UX Design, User Experience, CX: more than just a buzzword, User experience must become a major concern for companies that want to accelerate their transformation. But, what exactly is UX?
You have probably heard of it to describe the experience experienced by a user on a web or mobile interface. However, UX encompasses much broader issues than just navigating a website. In this article, we propose to understand what UX is and how everyone in the company can act on the user experience, so that it becomes a real lever for innovation.
The definition of UX
The term UX or User-Experience was democratized with the emergence of web interfaces and e-commerce sites. Very often, it describes ergonomics and therefore the ability to easily perform a task on an Internet site.
The concept of UX or Customer Experience is actually much broader. It refers to all the benefits and emotions felt by a customer before, during, and after purchasing a product or service. It is the result of all the interactions a customer can have with a brand or company. Therefore, we must talk about UX throughout the entire purchase and usage journey of a product or service.
A salesperson who misleads you is bad UX. A complicated packaging to open contributes to degrading the UX. An incomprehensible user manual, after-sales service that does not respond to your requests are also problems related to UX.
It is possible to evaluate a user experience using 4 main criteria:
- Is the experience effective?
- Does it make the product or service more desirable?
- Is it credible with the positioning/price?
- In short, is it pleasant?
Uber: user experience at the heart of the innovation strategy
Improving the user experience of your products or services will greatly contribute to fostering innovation within your company. To understand, Take the example of Uber. The service offered by Uber is nothing revolutionary: the company offers you the opportunity to sit in the back seat of a car with four wheels and pay the driver to take you from point A to point B.
But where Uber offers an innovative service, it is because The company has identified all the irritants and points of discomfort in the taxi consumption journey (the order, the payment, the experience in the taxi).
Uber then treated them one by one to offer a flawless user experience. This user experience comes first and foremost through the performance of its app and its features, without, however, deploying incredible technology.
User experience is therefore at the heart of Uber’s innovation and development strategy. To retain its customers, Uber must therefore ensure that this flawless UX is maintained, because it is on this variable that the company plays its differentiation.
The Experience Map to improve your users’ experience
To improve the user experience, you first need to understand and map out your customers’ buying and consumption patterns. To do this, you can use a tool called Experience Map, which will allow you to accurately trace your customer’s journey and points of interaction with your company, before, during and after the purchase.
1/ Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. By experiencing the same experience they have with your product or service, you will be able to identify all the irritants they encounter along the way. Again, we recommend the tool Empathy Map, which will help you find the sensations experienced by your customers throughout their experience.
2/ Treat all these irritants methodically
3/ Make sure you offer a user experience that is consistent with the new consumer habits of BIOPAU, particularly in terms of speed, autonomy, the multiplicity of available channels, and personalization.
4/ Use data, predictive marketing or even artificial intelligence to customize the user experience to the fullest extent possible.
5/ Finally, constantly test new things, gathering customer feedback and continuously improving the UX.
UX: a philosophy to be shared by the entire company
Because, as we’ve said, user experience is not just about improving the ergonomics of a web interface; it’s about rethinking all the points of contact that a customer has with your product/service., Everyone within the company is concerned with UX and must be an active participant in its improvement.
From executives to logistics to marketing and sales teams, everyone can influence UX positively or negatively.
It is therefore appropriate to’adopting a user-centric vision at all levels of the company, and that improving the customer experience is an objective at the heart of the mission of every employee.
Finally, while we talk a lot about customer or user experience, let us bear in mind that user experience also has to involve the company’s employees. We need to take care of them by offering tools, working conditions and operating methods that encourage the employee experience. This positive employee experience will, in turn, give them the desire to work hard to improve the customer UX… And the cycle is complete 🙂