2. Make Experience Design the Focus
All of the innovative thinking in the world can’t save a solution that delivers a
poor experience for the user. A superior user experience drives not only adoption success, but can result in premium pricing and value realization (Apple,
Nest, and Tesla are three well-known examples).
Experience Design (XD) is far more than the designing an attractive User Interface. it is a fundamental approach that focuses on the core value requirements
and needs of the user above all other considerations. it is easy for all of us in a
market to (often erroneously) feel that we have the best understanding of what
our users need and can translate that into functionality for our engineering
teams to deliver. XD places the user, not the product team, at the apex of functional and UI requirements prioritization.
Understanding a customer’s pain and delight is a priority, and without it you
can’t build what the user really needs. Much has been written about getting to
a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to get your solution in the market and in the
hands of your users. Any MVP plan that is not centered on the user and following an experience design led approach is doomed to fail from the start.
Often times, experience design is thought of more in the context of UI development and is assigned to a “role” in a project team. XD may be facilitated by an
Experience Designer, but it is the job of all members of a digital team and is less
a role than a process of delivering digital innovation and follows a prescriptive
model as described below.
Visioning and Ideation
First, define the problem space to help you understand what problems your
innovation initiative is trying to solve. Then seek to understand what you and
your customers want to achieve in the next 6 months, 2 years, and 5 years and
why the initiative could fail. The first step is to fully understand and describe
the customers you are trying to serve.
• Who are the customers?
• What do the customers do daily that relates to this solution and what are
the pain points they are facing?
Build Empathy
The next step is to create a customer journey map that captures each step
involved in completing task and goals. it is important that you understand the
problems a customer faces both internal and external to your application.
• What worked and what could be improved?
• Define metrics for user experience.
32 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2016