The week before last I was speaking at Digital Union's UX Day 2014 in Newcastle about measuring customer experience. The talk got a great reception — and it started with a provocation: stop designing for devices and start designing for people.
"Full room at #uxday @digiunion @analytdata — great talk, learning a lot"
Mobile is obviously a vital part of website design — many sites now receive more than half of their traffic via mobile devices. But the customers are still the same people. You need to ensure that your site is designed to meet their needs, full stop — not their needs on a specific device.
Customers don't see different channels or different teams. They see your brand. A bad experience in one channel will impact their perception of all channels.
The core principleWhere UX lab methods fall short
For many years I've worked alongside UX colleagues who champion User Centred Design methodologies. These are solid, and I respect the craft. But they tend to focus on small lab sessions with 8–10 people — and this has always made me a little nervous about their ability to extrapolate to a wide population. Are those 10 people representative? How do you know?
This is where measurement strategies come into their own. They offer the ability to inform, validate, and scale UX lab findings. You can use behavioural data to confirm whether the patterns you observed in the lab hold true at scale across tens of thousands of real users — or discover that they don't, and that something more interesting is happening.
A practical framework for becoming Customer First
Distil to core concepts. Take your designs and reduce them to their core features and functions — create a design ethos before you start building anything.
Get technical and CX teams involved early. How difficult are the design concepts to deliver? More importantly, how difficult are they to maintain? The best designs fall apart if they're impossible to keep up.
Define and communicate the goals clearly. Everyone across the organisation needs to be on the same page. If they're not, listen, respond, and adapt. If your staff aren't on board, your customers will feel it.
Segment your customers. Categorise users into groups based on key behavioural or demographic attributes. Ultimately, move towards personalisation — but baby steps are better than none.
Measure, act, repeat. Use analytics and customer feedback data together. One tells you what people do; the other tells you why. Neither is complete without the other.
By blending all of these techniques into a seamless programme of activity, an organisation can truly become 'Customer First' in its approach — not just 'Mobile First', which is only ever a proxy for the real goal.