Speaker Kevin S. Parikh keynote titled ” The Journey to Digital Singularity: A Case for Humanity”
Kevin Parikh is the Global CEO and Senior Partner of Avasant. Mr. Parikh is an author and speaker on topics of globalization, the digital enterprise and innovation. Avasant is recognized globally as a leading management consulting firm focused on strategic sourcing, business & IT transformation, globalization and digital transformation services.
Let’s get this straight: if you think user experience (UX) starts and stops with design, then you are not getting the most out of UX. In fact, you might be setting your user experience endeavor up for failure.
User experience should start with the very first strategy meeting. This means you have to include your UX professional at that meeting and all strategy planning after.
If you want a product/service that will truly provide great user experience, then your UX professional need to work on the strategy, vision, and planning. Currently most companies contract UX professional just for design and execution and leave them out of the strategy because they think they’re only designers. However, that’s like trying to build a puzzle using inside pieces and the edge pieces from two different puzzles. They just doesn’t fit together. And you end up with a disorganized mess.
Integrate your UX professional into customer strategy. You’ll have a company who better understands users and their behaviors and is more effectively oriented towards them. And that can only do good things for your organization.
We have two pieces of advice for you if you want to make sure you are giving your customers the best experience possible.
The first piece of advice is this: Make sure your company and whatever websites, apps, or services they provide are functional, easy to use, accessible, and desirable.
Secondly: Make sure that every aspect of your company is aligned towards giving users a great experience, from marketing to customer service. Everybody should be on the same page when it comes to functionality, usability, accessibility, and desirability. It’s not just about a digital product, it’s about every interaction the customer has with your company.
Your company has to work. It has to be easy to understand. It has to be accessible. And it has to be desirable.
Do this, and you’ll be attracting, converting, and retaining customers like crazy. Don’t do this…and you’ll continue to lose them.
Part 2 in the UX Team Series
We hope you’ve read the first article in this mini-series on the UX team. If you did, then you should be convinced that you need UX professionals involved in customer strategy, not just design. Now you may have found yourself wondering how that might look. You’re in luck because this second article in the mini-series answers just that.
Here’s what it would look like to integrate UX professionals into all parts of the strategy.
Remember, this process is ultimately about meeting the user’s goals. But it’s also about using the most efficient strategic process to do so. User experience reduces the risk that you’ll design the wrong product for your target audience. It’s about saving you grief as well as time and money.
One of the biggest myths about user experience is that it is something you can assign to just one person in your company.
Let me tell you right now, if you just assign a designer to UX and wash your hands of it, then it won’t work.
UX is more than one person. UX is a team.
Everyone who is involved in a user-facing element, software, product or service needs to be part of the UX team. Who might this include?
Not every project has each of these positions, and many projects have multiple people on each position. But the point is, if you have people in these positions, then they need to be on board with user experience.
What does it mean to have people on board with user experience?
At the very least, these people need to understand the importance of UX and be on board to (possibly learn) and utilize UX methodologies.
And it’s important to note that user experience needs to be ingrained in the company even deeper than the above positions.
UX needs to be at the core of the company.
Therefore, management needs to support UX, all the way to the top. That’s why we strongly recommend companies include UX in strategy. If UX is integrated into the very vision and philosophy of the company, then it goes without saying that users will notice and will reward you.
With good user experience, your users will feel respected and heard and will, in turn, respect you and give their attention, support, and money to you. It’s an ROI no-brainer.
You want to make products and solutions that work as soon as possible. The faster you can get your product out there, the faster you can start seeing ROI. The faster you can see a problem fixed and happy customers and clients.
There are two common ways to develop products and they are both wrong.
The first way involves churning stuff out as soon as possible, spitting it out into the world, and moving on. This way, you get a lot of cheap stuff, cheap apps and half-thought out solutions.
The second way involves spending a lot of time designing a product as thoughtfully and carefully as possible, making sure it is absolutely perfect before you launch. Your product might be better, but you’ve invested so much time into it, you have to ask yourself if it’s really worth it. And with our rapidly changing world, by the time you launch, your product might be obsolete or someone else might have done it already.
And for both ways you run the major risk of ending up with a product or a solution that people just don’t want to use.
The best way to design products is by combining these two methods. That’s basically what rapid prototyping means. You create prototypes, or concepts, as fast as possible and test them with sample customers. Then you go back and make a new prototype based on their feedback. You work quickly and test often.
For digital products, you’ll create versions of software that function minimally so that you can make sure it actually does what the customer wants it to do before you invest so much time into developing it.
In the end, by using rapid prototyping, you’ll end up with products and solutions that have been tailored and fine-tuned, but without the risk that they’ll flop once you’re finally done. You want to see a solid return on your investment? Make sure you know you’re making a valuable product.
It’s crucial for the success of your product, service, strategy, and ultimately business, to fully integrate user experience into your strategy, design, and development processes. It saves time and money, ultimately boosting your ROI, which is every company’s goal. But it leads to one important question:
Who will lead your UX efforts?
You have to decide whether to recruit members of your team internally or hire an external team.
While it may seem easy to assign this to someone in your office who’s already working for you, there are some disadvantages to recruiting internally.
When making the decision to go internal or external with your UX efforts, you have to think about what is best for your project and company. Make sure that whoever you choose has the time, perspective, understanding, and track record to find maximum success with UX integration.
And if you can’t find exactly that internally, then the answer just might be to look outside your company.
Why are creativity, problem solving, and collaboration the most important skills of this century? How does User Experience cultivate them? And how does this help us inspire success?
These are the questions you need to be asking yourselves in the 21st Century.
So let’s break it down.
Why creativity, problem solving, and collaboration?
Our world is getting increasingly digital, which really shouldn’t be a surprise to you. Physical production is, therefore, becoming automated more and more often. In the past, speed and efficiency were the most valued skills a professional could have. You can imagine a production line churning out products and imagine how that impacted values. It’s easy to draw a comparison between the economy and values.
Since the economy is now focused on digital, the skills we value have got to change. Obviously speed and efficiency are still important. But they’re not nearly as important as creativity, problem solving, and collaboration when it comes to predicting success. If we want to inspire success, we have to value skills that are truly inspiring.
So How does User Experience Cultivate these Skills?
Creativity
User Experience encourages thinking outside the box, but within your product/service’s limits. Figuring out how to do this automatically pushes the boundaries of your imagination. It makes you think in a different way. Thinking about what your user needs nurtures your creativity a lot more than just thinking about what your company wants.
Problem Solving
This methodology is all about solving problems. It’s about predicting problems and adjusting your product or service (or strategy or methodology) to keep them from happening. But the key is to not focus on the problem, but on the solution. This methodology gives you the tools, or the action plan, to do just that.
Collaboration
User Experience is a cycle that includes aspects of different departments. Each department has to come together with the same goal of creating a product/service that the user truly wants and needs. This collaboration encourages each participant to bring their best ideas to the table and work together to figure out what needs to get done and how.
Inspire Success
This methodology isn’t used only with digital products and services, but it is inspired by the
digital age. It’s about people coming together and collaborating to find the best and most
creative solutions to problems that products and services have or might have in the future.
And that’s something that we all want.
The Design Thinking process is an iterative methodology with the goal of finding and solving user’s pains and problems. This process involves the following phases, as you can see in the infographic or read below. Each phase uses diverse tools to generate insights and ideas that will pass on to the next phase of the process to create more ideas. Here’s what it looks like…
Service Design is all about…well, it’s about services. It’s a way to look at the big picture. It looks at the interaction between everyone involved in the service where they touch. It’s about looking at the whole journey, the people involved, and how they feel at different points in their journey.
Another way to think about this is as a service-focused offshoot of Design Thinking and under the umbrella of User Experience. Design Thinking is a methodology for solving complex problems and creating innovative products and services. Service Design takes it a step further and optimizes how the infrastructure of a service needs to look and function.
The main goal of Service Design is to make customer-friendly and competitive products. One of the unique ways it does this is co-creation. This method involves the end-users in the creation process of a service. This ensures it is user-centered. User-centered means it focuses on the needs and wants of the user, while traditional companies just focus on themselves.
The principal method of Service Design is mapping where customers interact with a service, known as touch-points. This mapping starts way before a customer ever actually comes into contact with a service and continues long after a customer has finished their interaction. What makes this methodology exceptionally effective is how it looks at a service from the customer’s perspective, rather than from a company’s perspective.
Designing based on the customer’s perspective and feelings is what will make the difference between a functional service and a truly desirable one. Functional services will work. But desirable services work and also make their customers feel positive emotions. If your customers feel great when interacting with your services, then you’re doing the right thing. They’ll gladly use your service, recommend it to their networks, and keep coming back. If they only ever feel negative emotions, then they’ll look for something better.
No one wants to lose customers. And that’s why you can’t afford to ignore Service Design.
