4 Misconceptions About UX Design and One Hard-to-Ignore TRUTH

 

In the increasingly design-savvy state of the world, it’s never been more important to stand out and develop a unique brand identity through UX design. While most organizations recognize the ability of UX design to be the key driver for customer conversion, they often don’t recognize how to use UX design strategically to deliver new values driven by core business metrics.

Having overseen UX Design-led business transformation at several organizations, here’s my take on the common misconceptions about UX design that can derail you from maximizing its impact on business outcomes.

Misconception #1: UX Design = Design Thinking

In the design world, the two major buzzwords – UX design and Design Thinking – are often considered synonyms. But in reality, Design Thinking is just an integrative thinking process that involves approaching problems in a right way. When you get the Design Thinking right, it doesn’t directly translate to getting the design right. UX Design is a much broader process that begins with understanding the business model, performing user research, and designing the service to fit into the users’ lives in a meaningful way.

Design thinking is all about examining and exploiting opposing ideas and constraints to understand the needs of the audience and empathizing with it. For instance, a leading bank took a human-centered approach in designing their loyalty program. They even went an extra mile to exempt a loyal customer from being charged for a bounced check. Solving a complex customer loyalty problem with empathy is design thinking.

Source: mcorpconsulting.com

While better use of design thinking methods is useful for any company to solve its most wicked problems, design thinking will not in and of itself drive better design.

Misconception #2: Enabling Better UX is the Design Team’s Job

By imbibing a design-centric culture and by hiring design-centric marketers, engineers, product managers etc., the design team can rely on a bigger team that serves as an extended UX arm. This holistic design-centric team is well-aligned with the UX needs and can easily get started with the build process on their own, rather than waiting for the core design team to initiate the mock-up first. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better…much more than any individual designer or design team can bring to the table.

“Everybody at Apple is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers.” - Ex-UX Designer at Apple.

Misconception #3: All Fancy New Tech Compliments Design

Anything that requires users to learn new and complex tasks to perform a desired action has little or no chance of resonating with them. Period.

Getting too tempted by the new piece of technology in town, there were numerous app makers who attempted to blend fancy tech with design and made it extremely difficult to master actions. The result? A whooping drop in app/product popularity!

Iconic examples of design failures in an attempt to get too cool with technology are the Gesture control TV remote controls, the seldom used Samsung Eye-ball tracking feature and the fascinating Google Glass.

Misconception #4: Optimized Design Leads the User to the Outcome You Envision

It’s often considered best to overly question user behavior and direct them to the outcome you desire. But redirecting the user who is repeatedly going off the rails with an intention to set them straight will serve no good. If they deviate a bit, it is absolutely fine to bring them on track but when they do it repeatedly, it’s probably intentional. And you should stop badgering them.

There is nothing more annoying than mobile websites with “Download Our App” messages every other second before you’ve even had a chance to read what the app can do for you.

The Truth: UX Design Has an Incredible Impact on the Company's Top and Bottom-Line

It is an undeniable fact that innovation drives business outcomes. Just take away the design part of any innovative idea and see what you’re left with!

Any organization that moves beyond an ad-hoc user-centric mindset to a sustained and centralized UX practice will find that a successful UX design has an incredible impact on their top-line and bottom-line.

When design is effectively integrated with business vision, strategy, engineering, etc., it serves as an influential force that helps businesses stay closer to customers, and in return, you can monetize customers for the great experience delivered.

As a continuation to this series, I will explore more on how ROI relates to User Experience Design. Until then would love to hear what other common misconceptions about UX design you have encountered. Share them in the comments below.

This is my guest post on http://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/design/misconceptions-about-ux-design.

Check out the presentation here: http://www.slideshare.net/monikris/4-common-misconceptions-about-ux-design

Stop guessing! Decipher your customer intent with touch point analysis

Today’s customers are more demanding and less forgiving than ever before.

96% of unhappy customers don’t complain and 91% of those will simply leave and never come back.

For businesses to create deeper, meaningful and empathetic customer connect,  it is indispensable to experience their brands as their consumers do to determine every possible way to make the product or service experience better, more pleasant, more human, and more productive.  This is possible only when every brand carefully analyzes every touch point throughout the customer journey - before, during, and after purchase.

Getting the Touch-Point Analysis Right. First Time. Every Time.

Any organization that performs touch-point analysis with utmost care, can uncover powerful customer insights as well as opportunities to improve how well customer-segment needs and wants can be met.

Establishing a Cause and Effect Relationship between Each of the Customer Actions

Human experience is complex, and mostly intangible. Several companies that do touch-point mapping exceptionally well, establish a cause and effect relationship between all the customer actions to arrive at a deep and meaningful understanding of each engagement.

Piecing together the bigger picture of why and how customers are interacting at various touch-points can help in delivering a predictive and proactive experience. The questions listed below can drive meaningful insights about customer behavior at each touch point.


Context and Device

What are the devices used for engaging with the brand and how best can you leverage all the contextual data gathered by the device, such as time and location?

Engagement channel 

Which is the actual site or media through which the customer first engaged? (Email/Social/Website/Paid Ad/SMS)

Touch-point sequence

How did the customer progress through the buying journey? What and where did the customer stop before and after engaging at each touch point?

Content consumed / action taken

What are the various content viewed/clicked/downloaded by the customer?

Time elapsed between each engagement

What is the time frame of each engagement, and the time elapsed between each activity and between activity and inactivity?

Finally, spot the touch-point that can trigger emotional connect.

Touch points with high volumes of customer interaction and those that can evoke strong emotions in customers turn into loyal advocates and will be ever willing to spend with the brand even if meaningful and available alternatives are presented.

Here are a few examples of the brands that have capitalized on this very fact to create a steadfast advantage over the competition.

Case In Point

PayPal’s Customer Effort Score

In the E-commerce industry, reducing customer friction is extremely important. Every extra second the website takes to load, costs you a customer. Reports suggests that even just a 1 second delay in page load time could reduce conversions by 7%. If that increases to 2 seconds, you’re looking at an abandonment rate of 40%.

PayPal was one of the early players to realize and act on optimizing this particular customer touch point.  And the result? Well, a $2 billion increase in transactions. Now that’s quite a big win!

Starbucks


So, how is Starbucks keeping pace with competition even now? Simple, personalization at every touch point and their ability to cater to each individual customer as a segment on its own. The “My Starbucks Rewards” and the loyalty mobile apps was a great step towards customer delight.

By optimizing the mobile touch point with a killer mobile app, Starbucks saw a whopping 4 million dollar mobile payments every week.

Tesco’s Social media strategy to show they care

 

Tesco like any other retail giant, has a myriad of touch points. Tesco has always been right by their customer’s side to assist them at every step.

The most remarkable is Tesco’s efficient use of Twitter as a customer service channel. Tesco uses Twitter really well for social customer service. Tesco is able to build a stronger relationship with customers by connecting at a personal level by adding a bit of humor to every interaction.

These are just a few example of impactful touch point experiences.

Have you been overwhelmed recently by any such experiences? Share it in the comments below.

Woo your customers with Predictive User Experience!

Today, we are in the midst of a revolution wherein customer experience is the currency by which companies will live or die.  More than ever before, customers are now truly in charge with the power to express their opinion in the open and make it count. With the convergence of cloud, social and mobile, the customer can now be an instant expert, instant advocate or an instant critic.

Gone are the days where they have just been numbers or accounts. It is high time they are regarded as unique human beings with distinct sets of needs. We need to acknowledge that they now expect more than just a product or service. They expect a relationship that is on equal terms. We need to earn their trust and keep up to it. 

Today we are in the midst of ever-connected, always-on, highly opinionated, on-the-move customer.

Not so long ago, every business assumed that the key to delivering great customer experience was about understanding the need and reacting to it.

But now, customers expect to be at the center of the world and giving them that special attention would mean empathizing and connecting to them at an emotional level. When we treat customers like individuals, predict their interests and preferences and proactively deliver those experiences, magic happens.

Thanks to the large amount of data that organizations have, it is used as leverage to identify patterns and build new models to predict future actions. While one aspect of using this data can help businesses achieve saving cost, the other most important use of this data will be in delivering superior experiences even before the demand.

This layer of intelligence to deliver a personalized and contextual Predictive Experience (that I may call) is going to be the way forward for businesses to become a customer’s company.

The latest report reveals that only a third of surveyed businesses are already in the game. Successful companies will only be ones that can harness real-time and predictive aspects of analytics and combine it with the user experience.

Here are a few such companies that are revolutionizing predictive experiences, making them have a notable advantage over the competition.

Mercedes:

Their effort in becoming a customer’s company is evident with their investment on developing a “Digital Companion”. The predictive experience they aim to deliver, elevates the notion of a car. It transforms from the “best driving experience” to “an old friend” who knows you and you learn to trust.

Amazon:

The Anticipatory shipping initiative by Amazon has set the retail industry on fire. With anticipatory shipping, the idea is to use the data to predict what customers want and then ship the products automatically.

Think of the feelings you get when you see that an Amazon package has arrived at your door — it’s delightful and exciting, even though you know what it is. I bet those feelings are amplified when you don’t know what’s in the box.

To remain the pioneer in moving the customer experience needle, you need to deliver predictive experiences to your customers that can connect at an emotional level.

And it is this emotional bond that can turn your customers into loyal advocates.


Share the strategy that has helped you attract and retain customers at every touch point.