❮ It’s one thing to create a great looking product that is easy to use. It’s another to create a great experience that continues to improve, delight, and expand its reach over time. ❯
User experience (UX) focuses on the experience people have when they interact with a specific product or service.
UX is crucial in all the stages of the development of the service before arrives to the end user.
Before start design the experience: it’s important that preliminary analysis has been conducted to understand if the service/product will meet the end user’s requirements.
- During the design of the experience: businesses should understand how end users are interacting with solutions.
- After the design of the experience: insight gained from end users should inform future adaptations of the service/product.
In the financial industry, today’s challenges extend beyond branches and ATMs. Instead, the focus is on apps and mobile devices. Banking institutions need to digitally transform with a seamlessly integrated mobile and web banking strategy to deliver excellent customer experiences and quality data reporting. With Design Thinking strategies, Scrum methods and a Human Centred Design approach, businesses in this sector can increase fraud prevention by up to 60 percent, while gaining enhanced data.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies can use Business Dive methodologies to provide a superior customer journey, including allowing customers to access clinical case information from their mobile devices, for example.
Alternatively, a beverage brand could improve conversions and sales from potential customers through marketing campaigns that boost sales.
UX Design methodologies have come to represent all the qualities of a product or service that makes it relevant or meaningful to the end user, from how it looks to how it responds when users interact with it. Of equal importance is how the product fits into people’s daily lives – UX relates to the way a consumer connects to a company, which includes every touchpoint from marketing to product development and distribution channels.
The objectives of UX Design are:
- Create truly relevant experiences for users to promote loyalty to the brand.
- Explore every touchpoint in the experience of the user and make it centered in their needs.
- Provide a human-centred designed experience, making a simple an enjoyable journey for the company and the clients.
- Understand the return on investment (ROI) of the customer experience.
Talking About UX is Talking About the Customer
All UX Design activities are aimed at facilitating user interaction with the product or service. A successful interaction relies on the UX Designer participating from the beginning, from the conceptualization to implementation, which should include the validation stage and subsequent iterations.
UX Design makes it possible to identify the motivations of the consumer, including their environment, their expectations, and their way of thinking. It places the consumer at the center of the design and enables the business to gain enough information to take decisions confidently.
The responsibility of a UX Designer is not only to generate only visual ideas, but also to make the whole team aware of the problem that is being solved based on the nuances of human behavior.
This awareness will ultimately take the form of a product or service that is desirable, technically possible, and financially sustainable.
How to Align the User Experience with Business Objectives?
The way to do this is by an UX Strategy, which is primarily about aligning the User Experience Design with business goals. The success of these companies is based on the same thing, a good business strategy that is informed by market data, detailed operational plans, and a clear understanding of how to generate revenue.
Understanding this way of managing a business model is the key to generating a more effective strategy, closer to the customer’s needs and projected for better results for the company.
How can companies benefit from Design Thinking, Lean UX and Agile Prototype? Get our insights here!
How to Develop a UX Design Strategy?
A UX Design Strategy relies on evaluating the insights of the user studies, business priorities and experience map. It also allows businesses to identify their target customer.
This will support the creation of guidelines that outline your company’s strategic approach to products and services.
The UX Design Strategy is a tool to communicate the vision of the product or service to the rest of the company, which is why the design and business strategy of a company should never be viewed as separate considerations. A correct application of a UX strategy will lead the team in the same direction, reinforcing the tactics that will lead the business to commercial and sustainable success over time. For this to be possible is important to count with an UX focused team that help to conceptualize the idea of the business strategy, the processes inside the business, the portfolio (service and/or product), and the customer experience. This team should be at least formed by:
A UX Lead: The person in charge of leading the team into the processes of conceptualizing an effective and successful experience. Able to understand and analyze the context and put it into an idea concept.
A Service Design Expert: The person in charge of understanding the opportunities for improving business processes to generate and deliver value in the design of services.
And a UX Desiger: The person in charge of ensuring everything related to user interaction offers the best possible experience.
Having a team dedicated to the creation a better experience is an even more effective way to generate innovative ideas is to ensure the success and effectiveness of the business, creating a relationship with the clients based on understanding and loyalty.
What Digital Transformation solutions do we offer? Learn more here!
UX Strategy and Business Strategy
A UX strategy is built by answering questions that relate to business strategy:
User-oriented:
- What is the problem you are trying to solve?
- Who are you solving the problem for?
- What is been done before to solve this problem? Why didn’t work?
Related to the project:
- What is the vision behind the project?
- How will we build a solution?
- What we need to make possible this solution?
Results-oriented:
- What goals are we setting ourselves?
- How will we measure the results we will achieve?
- What features will we build? What are we going to do to achieve our goals?
With these initial questionings we can build a map of the scenario, unnecessary features can be ruled out and we can begin to test hypotheses about what we believe is ideal for our product or service. Ultimately, this approach allows us to create better products by guiding every decision we make within the context of solving the problem our audience is experiencing.
UX Design Means Understanding Context
Creating a good experience requires a design approach that considers the context and goals of the users. Most executives, regardless of their industry, promote UX as key to their product strategy.
As AI algorithms are incorporated into businesses, organizational learning is just as important as machine learning. How should smart management teams maximize the economic value of smarter systems?
A good customer experience depends on a clear and engaging user experience. Let’s remember that this problem we are solving is the fundamental reason why our product is used and why our business survives.
