by designing your website through a customer lens.
What is Experience Design?
Every time someone interacts with your brand, it helps shape their overall customer experience (CX). These customer experiences can either be designed intentionally, or they can be left to chance.
Experience design is an approach that brings together different but complementary design and research disciplines to focus on the customer, help identify and really understand the problem(s) to be solved, and then design products and services to transform customer experiences and deliver solutions in a relevant way.
Experience design spans all channels (not just digital) and the points of interaction that a customer has with your organization or brand. As such it considers all aspects of the customer journey in a given context and develops a robust understanding of user behaviours, user needs and the pain points and challenges to be solved. We use insight and research to aid the understanding of the challenges and define what it is really like to be a customer in the current context. This enables us to design future state experiences, define the journeys we need to support and ideate to find solutions and develop rapid prototypes to quickly test, learn and improve.
As customer experiences are often cross channel (even digital customers can have cross channel implications) looking beyond digital user flows and wireframes is important, and experience design provides an approach for not only informing design but also the technical and operational dependencies that are required to underpin its delivery. Experience design therefore can be applied not only to digital products but also to services and operational capabilities that support the customer experience being delivered.
Experience design as you can see is more than just UX. It can be applied in different ways, to different scenarios, and ultimately contributes to a better outcome through a deeper understanding of the problems we are trying to solve, and how we fulfil customer needs in the best way – in other words, giving the people what they want so that they’ll spend more. And that’s where we come in. We’ll help quickly define who your customers are and what they want, and design engaging customer experiences. These days a frictionless user experience is no longer a differentiator, it is a basic requirement for customers who expect an optimized user experience across all platforms and devices. Experience design provides the differentiation and innovation, and this is what organisations are increasingly seeking to address. As the business landscape and customer expectations rapidly change, the need to innovate has never been stronger.
Our Customer Experience Services
Why it Matters: Experience Design Plays a Key Role in Digital Transformation
Quite simply, happier customers spend more. 140% more in fact, according to customer experience research by Harvard Business Review. That’s why it’s vital you approach everything through the customer lens. Having an understanding of their offline and online behaviours removes the guesswork, opinion, and risk in favour of evidence-based marketing, operational, and digital decisions. Making the customer journey more relevant to them can boost sales, increase loyalty, and make them more likely to share their experience with friends, effectively becoming your brand ambassador.
Most companies understand their technical capabilities, business requirements and overt customer needs. How they approach and blend these assets to innovate products and services is where companies fall short. Making informed choices is critical both to meeting stakeholder needs and achieving a good experience for the customer. If the emphasis is put on one aspect over another, disconnects can occur which can result in diluted solutions being delivered.
Experience design grounds decisions around a solid definition and understanding of the customer, and how technical and operational enablers deliver this. The future state design can highlight changes required and show dependencies and key requirements. Most importantly, it can show the impact of choices on the customer and the business, so that informed decisions can be made.
Technology choices must be considered in the context of the customer and the experience – if experience design is not embraced, the emphasis can shift onto the technology or the delivery approach, reducing the customer to notional stories, features, and function, crafted by internal views. As a result, solutions do get delivered, but do they really transform? What are they transforming? What value is being provided? How does this improve things for customers?
Experience design is key to keeping transformations honest and aligning the customer context and experience requirements with the technical and operational choices being made. Managing the tension that can exist here is essential in digital transformation.
How We Deliver – The Profound Way
Our experience design team will be working with your internal team and external customers, we’ll walk a mile in your customers’ shoes to help understand them. Along the way, we’ll discover their persona, pain points, and voice-of-the-customer (VOC), which helps inform your content strategies, ecommerce design, and technology choices. We then transform that invaluable customer insight into a modern digital platform, frictionless customer journeys, and a better-informed content strategy. Fast. All of which helps forge a stronger connection and more engaging experience for your customers.
We help digital teams design great experiences, make smart technology choices, and deliver successful digital transformations.
