This fifth and final blog in the series dealing with the 5 types of experience, is all about user experience.
Let me start once again with a modest disclaimer: simply reading this blog will certainly not make you a UX expert.
And I will be focusing on the development of completely new services, innovation and qualitative UX surveys that can prove so useful.
The purpose of this blog is to ensure that you know how to connect UX to the other types of experience, in order to use all 5 to raise the experience within your organization to a higher level.
And how you can apply the quantitative insights in order to continuously improve the user experience.
Scope of user experience
Theoretically, this is the definition of UX:
“User experience focuses on everything to do with the interaction of a user with a product, either digital or physical.”
In practice however, you will see most organizations only applying UX in the digital field.
Once again, the purpose is to reduce complexity and connect to daily practice, which is why I use the narrow, purely digital definition of UX.
I can hear you thinking: “but Zanna, how about service design if you define it so weirdly?”
As far as I’m concerned, service design is mainly an added value if you truly want to innovate.
So rather than improving products or services, you actually develop completely new services for your customers.
And yes of course, you can also use service design techniques to optimize your existing services.
And enough organizations already do so, so that is certainly valuable, especially in the role of product owners.
And yes, you can define just about anything done by your organization to be customer experience, and you wouldn’t be really doing anything wrong.
And yes, within service design, you also make use of user research and user design.
And before you know it, you’ll be drowning in the marshes of all kinds of overlapping disciplines.
For the sake of pragmatism and clarity, I therefore strictly segregate them so that everyone can understand what’s what within the own organization, and what roles people play.
As soon as that becomes clear, then it’s okay to connect them all up again.
From this perspective, user experience is all about improving the digital experience.
Challenges of user experience
The main challenge I encounter in practice is the many variants of measuring the UX in order to improve it.
I’m not referring to conversion here, as organizations already measure that, so that the optimization process is already underway.
Instead, my focus lies on measuring the user’s experience.
Some people measure an NPS on a specific page, others measure the CES, and others measure nothing at all, while the last group simply uses a 5-smiley measurement to request feedback.
In other words, I often see two things going wrong: the use of the metric(s) and the process of what to do with those insights.
Let me start with the first one.
Do you recognize this situation?
“We need to look for a better tool to measure the UX, because we’re gathering all kinds of data but nobody is doing anything with it.”
Of course, doing nothing with it has very little to do with tooling.
Measuring processes have often been initiated, on the website for example or in the app, and it stops there.
Nobody makes use of the insights gathered, for example because it’s all open text which takes far too much effort to analyze.
So before you start thinking about a metric, you’ll first need to choose what you want to improve and what the improvement process should look like.
Let’s imagine that I want to improve the ordering process in the app.
Step 1 should then be to determine, as a team and/or product owner, (1) what is not working well, (2) how to measure that, (3) how long you want to measure it and (4) how you will apply the insights found.
You therefore need to start by discussing a practical, short measurement and improvement cycle, before embarking on your quest for tooling.
Metrics of user experience
As we’re using the narrow definition of UX, namely improvement of the digital experience, we can ask very specific questions.
This often concerns a certain page or one or two screens within the site, app or (CRM) system if you want to consider the UX of your employees.
And as we all already know, convenience is crucial for a good digital experience.
And so I’m sure you can guess which metric is most useful in this case: the customer effort score.
You must however use it very specifically.
You always use this basis: “….. makes it easy for me to…..”.
So if I want to improve the ordering page in the app, my CES question should be as follows:
The app of organization X makes it easy for me to place my order.
You therefore start off very specifically and focused on where you will measure the CES, and you end in the same way.
You’re actually tailoring the CES variant for each location where you measure it.
As these are such specific and also quite transactional questions, 1 question and an open answer will certainly be enough here. Followed by the use of smart AI analyses.
Remember to make the open answer specific to the score I give, think in terms of:
1 or 2: Whoops, we didn’t do very well there! Can you name 1 thing that made it unnecessarily complex for you?
3 and 4: Hmm, we need to do better! Can you name 1 thing that would have made it easier for you?
5: Fantastic, great to hear that we’ve made it very easy for you, thank you!
Connection to the other types
Convenience is the basis for any online experience. But….. As an organization, you’re looking for more than that.
You want to ensure that I, as your customer, also experience a consistent brand experience in all my digital contacts.
You want to ensure that when personal attention is the main driver throughout my ordering journey (customer experience), that every digital development contributes to this feeling of personal attention.
All product owners responsible for the digital products of your organization should therefore not only apply convenience-related design principles, but also the principles behind brand- and customer experience.
To summarize
If you’re looking for more than simply a standalone user experience based on convenience, make sure that you connect your UX to all other types of experience.
You combine the hard online behavioral data (conversion, clicks, etc.) with the insights gained from the very specific customer effort score questions.
Your user experience then contributes to an optimum, integrated experience throughout all the journeys.
Another tip: combine all insights gained from brand, customer and user experience, and develop a practical workshop for all your product owners.
They will then learn the precise criteria that their digital products must meet, and you create a standardized measuring process instead of allowing everyone to do it their own way.
I hope you enjoyed this 5-part series on the 5 types of experience!
