Why intentionally designing customer experiences is key to differentiating yourself from competitors and thriving in a customer-driven world.
As customers’ expectations of experience continue to rise, brands are changing the ways they work to keep up…because they must. They’re working to keep up with their customers and ahead of their competitors, with experience leaders taking a systematic, customer-centered approach to design and innovation.
These leaders (including brands like Apple, Google, and Amazon) deeply understand their customers, their goals, their journeys and emotions, and their wants and needs. And they use these insights to design innovative experiences that perfectly meet those needs while driving business goals.
The success of design-led brands like these stems from making experience design and innovation a core business capability, having long understood that a customer’s experience is too important to leave to chance.
Great Experiences Don’t Happen by Accident—They’re Intentionally Designed.
The capability of experience design is centered around—and the solutions it develops are brought to life through—several interrelated skill sets, and relies on empathy, curiosity, and a deep understanding of human behavior.
Design thinking and human-centered design (HCD) are two of the most well-known ways organizations drive innovation because they allow people who aren’t designers to use standard methods and tools that make the process of creativity logical.
They guide teams through steps such as empathizing with customers and defining the problem. From there teams move to coming up with solutions to the problem, prototyping those solutions, and testing ideas before launch.
By adopting these methodologies, companies avoid the pitfalls of reactive “find and fix” approaches, ensuring solutions that are solving the right problem by addressing the root cause of issues. This strategic design process also minimizes future rework and churn, driving tangible value and reducing operational headaches. \
If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about t problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein
The human centered approach needs to be applied inside your organization as well. While design thinking will help you develop solutions that will be adopted by your target audience, to get these solutions to your customers you need to build partnerships with the stakeholders and teams who can make them real.
To bring designed experiences to life, it’s critical to understand whose support you need and involve them early and often in the design process. Getting their perspectives and support radically increases the odds of success.
Why Do Firms Embrace Experience Design?
Experience design focuses on understanding and addressing customer needs, which, when met, can significantly improve satisfaction and loyalty. The human-centered approach also challenges assumptions, redefines problems, and helps create strategies and solutions that meet human needs, and in many cases do so in new and innovative ways.
By creating experiences that are easy, enjoyable, and efficient, brands can eliminate pain points and streamline processes, ultimately leading to better customer (and business) outcomes. Some of the reasons leaders embrace experience design are because it helps...
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Drive Innovation and Differentiation: Enabling your ability to use your knowledge of your customers to design uniquely relevant solutions that cannot be easily duplicated.
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Enable Better Business Outcomes: Research from McKinsey and Forrester links design excellence to better customer loyalty, revenue growth, stock market performance, and higher valuations.
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Promote Cross-Organizational Collaboration: As people with different perspectives and roles collaborate on problem-solving and innovation, it facilitates collaboration and solutions that care for the customer journey.
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Encourage Learning from Failure: In an environment where experimentation and iteration are embraced, failure isn’t swept under the rug but is examined and learned from.
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Mitigate Risks and Reduce Costs: By identifying potential issues early in the design process, experience design helps avoid costly redesigns and mitigates risks associated with taking solutions to market.
Common Challenges and Pitfalls
The most common experience design-related and innovation challenges are driven by common misperceptions about what experience design is, how it works, and the value it can drive. That said, an average 85 percent ROI on design thinking tends to get execs’ attention, as does ROI of up to 229 percent on individual projects.
But just because a team has gone through design thinking training doesn’t mean anyone can design. And if it’s a muscle that isn’t exercised afterwards, then of course the skills gained will perish. As important as education is, experience design also requires leadership buy-in and investment in design talent to help embed the capability in the organization.
Another common issue is focusing on quick fixes without solving the right problems. A related issue is the tendency to solve for the problems that are the most obvious… without a system for identifying and prioritizing the most important initiatives to fix negative customer experiences.
Embracing an Experience Design and Innovation Capability
Experience design and innovation aren’t fuzzy nice-to-haves. After all, an average 85 percent ROI on design thinking tends to get execs’ attention, as does ROI of up to 229 percent on individual projects. They’re also key drivers of differentiation and a critical capability for organizations that wish to survive and thrive as customer needs and market dynamics continue their thunderous change.
Creating an experience design and innovation capability requires an organizational shift based on thinking about solving human wants and needs, helping each person understand the impact of intentionally designing experiences, regardless of their role.
Great experiences deeply engage customers, successfully solve their wants and needs, generate more engagement, and drive advocacy, repeat business, and loyalty—all of which help drive top and bottom-line business benefits.
After all, at its core, experience design is about creating value—both for the customer and for your brand.