This is the eighth and final in a series of blog posts sharing the results of our study on the business value of experience design. In this post, we explore the power of creativity to stir excitement, reduce anxiety and express the company’s values to help it stand out from the competition.

Earlier this year, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark commissioned $84,000 to Danish artist Jens Haaning to deliver two new pieces of artwork. Haaning delivered a surprising result when the museum uncrated two blank canvasses. Entitled “Take the Money and Run,” Haaning describes the work (or lack of it) as a statement on “poor wages.” Whether you see Haaning’s work as a violation of a contract or a thought-provoking expression of socioeconomic disparities, he accomplished what all creative endeavors strive for: eliciting a response.

We wanted to save Creativity for last in this series, because it’s the first thing many people think of when they think about Experience Design. Like being On Brand, creativity is often narrowly associated with how a design looks: colors, imagery, and generalized aesthetics. But, despite being the most familiar elements of great design, creativity is one of the most elusive ones. We know creativity when we see it: it is original, unique and surprising. But creativity also applies to what we don’t see: How it works, the structure and process of a product, and how it delivers on the entire experience. Creativity is an essential ingredient throughout the entire product lifecycle: identifying new markets to research to build empathy, re-imagining and breaking the rules of a business process, questioning technology platforms to create new innovations, or experimenting with new ways to work your logo into a web page. Creativity is the single element that can be applied across all of the other seven values of experience design to multiply their impact.

It’s been said that creativity is what links the head and the heart; the left brain and the right brain; the art and the science.  A creative design does not exist for the mere sake of being creative and garnering its own attention. A creative design ultimately serves to solve a customer problem. But a creative design also uses that experience to differentiate from the competition.  The Southwest Airlines boarding experience – where you are assigned to a boarding order rather than a specific seat – creatively solves a problem for passengers’ need for a fair shot at the best seats.  It sounds counterintuitive, but Southwest loyalists will also tell you that it results in a much more orderly boarding experience. And as the only major airline to follow this boarding process, it is also a creative differentiator for the overall travel experience.

How can you add creativity to your experience design? While many companies, film studios, and rock bands are known for their larger-than-life creative saviors – Steve Jobs, Stanley Kubrick, Patti Smith – the reality is that this is largely mythology. Creativity is not a single person, but a team with a shared culture and process that is open to creativity. Just like creativity is not limited to a single person, it’s also not limited to a single phase or step in a project. It takes a culture commitment across a deliberate process. This process encompasses several creative tools and methods to build empathy, design and ideate, test and experiment, and ultimately iterate to an optimal outcome.

Like Haaning, I considered eliciting a response by posting an empty blog post, but since that idea has been done before, I hope the response I elicited inspired a creative solution for your product or project.

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts sharing the results of our study on the business value of experience design. Read the last post here. In this post, we explore the role that designers have in translating brand identities into digital products.

Consider some of the most influential and signature elements of the most iconic brands:  The sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The Southwest Airlines boarding experience. The look and feel and – sometimes the frustration – of IKEA assembly instructions. These elements define our experience with a brand well beyond the logo, the ad campaign, and the experience of the products themselves. They are immersive, sensory, sometimes emotional and, because of that, memorable.

These are all examples of intentional brand expression. Organizations spend a considerable amount of time and resources defining their brand and finding effective ways to express it. This is most often understood at the surface level: the logo, the color scheme, photography, the voice and tone in their copy, and even the personalities of their spokesperson. But as digital channels and interactions become the primary means of brand discovery and expression, those experiences become the primary means of defining the brand itself.  Brands still have control over this expression, but it needs to carry over seamlessly to these experiences. Brand translation is catching up with brand expression as a core competency for marketers.

How do you get everything you want to say to all of the people who need to hear it when you are confined to a 5.4-inch mobile screen? It’s easy for the brand – and the experience – to get lost in the medium. As we’ve talked about earlier in this series, the technology alone is not enough to meet customer needs and expectations. Digital channels bring tremendous complexity, but with it, tremendous opportunities for brand translation.

There are many subtle but powerful options for brand translation. When and how you choose to push personalized messages to a customer translates into an expression of how much I know about the customer and what matters to them. The transparency and frequency of order and shipping status conveys a shared openness and anticipation of the fulfillment experience. Even the tone and utility of help messages can assure the customer that you care about ensuring they get their work done. These and many other new options are also new considerations for the experience designer.

Experience design needs to go way beyond the style sheet and the merely creative brand expression.  Building on many other methods we’ve discussed earlier in this series – notably customer empathy and testing – your experience design approach can open up the aperture to make a 5.4-inch screen feel like a 70-inch screen.

What will you do to translate your brand?

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts sharing our study results on the business value of experience design. Read the last post here. This post explores the value of understanding both the limitations and the possibilities of the underlying technologies to drive an optimal product experience.

MC Escher was a Dutch artist famous for creating imaginative but physically impossible scenes. You probably recognize his endlessly looping staircases, convoluted floors and ceilings, birds morphing into fish, and other complicated scenes. They are amazing but impossible to create in the real world. In the same way, imaginative and creative experience designs that can’t be feasibly implemented – either because they don’t fit the timeline and budget or just aren’t technically possible – are equally destined to remain artwork.

Too often, requirements, designs, budgets, and deadlines are set before engineering can figure out possible.  Compromises are made. Dates are missed. Budgets evaporate. Resumes are updated. An exciting pitch deck, complete with a beautiful product comp and clickable prototype, will set high expectations even in an agile world. In our experience, the best digital experiences come from a partnership between the design team and the engineering team.

History is filled with great design and engineering partnerships. Bell and Watson. Jobs and Wozniak.  Jesse and Heisenberg. The yin and yang of design and engineering is a complex relationship that is fascinating yet elusive. One thing for sure: it doesn’t happen by accident. The design and engineering partnership is a deliberate decision to bring the right people, process, and technologies together.

If you’ve been reading this series, you’ve probably noticed that we ask many designers. We ask them to develop customer empathy. We ask them to understand human behavior. We ask them to be innovative and creative. And now we’re asking them to understand the technology they are working with. The modest ask is that the design team build basic fluency with the platforms, environments, and even the type of content and data available to the product team. This may require some onboarding and structured education, but the goal is to develop a general sense of what is possible and where the design might be pushing the envelope.

Another element of a design and engineering partnership is the practice of a shared process and methodology. Communication and trust breakdowns often emerge from disconnected roles and responsibilities, expectations, and handoffs that can be avoided by taking the time to blend various approaches and experiences that designers and engineers bring to the combined team. In the urgency to get projects off the ground, this critical step is often missed but is well worth the time. Fortunately, methodologies like Design Thinking and Scaled Agile have sorted out many of these disconnects and are a great starting point for a deliberate partnership.

Finally, in addition to defining what is possible to accomplish, the technology will influence how flexible the design approach can be. In the early days of monolithic computing, your experience options were limited to a few shades of green screen. Client/server, model/view/controller, progressive web apps, and all sorts of advances have accommodated much more de-coupled architectures that allow for much more flexibility in the possible experiences. A shopping cart can be a complex web page or a single pixel in a digital ad. Add in the promise of low-code and no-code platforms like Appian and Square, and all that your project might be left with is design.

The value of a design and engineering partnership is directly evident in better products and faster projects.  Hopefully, your experience is also resulting in updated resumes – but for all the right reasons.

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts sharing the results of our study on the business value of experience design. Read the last post here. In this post, we explore the value of innovation: Bringing diverse and fresh ideas and perspectives to help the organization think differently, differentiate and future-proof its investments.

Sometimes you need to build a simple web page to let people know that your café is open for business and see what’s on your menu. The page design reflects the warmth and character of the dining room, and it even has some nice shots of the signature dishes. Then there are times where you need to figure out how to transform your little café for touchless ordering and curbside pickup – and keep your staff safe from a global pandemic. The former is creative expression. The latter is innovation by demand!

There are several definitions of innovation, but my favorite (from Paul Sloane) does a great job of connection creativity and innovation: “Creativity is thinking of something new. Innovation is the implementation of something new.” Creativity and innovation are inextricably linked but innovation is not an everyday requirement. But when innovation is the only option, design is critical to understanding the problem and finding a way forward.

Creativity is thinking of something new. Innovation is the implementation of something new.

Before we go too much farther, we should probably level-set on what innovation really is – and is not. Just because something is new, doesn’t automatically qualify it as an innovation. Like Sloane’s definition implies, if it’s not implemented and used in some practical way, it may just be a good exercise in creativity. Secondly, while technology is responsible for many high-profile innovations, not every new technological accomplishment is an innovation. In fact, Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation calls out the diversity and creativity found in process, service, channel, and many other tactics to innovate on. Finally, not all innovation needs to be disruptive, turning the tables over and reinventing entire industries. In the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen points out that sustaining innovations are equally important to make continuous improvement and protect existing models and market share.

One of the most understated and often surprising elements found in successful innovations is the perspective that an outside, unbiased view can bring to the process. The “think out of the box” cliché exists because it is a challenge for teams to change their limited mindset. But no matter how hard we try to do this, we are limited by our own experiences and interpretations. Until we invite a diversity of thought, opinion, and experiences, that box will remain limited. As mentioned before, it starts with customer empathy and revealing what they see, but extending the view from other industries, demographics, and practitioners can be a great tool for stepping back and seeing and noticing things differently.

I’m sure you’re heard the rally cry (or found it on a t-shirt): Innovate or Die! Sounds like a good reason to drop what we’re doing and start building the next greatest mobile app to transform our business! Again, let’s level set. We agree that some part of your business should be innovating and solving new problems. But it’s not realistic to devote time and energy to innovation projects at the expense of keeping the lights on or simply keeping up with customer expectations and competitive pressures. You need a system to balance the effort and make informed decisions about the innovations necessary to stay relevant, differentiate, and grow the business.

We are partial to a couple of systematic ways to bring design and innovation together. Design Thinking is a collection of tools and approaches to develop customer-centered empathy and apply iterative experimentation to solving business problems and create true innovations. It’s been described as “business people thinking like designers thinking like business people” and it can be a challenging experience. But those challenges are exactly what breaks open the problems that Design Thinking teams are solving. Now/New/Next is Perficient’s unique approach to finding that balance between sustaining and disruptive innovations and figuring out where to spend your time on new designs and innovations. It’s a fun, informative, and fast way to get clarity and start making progress.

Next in the series I’ll share how designers can thrive by understand what’s possible – and what isn’t – with the technologies they are working with.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts sharing the results of our study on the business value of experience design. Read the last post here. In this post, we explore the value of a lean design:  A collaborative approach to design that is pragmatic, inclusive, and moves fast to show valuable purpose to the company and its customers.

Design, and everything it entails, comes with many misconceptions and preconceived notions about being an ambiguous, mysterious dark art. There is some truth behind those allegations. Design encompasses the emotional and intangible elements of a product and is often only associated to its limited, tangible aesthetics. Bad product design invokes an instant reaction from the user, but good product design is effortless and therefore unnoticed and even further misunderstood. To compound matters, designers are terrible at explaining the value.

We all want great design, but for many organizations, design is a new or foreign concept. When a new project lands on their desk, it’s like they’ve landed in Oz, the Wicked Witch is not happy, and they just need get home. Frustrated, people tend to buy into myths. The first myth is that the Wizard – a lone design hero – is going bestow deep customer insights into a never-before-seen creative design that will be easy for developers to build in a Tuesday afternoon hackathon. When Wednesday comes and goes and it’s not there yet, the frustrated project team settles in for the long, arduous journey to follow the Yellow Brick Road. They wait weeks for the customer research to come in, another few weeks for the big design reveal to come down from mountain, and hope they can make their release date that has suddenly zoomed into view.

We believe that digital product teams, the customers they serve and their business stakeholders deserve better.

First, we need to consider the value of speed and velocity in product development. The faster the product can bring new value to its customer, the sooner the business can start to see the economic benefits of their investment. Great design teams look for areas to accelerate the design process and interact with their stakeholders more frequently. One of the primary routes to making things faster is simply avoiding the activity that is only adding marginal value to the project. To those without an understanding of design, all of the activity might feel like low-value fluff as they wait for their design hero (or Wizard) to arrive. Less spend on design means more spend on features! But great design also results in better features, and in many cases, eliminates features – and therefore time and money – that just don’t matter to the customer. It’s not always easy but finding the right balance of design effort that is just enough – but not less – can be tricky. Product teams need to have an open and deliberate dialogue about precisely how they are going to incorporate design into their process.

Designers, engineers, and business people working together in perfect harmony? For centuries the project mantra has been: “Cheap, fast, and good. Pick two.“ But digital product teams have the advantage of instant collaboration and communication tools, access to customer and market data, and, for many teams, the ability to prototype, experiment, and test quickly. We have lowered the barriers to transparency and real-time collaboration to allow for an iterative, co-design experience that is simultaneously accessible to designers, engineers, and business people. We can take a feature from an idea in the morning, to a visual prototype in the afternoon, to an interactive, data-driven prototype the next day. Stakeholders and end users can start giving feedback on what they see, engineers have a better understanding of they need to accomplish, and the sales and marketing teams can start formulating their messaging. There is no substitute for this kind of rapid feedback that not only produces a better product, but also demonstrates the real-time value of design, reduces everyone’s anxiety, and builds trust amongst the team.

Alas, there is no Easy Button for this day-in-the-life story, and it does take a holistic organizational commitment to change. But the good news is that there are proven ways to get it done. The iterative process is not new to developers but is relatively new to designers.  A deliberate adoption of Design Thinking, Lean UX, and other iterative process models takes some adaptation and will need some clear-eyed discussion about how it fits into your project funding model and your engineering processes. But these models have matured quickly and pair well with prototyping tools, integrated DevOps models, and dedicated Design System tools that are also readily available. Progressive designers are also taking on more “t-shaped” profiles, having broad design skills with one and sometimes two specializations – even deep technical understanding if not development skills.

Every business deserves to give their customers a well-designed digital experience. In fact, it’s simply not an option given today’s customer demands and expectations. It’s not as easy as closing your eyes and tapping your heels together three times, but you might find that you don’t have look any further than your own backyard.

This is the third in a series of blog posts sharing the results of our study on the business value of experience design. Read the last post here. In this post, we explore the value of knowing the industry:  Applying the unique demands and challenges that the industry category brings to remain competitive and relevant.

In 1944, British grad student John Hellins Quick wrote a detailed technical description of the Turbo Encabulator, a device “to measure inverse reactive current in unilateral phase detractors with display of percent realization.” It went into great detail on features like “panadermic semi-boloid stator slots” and accessories such as the “interelectrode diffusion integrator.” It’s all very convincing but in reality, it’s completely fabricated nonsense and a parody of techno-babble which started an inside joke for engineers that continues to this day. It reached some recognition in the 1970s with this sendup of an industrial video and has inspired variations like this brilliant explanation of the Donnely nut spacing and cracked system rim-riding grip configuration.

The genius of the Turbo Encabulator is how it calls attention to the esoteric details that every expert, every wonk and every geek knows about how things get done – in the weeds and in the trenches where the rubber meets the road.  It became a fun competition to see who can come up with the most ridiculous technical explanation, but it’s also a kind of test to see who is smart enough to know that it’s an inside joke. This “test” is an important ritual for vetting who has the requisite knowledge to get a seat the table as companies look for insiders and experts who are ready to get started on day one. For the design professional, this often means coming in with industry experience and a point of view that will give the team a head start on understanding the customer.

Industry knowledge creates a few advantages for the designer by building a level of built-in customer empathy. For example, understanding what it’s like for a construction manager to order supplies from the job site for the next day is a head start on audience and persona definition. Knowing the difference between a payor and payer – if there is one – might be a head start on building a content strategy.  Understanding the needs of both a patient and the provider when finding a doctor and booking an appointment is a head start on task and user story development. And knowing what interactions make sense when making a table reservation at a restaurant may jump start the design of the same find-a-doctor experience because half of the user research can be explained in those expectations.

All things being equal, industry knowledge is like home field advantage for the design process. It’s a head start because it can shortcut some of the empathy building that comes from up-front research or reduce the initial onboarding and orientation time. It can shortcut some of the ideation cycles when the design starts with experiences and interactions that are already proven to work. At the same time, the design process can also be stunted by old ideas and an experience that lacks differentiation or truly authentic empathy. You’ll get a head start but you may be disappointed with the degree of originality. No worries, we still have strategy and design techniques for that. But better yet, we can borrow from one wellspring of industry knowledge to inform another. This crossover is valuable when one industry is trying to emulate an interaction or experience pattern to innovate on a customer problem, such as the aforementioned table reservation influencing the design of an experience to book a doctor’s appointment.

Knowing your projects’ industry and business environment up front is a fast way to build empathy and get a head start on the design process, getting you to market faster or leaving more time to spend innovating on truly differentiating ideas. More importantly, it can make the difference between splay-flexed brace columns and pin-flam-fastened pan traps.

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This is the second in a series of blog posts sharing our study results on the business value of experience design. Read the first post here. In this post, we explore the value of outcomes: ensuring that every user interaction builds and delivers on the business outcomes that the company is investing in.

As a kid, I was enthralled (like everyone around me) by the Star Wars universe. The heroes, the villains, and the adventure were great fun for everyone, and it is a phenomenon that is as strong today as it was then. But what really got me was the tech: the spaceships, the droids, the intergalactic battle stations. If I could have lived in that universe, I would have spent all my free time hanging out at Tosche Station and tinkering with DIY projects. But one of the most captivating cinematic details in the franchise is the attention paid to the control panels, user interfaces, and industrial design. They are sometimes complex, with hundreds of buttons, dials, and knobs doing who knows that. Other times they are ultra-sleek and sophisticated but for no apparent reason. The logic behind this mysterious mix of analog and digital never mattered. It doesn’t matter because it looks amazing!

Design without a user is just the process of creating something.

In the real world, products are designed for a purpose. They perform a function to solve problems for their users and make their lives better. In the real world, form follows function, which is to say that form (the aesthetics, the feel, the intangibles) also matters. In my last post in this series, I introduced the value of user empathy, which is fundamental to understanding how both form and function matter to product design. Building empathy reveals user needs and preferences so that designers can find the best way to deliver form and functionality.

Any product marketplace exists merely to bring companies and customers together for mutual benefit. Often that benefit is simply an economic one, but equally important are the holistic needs of connecting people, keeping communities running, and, yes, making the world a better place. There is no shortage of user problems, tasks, product features, and functions to explore, and product teams live to find new solutions. But too often, product teams become distracted by the thrill of a new user experience or the awe of new technological innovation to pause long enough to make sure it makes economic sense.

A leader without followers is just a person out on a walk.

Unfortunately, too many product teams are focused on the up-front work-at-hand. Budget and due date are critical, but only one dimension. Burn rate, project velocity, and defect rates tell us how the project is doing. Performance, scalability, and uptime tell us how the platform is doing. But all too often, product teams ignore the intended purpose and outcomes of the product itself. If we delivered on time and on budget, but nobody used it, we should question our career choices. Product owners have a responsibility to set product goals, and outcomes alongside product requirements and designers have an obligation to meet them.

Outcome-based experience design starts with empathy, but that empathy eventually needs to break down into intended outcomes that inform and govern the design process over the product’s lifetime. We believe in a few core, key metrics that work together to guide product teams.

Behavioral Metrics – what user actually do with their experience

• Time on task – Understanding how long it takes users to complete a task is a good indication of how easy your product is to figure out and how easy – or frustrating – it is to use.
• Task completion rate – Are users able to accomplish their tasks before finding some workaround or just giving up completely?
• Conversion – What is the product’s success rate in getting users to accomplish certain desired tasks, like completing a form or checking out an order?
• Order Value – Accomplished through several means, including price and promotion, and making it easy for users to discover products.
• Retention – Do they come back for more? Sometime measured by recency (how long between visits) and frequency (how many times in a time period.)

Attitude Metrics – what customers feel and say about their experience

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a measure of how likely a customer or user will recommend your product to someone else.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – A simple percentage of users who have a positive experience.

Business Metrics – higher-level outcomes that support the overall business model

• Sales revenue, new business, cross-sell, up-sell)
• Leads generated
• Appointment and reservations made.
• Reduced support costs through customer self-service and call deflection

We strongly believe that a focus on both empathy and outcomes will produce a better product. And when those outcomes ladder up to business goals, experience design pays for itself in multiples.

One final lesson from Star Wars. Sure, they had magnificent user interfaces, but somewhere along the line, they shortcut the design process and left that exhaust port completely vulnerable. And that was a terrible outcome.

This is the first in a series of blog posts sharing the results of our study on the business value of experience design. In this post, we explore the value of empathy: revealing how users think, perceive, and interact with digital products and how those product experiences help make their lives easier.

The history of technology – especially digital technology – is filled with great ideas that didn’t quite work out as expected. The Microsoft Zune is almost a case study in product flops. The Segway is still really cool, but do you know anyone who owns one? Google Glass is science fiction come-to-life but it was cancelled after a couple of years. We are constantly enamored by new technology and romanced by a new possibility that we didn’t know existed. After all, we have technology to thank for our very way of life: air conditioning, modern plumbing, refrigeration, DoorDash. We are so enamored, in fact, that sometimes we put all of our faith in the technology alone to come through. But the reality is that the technology works with you, not for you, and in the Age of the Customer, it’s more important than ever to realize that products only exist for the people who use them.

That sounds obvious and intuitive, but what it’s really getting at is putting other matters aside (Can it be done? How much will it cost? How long will it take?) so you can first ask: “What problem does this solve for my customer? What will this product even do for them?”  That can be a challenging shift in priorities. But it also takes a change in mind set as project teams get off the ground. It means understanding who your users and customers are in the first place. It means understanding the jobs and tasks they need to get done. It means understanding the barriers and friction points getting in the way. It also takes an appreciation for the pressures, distractions, and emotions surrounding them. Putting all of this together gives us a powerful insight that is arguably the most powerful design tool: empathy.  Empathy helps a first-time home buyer through a mortgage application. Empathy helps the construction crew leader get the supplies ordered for the job the next day. Empathy helps parents find the right specialists when their child is sick.

Smart experience design ultimately helps you build a better, more effective product because that product is simply doing what the user needs.  But great design is also knowing how to use the product elements to their advantage. Decisions on features, dialogs, alerts, imagery, knowing when to scroll and when to hit “next” add up to the overall success of a digital experience and build on both empathy and raw design talent. These interactions add up to product experiences that not only solve user problems, but they reduce friction and frustration between you and your users. Over time, these experiences come to define the brand itself, eclipsing traditional efforts at building brands through aesthetics and taglines.

As a force multiplier, strong, empathic design teams who also have deep industry and category experience (for example, member portals and the onboarding process) can jumpstart project teams weeks and even months ahead by starting with a very focused customer expectation. Furthermore, a strong design team can identify up to 30 percent of unnecessary engineering costs by cutting out low-priority features and setting up reusable components. Really well-designed products can be so intuitive, they can materially reduce the support and training burden on the organization.

Empathy has been described by some designers as “scraping away all the noise and junk to get down to what the user really needs so that the design presents itself.” For many designers, empathy is design.

Next in this series we’ll share how experience design works to drive user behavior towards specific business outcomes.

Digital disruption continues to accelerate across every industry, including the digital industry itself. The digital agency emerged in the 1990s, soon after companies realized that the web would be driving customers to their business and they needed to drive their customers to their web site.

Digital agencies merged decades-old creative and marketing experience with emerging user experience and interactive technology expertise to accelerate the dot com boom and give countless brick and mortar companies their digital start.

As customers shift their brand interactions further into digital channels, brands and companies are slowly realizing that their customers’ experience with these channels has come to define the brand itself. These implications go far beyond the marketing and creative services that digital agencies have provided historically, as the technology and business interdependencies to support them have become inextricably connected and incredibly complex.

The digital agency mission is being interrupted by the pervasiveness of digital itself and brands and companies are rewriting the rules to meet customers where they are.

Peak Creative

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in the case of digital experience design, it’s a quick way of getting a product off the ground. In this rush to market, brands look to their agencies to ensure that their brand expression is sufficiently creative enough to differentiate them. But, as brands commoditize digital offerings, creative is not enough. The next breakthroughs come from better understanding your customers’ problems and goals.

Shifting Agency + Engagement Models

Now more than ever, companies are opting to bring this expertise in-house and relying on owned data and insights. Hybrid models are disrupting the traditional agency retainer model, and agencies are operating on a project basis or even more-progressive outcome-based engagements. Large consultancies are acquiring boutique agencies in order to scale up or meet flexible client demands for end to end experiences.

Data + Marketing

A clever and creative campaign is no longer enough to make a brand stand out. Relevance is beating creative for customer attention, and relevance is being driven by data. Long ago, the winning campaign was the one the customer liked the best. Today, intelligent software can determine which ad campaign customers are converting on and then adjust ad sets across all channels in moments. The CMO role itself has changed from brand ambassador to brand scientist, demanding more capabilities from agency partners.

Democratization of Production

The days of the editing bay, the studio, and the lab are giving way to Photoshop, the iPhone camera, and videoconferencing. The hardware and software tools for collaboration, prototyping, and creative production are simply more economical, easier to use, and accessible to anyone. Add deepfake and augmented reality technology to this mix, and the creative agency is even further interrupted.

How to Get There

Choosing the right digital partner requires coming to terms with what your customer’s needs are, the unique qualities of your brand, and your organization’s ability to deliver on the brand promise.

Here are some key capabilities to consider when working with a digital partner:

• Understand Your Customer: The right partner will understand your customer and offer solutions that consider the human experience. Today’s customer wants the Amazon Prime experience from all brands. Be sure your partner can deliver customer-centric offerings for your brand.
• Deep Industry Knowledge: The digital needs for the healthcare industry are drastically different than those of manufacturing. Make sure your partner has demonstrated success in your industry first and has results to prove it.
• Technical Knowledge: Make sure your partner has technical expertise across all platforms and technologies your brand requires or may be adding in the future. A deep bench of capabilities is key.
• Agile Approach: Your partner should use iterative or phased planning and continuous integration. Digital is accelerating roadmaps. Be sure your partner is anticipating industry shifts and ready to lead you through today as well as tomorrow.
• A Focus on Business and Digital Operations: Make sure your partner brings strategic leadership in both business and digital. The right blend of consultancy and agency can provide the unique outcome-based solutions your brand needs.

Let Perficient help you on your digital transformation journey. Learn what we do.

Whether you’re checking your bank balance, getting an oil change, or enjoying another curbside pickup for Taco Tuesday, everyone loves a great customer experience.  And if you’re on the other side of that exchange, everyone wants to make their customers happy and coming back for more.  But a great customer experience is not a matter of timing and luck. It takes deliberate, thoughtful planning to orchestrate the right people, processes, products, and, yes, technologies to do it well and consistently. This is especially true for digital experiences where the user experience will dominate the customer experience more than any single factor. Customers want a well-thought-out, engaging user experience that solves their problems and helps them get things done.  It’s not always easy for brands and companies to deliver on these customer expectations, but it’s well worth it.

Perficient’s Digital Strategy and Experience Design teams are missioned with helping our clients deliver the best possible customer experience with their digital investments. It is why we’ve invested in strategy and design teams, in design labs and studios, in tools and methods, and in constantly finding new ways to do it better. It also means taking an active role in understanding what problems and opportunities our clients – some of the best brands and companies in the world – are trying to solve. We recently completed an in-depth research study to reset on a few assumptions and take stock of the experience design profession. We had one big question:

What is the business value of experience design?

We’re excited to share some of our study results in a blog series we’re kicking off here. But first, some background on our research approach.  Our goal was to understand which aspects of experience design make the most difference in accomplishing an organization’s digital experience mission. We started by developing our customer’s voices from 102 companies across eight unique industries, each with fairly large digital experience footprints and dedicated experience design teams. Our participants fell into four job categories: Executives who sponsor the work, Product Owners who define it, UX and Design professionals who design it, and technology professionals who bring it to life.

To further understand what organizations go through to deliver digital experiences, we broke these roles down even further into their collective experience design tasks and responsibilities – known as Jobs-to-be-Done in our methodology. The experience design burden is broad, and it starts with finding new opportunities and markets, deciding which features and functionality customers need, and advocating for customers and users.  Teams need to build organizational consensus and alignment and justify investments in digital products before they can actually create them. Finally, those products and experiences need to communicate brand identity, drive sales and revenue growth, and drive customer loyalty and satisfaction. In case you were looking for a job description, you’re welcome!

After exhaustive surveys and follow-on interviews, we arrived at the most important aspects of experience design that drive an organization’s digital mission. There are too many tasks to mention and far too many aspects to consider in every situation. Still, these eight stand out as the aspects that every organization truly serious about digital experience need to master:

Revealing how users think, perceive, and interact with digital products and how those product experiences help make their lives easier.

Ensuring that every user interaction builds and delivers on the business outcomes that the company is investing in.

Applying the unique demands and challenges that the industry category brings to remain competitive and relevant.

A collaborative approach to design that is pragmatic, inclusive, and moves fast to show valuable purpose to the company and its customers. ​

Bringing diverse and fresh ideas and perspectives to help the organization think outside of the box and future-proof its investments.

Understanding both the limitations and the possibilities of the underlying technologies to drive an optimal product experience.

Translating brand identities into digital products while understanding that the experiences they produce will have an equal or greater impact on brand perception.

Using the power of creativity to stir excitement, reduce anxiety, and express its values helps it stand out from the competition.

In my next eight blog posts, I will detail what it takes to build these capabilities and exactly why they work to drive the best digital experience possible.

Read the full series here

In my last post, I shared the primary insights you need to pull together a Now/New/Next portfolio and get started on making sense of where you stand in the market. In this post, I’ll share how to use those insights to make sense of what to do about it. 

The Approach

For most of us, there is no shortage of problems to solve or great ideas to consider. The trick is – and always has been – to figure out which changes will make the difference for your customers and for your business. Now/New/Next is ultimately about framing your options and giving you a dose of serenity, courage, and wisdom to make the tough decisions. We use the insights and measures we’ve collected to arrange the experiences and capabilities under consideration into six manageable groups and, finally, to balance the portfolio to fit your limited time and resources.  

We’ll start with the six groups: 

Parity 

Parity experiences are those that you and your peers are all delivering to an equivalent degree. These are common, often unnoticed experiences that customers quietly expect in their normal interactions. For example, an online shopping experience is as familiar with most shoppers as checking out in a physical store is. Browsing, adding to a cart, and checking out in a browser follows a pretty regular pattern that is just expected at this point. But over time, there are new elements to that experience that also become expected, like the ability to take different payments options or to pick up my order in a local store. This is why experiences in the Parity bucket need constant attention to maintain that parity status. 

Table Stakes

Table Stakes experiences are similar to Parity – except you’ve somehow slipped behind. Either everyone but you is doing it (talk about peer pressure!) or your version has degraded in some way. The latter is the case with most of our clients, and unfortunately client satisfaction or product quality issues are pulling those experiences much lower than most organizations realize because the expectations and unspoken needs are so much higher in the Now zone. This is why the attention on Table Stakes experiences is to get to the root cause and fix them.

Trending

Trending experiences are those that you and some of your early adopter peers are delivering. Many of these experiences and capabilities are powered by rapidly maturing technologies that have already started to prove themselves out. For example, some smart electronics and appliances have embedded voice-enabled virtual assistants and connected devices. It’s not always high value, but it looks promising and some of the major challenges have worked themselves out. Trending experiences are typically at a crossroads where you need to decide what to do with them. Are they part of your core portfolio or will they play a niche role? Will this become table stakes some day and we need to just make the investment to mature our capabilities? Or should we go the other way and invest in a risky but innovative direction?

Emerging

Emerging experiences are where a few of your fast follower peers are delivering but you haven’t yet taken the leap. It’s on your watch list but it’s hard to tell whether this is working out for anyone, so the urgency isn’t there. But the concept is there, and that is why these experiences exist in experimentation mode and are candidates for pilot projects. 

Differentiating

Differentiating experiences are those that you and you alone deliver amongst your peer group. These are truly unique experiences and capabilities that make up your unique value proposition and continue to prove themselves, but are at risk from being duplicated or simply made irrelevant as needs and tastes change quickly. Netflix is a prime example of a pioneering differentiator in at-home media, quickly pivoting to content creation as it’s differentiating value as traditional media companies ramped up their streaming services. This is why differentiating experiences need constant protection and refinement.

Innovating

Innovating experiences are the ones nobody is doing. They are the differentiating ideas that haven’t happened yet. They are the dreams, the crazy ideas, and the happy accidents. Innovations – particularly disruptive innovations – get a lot of attention because they are typically monumentally heroic tales or tragically disastrous lessons. But real innovation is about ongoing, deliberate, customer-focused improvements that come from intelligent and informed investments.  

So What? 

You collected the insights. You’ve sorted them out. You’ve summoned serenity, courage, and wisdom. It’s time to make decisions.

We’ve mentioned “balancing the portfolio” a few times, and what we mean by that is that you need to make choices that include Now and New and Next experiences all at once. How you apportion them and balance your limited energy, attention, and resources is based on some strategic assumptions. We like to start with the 70-20-10 rule to help guide these decisions. Defined in the 2000 book “The Alchemy of Growth,” the model provides a balanced approach for investing your time and resources. 70% of your focus goes to the highest priority experiences, maybe sustaining or fixing what you’re doing now, while 20% would go toward secondary priorities and emerging experiences and 10% would go toward truly disruptive innovations that will put you ahead of the pack.

Now the 70-20-10 split is not a hard and fast rule. Some organizations may find 50-40-10 a better fit. Others, a more risk-averse 90-5-5. It all depends on where your business sits in the market and where you want to take your business. It’s like investing for retirement. If you’re young and just starting out, you might be more conservative in your investment strategy. Older investors who are further along in their career may need to be more aggressive to achieve their goals. The key here is to balance your innovation portfolio in a way that makes sense for your business.

Now/New/Next is a rapid way to know where you stand and bring the Voice of the Market to help you jump ahead to a quick but informed decision point. It works best to focus further strategy investment where you can validate with primary research and traditional business case analysis, and often with prototype and pilot experimentation. If you want know more or know where you stand in the market, I’d be happy to share more. 

In my earlier post, I shared our motivation for Now/New/Next and why our clients are using it to rapidly make smart decisions to focus their Customer Experience attention. In this post, I’ll share what you need to know to build your Now/New/Next portfolio.

The Approach

At the center of Now/New/Next is knowing where you stand with your customers. In order to do that, you need some insights to help you come to terms with the experiences you deliver, those that your competitors and others bring, and make an honest assessment of how well you’re keeping up. We get here by taking a systematic approach to gathering and measuring those experiences so we can help you build an experience strategy that balances the right amounts of sustaining and disruptive innovation to bring the Now, the New, and the Next together.

What Experiences Are You Delivering?

To get started, we decide where and how much of your business you’re trying to understand. Some clients take on a complete customer lifecycle in order to explore more transformational opportunities and find areas where the organization needs to align and focus. Some clients already have specific areas to optimize. For example, we are working with a client that needs to diversify its customer base. The client needs to develop a narrow strategy for market awareness and customer acquisition, which is where we will focus the effort. In either case, we like to take a customer-journey approach to the inventory, which helps us to systematically identify these experiences, map them to business capabilities, and set up an apples-to-apples comparison against the market.

In the diversification example above, we start taking stock of the awareness and acquisition journey by identifying each interaction across each channel. What kind of content is your website sharing to drive awareness? Maybe you produce a lot of good content, but can you personalize it for specific audiences? Do your product pages include detailed product content like reviews and videos? Do you have a tool to find a dealer? Does it connect to available inventory? Can consumers find you on social media? What kind of email campaigns are you running? The goal is simply to get a current state snapshot so we can find a baseline for comparison.

What Experiences Are Your Customers Expecting

IBM’s Bridget van Kralingen famously stated: “The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want everywhere.” So what are these expectations? With the same customer journey in mind, we choose a handful competitors and a couple of comparables and leaders to find out. The goal is to build the same snapshot we took of your experiences across the broader market, and along the way discover a few potential experiences that you’ve considered and inspirations for new ones. Some clients conduct this competitive analysis periodically, but Perficient also maintains a research-driven benchmark of journeys and experiences across several categories to accelerate this effort.

With this simple picture in front of us, we can start to approximate where you stand, and the big picture suddenly begins to appear. FOMO begins to set in: “Everyone is doing that except for us.” Ideas begin to take shape: “What if we had a scheduling tool that looked like their reservation tool?” Old ideas begin to fade: “We’re the only ones doing that but it’s not really adding value anymore.”

With a relative measure of customer expectations based on whether the experience exists or not, you may have a good start on a new experience strategy. But chances are you’ll need to look a little more closely to find more measurable differences to guide your decision-making.

Do Your Experiences Go Far Enough?

The first dimension to consider is the degree of achievement you’re providing in each experience. By achievement, we are looking at the depth and breadth of that experience: how fully featured it is, how many options you provide, how rich the content is, and generally how far it goes to deliver the most robust experience possible. By measuring and comparing your level of achievement for a given experience, we can start to fine tune how far you really need to go with it. New experiences can get away with a very small and simple set of features. Sometimes a little can go a long way. But as experiences mature, they become more complex and differentiating, and what was exciting last year is just basic and un-differentiating today, which is why the price of a great customer experience is constant vigilance.

Back to our manufacturer example. Let’s say they’ve provided a dealer locator. The most simplistic form of a dealer locator may be a simple list of dealers by city, along with a phone number and a link to their website. Most dealer locators today might offer a more sophisticated locator by zip code. Even more advanced experiences may include views into specific inventory for products or services you’ve been looking for. Even more advanced locators may give you real-time access to schedule an appointment (especially important under social distancing). Now imagine using these ideas, from finding a doctor, setting up a contractor, or making a restaurant reservation, and you start to see the power of cross-category inspiration.

Do Your Experiences Work as Promised?

Now that we’ve sorted out how much we’re delivering, we need to take a hard look at how well we’re doing it. The second dimension to consider is our level of performance. Performance includes a number of factors that describe the overall quality, reliability, and stability of the experience. Does it crash all the time? Are the search results accurate? Are deliveries made on time? Is our phone menu a complex dead-end maze? Although there is some forgiveness with emerging, untested experiences, there is little patience for table stakes experiences that have a high level of expectation to “just work.” Missing your performance expectation with current customers is an easy way to lose revenue, which is why we typically lean toward the Now when balancing the New and the Next.

The performance measure can be a tough pill to swallow when you have to defer a great innovation in favor of shoring up the foundation. But the cost of keeping a loyal customer is far less than the cost of acquiring a new one and why this measure cannot be overlooked.

The Voice of the Market

With these insights, Now/New/Next opens up a collective voice you may not have considered: The Voice of the Market (VOM). It’s not a substitute for the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and the Voice the Business (VOB), but a valuable consideration in the open transparency of digital business. The VOC is vital to confirming whether or not customers even care about the experiences you’re providing. The experiences may meet all expectations, but are they really making a difference in your customers’ lives? We need to listen to the VOB to make sure you can feasibly deliver this in an economical way that fits your long-term business plan. What we love about the VOM is that we’re moving fast to narrow where to focus your research and deeper analysis when you need it.

In the following post I plan to answer, “So what?”: How to make sense of these insights and get to the decisions you need to make for your customers.