Customer Experience - Big Nerd Ranch Tue, 20 Sep 2022 20:30:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 The 5 Steps of the Digital Customer Journey https://bignerdranch.com/blog/the-5-steps-of-the-digital-customer-journey/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/the-5-steps-of-the-digital-customer-journey/#respond Wed, 22 Sep 2021 20:43:58 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7759 A customer’s journey with a business can make all the difference, whether it’s physical or digital. Read on to learn more about a digital customer journey and how you can utilize it for your business.

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Picture it: Your coworker tells you about this great new coffee shop in town. Suddenly you start to see flyers and stickers for this coffee shop everywhere on your commute to and from work. You think to yourself that maybe it’s worth giving this coffee shop a chance, so the next day you stop by. Not only is the coffee amazing, but the staff is super friendly. They even give you a free cookie with your purchase. 

You had an excellent experience. This is now your favorite coffee shop.

When we consider the digital side of things, there’s a process that starts with someone first learning of your company to actually becoming a loyal customer.

The customer’s first point of contact with your brand, all the way to their final purchase, subscription, or outreach on your website, is known as the digital customer journey.

What is the digital customer journey?

The digital customer journey is the path an online user takes to find your business. It’s a journey that’s made up of every single interaction a customer has with your company, from social media to your actual website.

There are five parts to the digital customer journey experience:

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Fulfillment – commitment (email signup, form fill, something where they interact)
  4. Experience
  5. Loyalty

1. Awareness 

This is the point in the customer journey where you’re on the radar and your next customer first notices your brand. This can be through many different doors, from word of mouth to social media or ads. This is when first impressions are made and where you can reach your customers. One of the most significant differences to the digital customer journey as opposed to the physical-digital customer journey is that you have stronger control over your message with the digital journey. You control where your digital ads are displayed through social media, your website, and ad placement.

2. Consideration

Your customer has heard of you and is now thinking about how you might be able to help them. This is the step in the customer journey mapping where they visit your website and actually start to engage with your company and brand either directly on the site, through reviews on the internet, or social media. Once again, you have complete control here. Do you want the customer to truly consider your offer? Having a great website will help with that. Having excellent copy and a clear call to action also doesn’t hurt. 

3. Fulfillment 

In our coffee shop example, the fulfillment stage means an actual purchase. In the digital world, this could be a purchase, but it could also be a newsletter signup, a follow, or even a page view. Because fulfillment can mean many different things, it’s essential to define exactly what fulfillment looks like for you and your company. As part of your digital strategy, make sure you define your goals. This helps to ensure that the fulfillment you’re getting is what you want. Page views are great, but if you really want newsletter signups, make sure that’s what you’re tracking for so you don’t get lost in a sea of data.

No matter what action takes place, fulfillment is the place in your customer journey map where your customer commits. They’ve done their research and have decided that your product or service can solve their problem.

4. Experience

Does your product or service live up to your promises? This is where the customer will determine if what was expected is what they received and determine if they are satisfied. It is also where the first impression of your customer service takes place and can play a huge part in overall customer satisfaction. This is also why it’s essential to know the principles of customer experience for your business. 

So, if you promised a newsletter but didn’t deliver, that’s a bad experience. Or, if they fill out the “Contact Us” form and someone is in touch with them the same day? That’s a fantastic experience. 

Experience is arguably the most important step because this is where retaining a customer and creating loyalty takes place. Without great experience, the first three steps don’t mean much because a bad experience will deter a customer from making it to the next and final step: loyalty.

5. Loyalty

If your product or service delivers exactly what your customer expects, congratulations, you just gained a new loyal customer. Customer loyalty is all about whether or not your customer actually continues to use your service or product.

Although the physical customer experience journey is linear, the digital customer experience takes place as a big ole circle where all the touch points are connected. For example, the loyalty step feeds directly back to the awareness step because if you gain a loyal customer, they are more likely to pass on the good word about your product or service to their friends and family and even share on social media.

The circular digital customer journey tends to get just a bit complex, where certain steps are either skipped altogether or combined with another step. For example, let’s say your favorite YouTuber highly recommends a mobile app that up until now you had never heard of but now, after their raving review, you suddenly feel compelled to download. 

In one fell swoop, you were made aware of this product, considered it, and have followed through with fulfillment.

How The Digital Customer Experience Relates to CX.

The digital customer journey is also directly related to Customer Experience because a great Customer Experience also starts with awareness and ends with loyalty. Customer Experience is all about listening to your customers’ wants and needs. If customers feel heard, they are more likely to not only continue purchasing your product but are also likely to share with others how great your product or service is.

Great Customer Experience can also help to figure out why customers are getting stuck at certain stages in the digital customer journey. Maybe customers are making it to the Consideration stage and visiting your website but not actually making a purchase. By conducting exercises such as surveys, you will be able to figure out exactly why customers are not acting in the way that you expect them to—and how make the right changes.

Understanding the digital customer journey and how it works for a business is essential to reaching a potential customer and keeping a loyal one. Customer behavior, interaction, and experience, whether digital or physical, make all the difference for a business. Gaining customer loyalty and engagement can build your business community.

It’s Time to Turn Visitors into Loyal Customers

Here at the Ranch, we take the Digital Customer Journey seriously. We know that a great Customer Experience and amazing digital product can turn customers into super fans and help you hit your goals. Since a customer can often make multiple touch points with your brand, we use an iterative approach of proven CX strategies to help you validate your assumptions or offer a new path to success. 

Ready to get started? Get in touch (and we promise an actual human will call you).  

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4 Things to Look for in a Customer Experience (CX) Agency https://bignerdranch.com/blog/4-things-to-look-for-in-a-customer-experience-agency/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/4-things-to-look-for-in-a-customer-experience-agency/#respond Mon, 16 Aug 2021 15:23:39 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7692 Customer Experience (CX) is at the core of every successful and sustainable company. As such, it’s essential to be knowledgeable on and apply the principles of customer experience to your business. The trick is to get from knowing you need it to actually putting it into place. That’s where a great Customer Experience agency comes into […]

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Customer Experience (CX) is at the core of every successful and sustainable company. As such, it’s essential to be knowledgeable on and apply the principles of customer experience to your business. The trick is to get from knowing you need it to actually putting it into place. That’s where a great Customer Experience agency comes into play. 

A great Customer Experience agency can help to improve your company’s relationship with your customers for the better. Picking the right CX agency can seem daunting at first but it doesn’t have to be. Don’t worry, we’re here to help. 

Here are 4 things to look for in a CX agency:

  1. Uncover challenges you didn’t even know existed
  2. Remain solutions-oriented throughout the entire process
  3. Turn your customers into superfans 
  4. Help you hit business goals

1. A great Customer Experience agency helps you find challenges you didn’t even know existed.

Finding the right solution is important but to find the right solution, you have to first find the right challenge. And by that we mean the issue that is most impacting your user and most likely to be the reason why your digital product isn’t working as well as it should.  

The big obstacle is that the user-specific issues might not be obvious. A good CX agency conducts user and stakeholder interviews, deep dives into the tech, and, above all, observes actual users using the digital product. In doing so they reveal not just the clear challenges, but those that are underneath the surface as well. In essence, it’s about data, all of which directly influences the next point. 

2. A great Customer Experience agency is solutions-oriented.

The extensive research of the first point is all collecting information and better understanding the problems. The good news is that there are probably tons of solutions out there. The hard part is finding the right solution for you and your company. 

That’s where context comes into the picture. A solutions-oriented Customer Experience agency takes the problems at hand and overlays them with the company goals. The solutions that best match up to both the problem and the goal are the ones that rise to the top. See, a great Customer Experience agency doesn’t just find a solution, they find the best solution possible. And they do that by utilizing the best of the best from various fields – design, project strategy, engineering, and more. We connect with the right people to find the right solution.

3. A great Customer Experience agency helps to make your users happy.

The ultimate goal of any digital product should be to provide the best experience possible for your users. That’s done by listening to your customers and finding the solutions that best answer the needs they expressed. 

The result is that you aren’t just adding new features and functionality to your app just to add them but instead are focusing on the features and functionality that actually improves their experience. So, your users are heard, they’re happy, and pretty soon, they are super fans. 

4. A great CX agency helps you hit your business goals.

Bottom line? Well, it’s your company’s bottom line. And providing great Customer Experience is great business. It’s vital that your users have the best experience possible, but it’s also important that your company’s goals are kept in mind throughout the process. 

A CX agency will ensure both. And they’ll do that by moving through the entire process with purpose and an eye on both the user’s and the company’s needs. It can be a tricky line to walk, but an agency will have the experience and skills to walk it with confidence.  

At the Ranch, you’ll find all that and more. 

We’re here to help. We’ve got a team of Customer Experience experts ready to take a deep dive into your digital product and help you walk that line between being user-focused and keeping a laser focus on your company’s goals. Ready to get started? Get in touch and let’s chat! 

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The Five Principles of Customer Experience https://bignerdranch.com/blog/the-five-principles-of-customer-experience/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/the-five-principles-of-customer-experience/#respond Fri, 09 Jul 2021 15:08:11 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7614 We’ve discussed the importance of Customer Experience before. Customer experience encapsulates every interaction between your company and them—online, in-person, and across platforms. From the initial digital customer journey and customer support to their eventual success and satisfaction. At this point, offering a great customer experience as a service is vital to helping your company stand […]

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We’ve discussed the importance of Customer Experience before. Customer experience encapsulates every interaction between your company and them—online, in-person, and across platforms. From the initial digital customer journey and customer support to their eventual success and satisfaction. At this point, offering a great customer experience as a service is vital to helping your company stand out from the rest, especially in the digital space. There are five principles of Customer Experience to keep in mind. 

The Five Principles of Customer Experience

  1. Lead With Questions and Listen
  2. Pair Your Data With Context
  3. Work Towards Continuous Improvement
  4. Build for Humans
  5. Keep Your Business Goals in Mind

From the outside looking in, Customer Experience might seem like a daunting task to get started on. To help make it a bit more approachable, let’s take a deeper look at five of the basic principles of customer experience through the lens of a digital product.   

1. Lead With Questions 

Two of the most important elements of Customer Experience are asking questions and listening. See, the main reason Customer Experience as a service exists at all is to work towards the best product that your customers want and need. Remaining receptive to feedback and keeping the customer needs top of mind at all times ensures your product goals are aligned with theirs. Basically, Customer Experience helps you find the intersection of what you think and what actually is. Asking “why” is vital. 

In practice, that means user and stakeholder interviews where you dig into what parts of your digital product are working and what parts could use some help. It’s also putting your app through a host of tech assessments, and just some good old-fashioned observation. 

2. Pair Your Data With Context

The great thing about interviews and tech assessment is that you’ll end up with a lot of information about a lot of different aspects of your digital product. The downside? You’ll end up with a lot of information about a lot of different aspects of your digital product.

See, data for the sake of data is pretty much useless. Sure, you might be able to formulate insights, chart a trend here or see a pattern there, but without putting some context to match against that data, you’ll be lost. 

In the case of a digital product, the context you’ll need will largely revolve around your users’ interactions as well as how they experience your app.  For example, overlaying the expected path a user would take to fill out a form with the actual path they end up using. In comparing your expectations with your users’ reality, you’ll have a better understanding of how to improve things. 

3. Work Towards Continuous Improvement 

We’ve previously touched on what’s known as the critical feedback loop—or tapping into your customers’ feedback and expectations for your app and baking that into your future plans. Basically, it’s the idea of continuous improvement. 

It goes something like this: you’ve listened to the feedback, added some context to it, and now you’re implementing new features and functionality. Your users are thrilled! Mostly. So, you listen to feedback, add context…you get the idea, right? 

The ideal end result is an app that is constantly evolving to meet the needs of your users and provide them with the experience they want and need. The best part? You’ll get happy users and a fantastic app. 

4. Build for Humans

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day business of Customer Experience and app development as a whole and forget that we’re building things for actual human beings. So while this last point is a bit abstract, it’s one of the most important principles of Customer Experience, and, to be honest, of doing business as a whole. So what do we mean by “build for humans”? 

Perhaps the best way to think of it is to bring as much empathy to each and every portion of your project. Put yourself in your users’ place, imagine how they see your app and the changes you’d most like to see in that case. Try and identify pain points potential customers might experience—and how you might be able to solve or work around them. 

And, perhaps most importantly, remember that at the end of the day your digital product will be its best when the majority of people enjoy using it. Remaining customer and user-focused will allow you to continuously build products that will both fulfill a need and offer a great customer experience.

5. Keep Your Business Goals in Mind

While Customer Experience is largely focused on the, well, customer, it’s also important to make sure that you’re hitting your business goals. These aren’t at all mutually exclusive, however. The good news is that ensuring your users have the best experience possible often leads to hitting your internal goals. 

The key here is to set specific goals from the start and keep an eye on them throughout the process, knowing that those goals might shift as the project goes on. It’s a balancing act between what is best for the user and what is best for your business. And that line can often be found by investing in a Customer Experience engagement.  

Turning Principles Into Practice

Now that you’ve got these customer expereience principles in mind, you might be wondering just how to get started. Keep reading about the four things to look for in a customer experience agency or reach out today! We’ve got a team of Customer Experience experts ready to take a deep dive into your digital product and help you walk that line between being user-focused and keeping a laser focus on your company’s goals. Ready to get started?

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A Great Digital Product Isn’t Enough Anymore https://bignerdranch.com/blog/a-great-digital-product-isnt-enough-anymore/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/a-great-digital-product-isnt-enough-anymore/#respond Thu, 01 Jul 2021 17:08:28 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7593 How Customer Experience Creates Super Fans and Helps Your Brand Stand Out You’ve done it. After months (or years) of dedicated hard work, you’ve launched your amazing new digital product out into the world. Or maybe you’ve added some amazing new features to your existing app and they are finally ready to see the light […]

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How Customer Experience Creates Super Fans and Helps Your Brand Stand Out

You’ve done it. After months (or years) of dedicated hard work, you’ve launched your amazing new digital product out into the world. Or maybe you’ve added some amazing new features to your existing app and they are finally ready to see the light of day. Now, it’s time to sit back and let the good times roll, right? 

Since you’re here, we’re guessing you know the answer to that. We’re now to the point that just having a great digital product isn’t enough. To make things even more complicated, your company has to be in tune with your users, ensuring that you’re providing not just the experience that they want, but the one that they need. 

That’s where Customer Experience comes into the mix. But how can Customer Experience help your digital product, and by extension, your brand, stand out from the competition? 

Continuous Improvement of the Things That Matter

At its heart, Customer Experience is about listening to your users. It’s about looking at the breadth of their interactions with your product and brand and learning what is important to them, what’s working with your app, and what needs to change. This could be anything from “the colors make it hard to read the text” to “I really wish you’d add the ability to share a form with my teammates.” 

In essence, you’re getting the upper hand on your competitors from literally the most important source in the world—the actual users of your digital product. As you incorporate that feedback, you can do so knowing that you’re not just adding features or functionality for the sake of adding them but focusing on the things that will make a better experience for your users. 

So, listen, build, repeat. This is called a critical feedback loop, though we like to refer to it as the Awesome Feedback Loop because the result is a digital product that is user-focused and, most importantly, one that stands out from the crowd. 

Happier Users + More Users

Once you’re well into the Awesome Feedback Loop, you’ll ideally see a couple of things begin to happen. The first is that your current users will go from being customers to being fans. And why not? Everyone loves being heard, but seeing that feedback put into action takes that relationship to the next level. 

The second great thing is that you’ll find that your app is attracting a whole new customer base. In part because the changes, updates, and other bells & whistles you’ve put into place for your current customers are probably the same ones that new users have been craving. Also, your customers turned fans are going to talk and share their great experience with others. 

Bottom Line? A Better Bottom Line.

Following through on a successful Customer Experience project can, in the best case, create super fans of your current users and bring in new customers at a brisk pace. But even if the best case is still a ways off, you’ll have a digital product that keeps getting better as you continue to listen and respond. It’s a win for your company, and, most importantly, it’s a win for your users. 

And that highlights the real benefit of bringing Customer Experience to your company—you’ll find that the decisions you make for your business are inherently those that are best for your users. It’s a mindset as much as a process. As a digital product development agency, we can help bring your ideas to life.

It’s Time to Tap Into the Awesome Feedback Loop

All of this might seem daunting, but don’t worry, we’re here to help. We’ve got a crack team of Customer Experience experts ready to help you help your users. So, if you’re ready to get started on your next project or would like to just chat about how you might begin, be sure to give us a shout

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Customer Experience (CX) vs. User Experience (UX) https://bignerdranch.com/blog/the-difference-between-user-experience-and-customer-experience/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/the-difference-between-user-experience-and-customer-experience/#respond Tue, 22 Jun 2021 10:00:55 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7576 You know how every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square? User Experience and Customer Experience are kind of like that. Allow me to explain CX vs UX a little more. User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) have many similarities, but ultimately User Experience is just a piece of the […]

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You know how every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square? User Experience and Customer Experience are kind of like that. Allow me to explain CX vs UX a little more.

User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) have many similarities, but ultimately User Experience is just a piece of the bigger puzzle that is Customer Experience. Having a great UX is fundamental to the daily use of an app. If it doesn’t look good or is confusing to use, you’ll lose customers.

Customer Experience (CX) allows you to determine what things need to be fixed, clarified, or added on to when it comes to your digital product as defined by customers’ relationship with your digital product through customer loyalty and customer feedback. And to really begin to put together these puzzle pieces, it’s vital first to understand why User Experience and Customer Experience are important, individually, before comparing CX vx UX. 

What is User Experience?

User Experience (UX) encompasses everything that your user, well, experiences, when they use your app. From the color scheme to the font size to how the information is laid out. At the end of the day though, UX is based on a single interaction, and can still make or break your app if the CX designer is not careful.  

Bad UX looks like a user having difficulty navigating to another page due to the buttons being hard to find, poor color combinations that make it hard to read text or information that isn’t laid out as expected.

On the other hand, good UX is as easy as one, two, three, and makes it so the user can easily achieve their end goals with no problems. Having color choices within your interaction design foundation that easily signal the next steps, and making it easy to find the correct buttons and links through effective sizing, font, and colors are just two examples of good User Experience.

Based on this information, it can seem as though if an app has a great User Experience due to a well-built user interface design, then they’ve won. They’ve won the Great App Experience™ award, which as of now isn’t an actual award but maybe it should be. But User Experience is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait, there’s more? Yes, there’s so much more to creating a positive experience. 

User Experience is only one part of Customer Experience

As earlier stated, User Experience revolves around a single interaction. The user logs into your app and the UX is what they see and how they navigate. 

Customer Experience, on the other hand, is made up of every single interaction your customers have over time with your brand.  In other words, Customer Experience is the understanding behind the how and why in regards to your users’ interactions with your company in any context. 

Depending on your brand or company, it can be with your digital products (app, website), physical locations (employees at a store) or remote support (employees at a call center). Creating a holistic and positive experience that connects each context to support the goals and needs of your customers is no small job. Where do you start?

Customer Experience is about listening to your users

Customer Experience is about reading into customer satisfaction to learn what your users want and need from your company and figuring out ways to improve their overall experience. Maybe your users are telling you that the wording on your app could be better and therefore make it easier to find what they need. It could be as simple a fix as swapping out the word ‘portfolio’ for ‘profile’. It could be that the system your employee is using doesn’t have access to the same information your customer facing app does and this causes confusion when they try to solve a support problem.  

But how can a company figure out what its users need? Great Customer Experience design is about listening to your users when they tell you what is and isn’t working within the overall experience. How do you “listen” to your users? You use research techniques that allow you to capture what is really going on whether that is interviews, observations, surveys or analytics. They’re basically offering you the cheat code to creating a fantastic digital product. It’s up to you to use it to create a positive experience.

So what is the ultimate difference between user experience and Customer Experience?

In short, UX is what your customer interacts with on a day-to-day basis. It’s each and every button tap, search, or form fill out in your digital product. Customer Experience, on the other hand, is the entirety of all of those interactions for each and every customer. 

So, having a great UX design throughout the entire customer journey is fundamental to the daily use of your app. If it doesn’t look good or the user’s interaction with it becomes confusing, you’ll lose customers. Customer Experience allows you to take a relationship’s worth of use and determine what things need to be fixed, clarified, or added on to when it comes to your digital product. It also enables you to make changes to your app that make sense in the long run, helping you avoid things like Design Debt

In other words, the understanding that comes from Customer Experience can inform the details of your User Experience. Considering hiring customer experience experts? Check out the four things to look for in a customer experience agency

Are you ready for your own cheat code? 

Here at the Ranch, we take a measured and informed approach to Customer Experience. Since there are often multiple ways of solving challenges related to a customer interactions, we use an iterative approach of proven CX strategies to help you validate your assumptions or offer a new path to success for a good customer experience. 

Ready for change? Reach out to us and let’s get started.

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How to Best Manage Design Debt https://bignerdranch.com/blog/how-to-best-manage-design-debt/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/how-to-best-manage-design-debt/#respond Wed, 16 Jun 2021 15:22:34 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7573 And avoid it in the future. Have you ever been in a building that’s had several additions to it and the whole layout just seems confusing? Sure, all the types of rooms you need are there, but the flow is way off, and the door labeled “restroom” leads to a closet? It feels wrong and […]

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And avoid it in the future.

Have you ever been in a building that’s had several additions to it and the whole layout just seems confusing? Sure, all the types of rooms you need are there, but the flow is way off, and the door labeled “restroom” leads to a closet? It feels wrong and leads you to places you least expect. 

That’s your app with a healthy dose of design debt. The look and feel are off and the provided information doesn’t quite line up with what’s expected. But don’t fret, we’re here to help. 

We’ll take a look at the two major components of the UI and UX of your app—Visual Language and Information Architecture—and then walk through how to best dig out of that nasty debt. Finally, we’ll take a look at some steps to best avoid design debt in the future.

Visual Language and Information Architecture

Visual Language

The very first thing a user notices about your app is the look and feel of it. Now, we can talk all day about User Experience (UX) and how vitally important it is (and, it is!), but the visual identity, or language, is the first impression. 

Visual language describes all the things a user sees when they first open your app. So, not just your color scheme and font choice, but the size of your navbar and how rounded your buttons are. Having a consistent visual language is vital for an app, not just because it looks great, but because it helps the user navigate. If all the buttons to submit information are the same then the expectation for what those buttons do is clear at a glance.   

Often, a lack of visual consistency is the first sign of design debt. Maybe buttons don’t match a style or font sizes are all over the place and vary by 1-2pts. Basically, it looks like a cobbled together app with several styles thrown together. 

But having a clear visual language isn’t always enough. In fact, a strong visual consistency can actually mask some more deep-rooted UX Design Debt issues like poor information architecture. 

Information Architecture

In essence, Information Architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing, structuring, and labeling content in a way that allows your user to know where they’ve been, where they are, and where they are going in your app. So, it’s not just that your buttons are located where they should be, it’s that the text on them is clear and expected as well. 

When IA is done well, your users have a clear sense of the path they should take to achieve their goals. For example, if someone is ordering food through an app, they would rightly expect the menu button to take them to the menu. 

If the menu button instead takes them to the location address, that’s a problem. Poor Information Architecture can unintentionally hide important features, confuse your users, and, ultimately, lead those same users to abandon your app altogether.  

So now that we’ve talked about all the things that can go wrong, how do we fix it all?

Digging Out of Debt

To best work yourself out of debt, you first have to find all the issues you can and then begin solving them. 

Step 1: Design Audit

A design audit looks at both the visual elements of your app and how the information is presented. The end result is an analysis of the overall user experience that identifies visual inconsistencies and pain points while offering suggestions for a way forward. 

In practice, an audit will help you further define your app’s experience so that your users get the most out of their interactions. That means you’ll get guidance for visual style, color, and typography to ensure that the look and feel of your app is consistent throughout. You also get a list of critical usability flaws, the type that can be actual blockers to your app’s success. 

Finally, a design audit will take a hard look at your IA and determine what’s clear and what needs some help. Is all your labeling accurate? When you click a button that says “Contact Us” are you taken to a form or another, random page? 

Now that we’ve got the list, it’s time to start the clean-up. 

Step 2: Reduce, reuse, recycle 

The good news about cleaning up design debt is that we rarely have to start all over. In fact, one of the best ways to pay down design debt is by recycling previously used content, components, and visuals, a concept best illustrated through Cradle-to-Cradle Design. In a nutshell, Cradle-to-Cradle Design is the concept of taking a product that is no longer useful or wanted, breaking it down into its essential parts and using those parts to build something new.  

This is most often seen in physical products, like an electric toothbrush. We can take all the individual parts of the toothbrush—the tiny wires, springs, and motor—and break them down, reconfigure them, and then repurpose them in a new toothbrush. But how do we do that in a digital product? 

For this example, let’s consider an app designed to create and submit forms while also allowing team members to collaborate using that shared information. We’ll start with our main navigation bar—the same navbar that you’ve been iterating on, adding content to, and implementing new features in for the past three years.  Now, your navigation bar is bloated

Let’s start by breaking down our navbar into its individual components, both from a visual and content standpoint. It’s an easy lift to get our color scheme set and make sure our fonts are consistent, so let’s move to the content. 

In looking at our ‘reports’ and ‘teams’ tabs, we can take a step back and try to find new connections that allow us to reorganize and restructure. Maybe we now understand that the most important feature to know about our team is how their reports are connected to one another. So let’s merge teams and reports together and see what that looks like. 

Now it’s clear where your users should go to both create and share reports with one another. We’ve eliminated a step and cleared up any possible confusion with our IA. 

How to Avoid Design Debt

Unfortunately, there’s no way to completely avoid acquiring any debt, but there are things you can do that will ensure you and your team avoid the vast majority. Put simply, it comes down to planning. 

Start by making sure your project team is set up for success by creating a single source of truth for all things visual—things like button styles and font usage. It’s important the entire team has access to the style guide and usage documentation so that everyone on the team has the information they need to check where simple styling inconsistencies may show up. 

Second, focus on your Information Architecture. Make sure that you’ve put the time in to discover how your customers will use your app and what they expect from it. A lot of this context comes from an in-depth Customer Experience project and will help you make the best decisions possible in regards to how your information is laid out. 

BNR—The Debt Erasers

If all this seems daunting, don’t worry, you’ve got support. From a Big Nerd Ranch Design Audit to a full-blow Customer Experience project, we’re here to help dig you out of debt and, best case, start you on the right path before any accumulation even begins. Get in touch and let’s get started. 

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What is Customer Experience (CX) and Why it’s Important https://bignerdranch.com/blog/what-is-customer-experience/ https://bignerdranch.com/blog/what-is-customer-experience/#respond Wed, 02 Jun 2021 18:09:54 +0000 https://bignerdranch.com/?p=7543 It’s not a secret that consumers are looking at their relationships with companies differently than before. Customers are expecting more from companies they work with, not only from a service perspective but from a relationship one as well. That means that your company needs to provide not just the best of what you do, but […]

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It’s not a secret that consumers are looking at their relationships with companies differently than before. Customers are expecting more from companies they work with, not only from a service perspective but from a relationship one as well. That means that your company needs to provide not just the best of what you do, but the best overall experience as well. 

In the digital space, that means not only does your digital product have to look great and work well, but it means that you have to consider the overall experience your user will have with your app. That’s where Customer Experience (CX) comes into the picture. But what exactly is Customer Experience? 

Building Relationships that Matter

The old way of thinking had us looking at each customer interaction as a separate entity and judging the value of that point of contact on its own. The major downside of that approach is that it’s impossible to see beyond one experience or another. That leads to a very limited view of both how your customer interacts with your product and your product itself. Customer Experience aims to change that by looking at your users from a holistic viewpoint. 

So, in essence, Customer Experience is the relationship a person builds with your company over time. The keyword being “build,” since this isn’t something that happens overnight. Because of that, it’s best to think about Customer Experience at three points—A Single Interaction, The Beginning of the Journey, and A Lifetime Relationship.

A Single Interaction

The interesting thing about Customer Experience thinking is that all that came before is still vitally important—it’s just not the end goal anymore. The single interaction is a perfect example of that. Basically, a single interaction is an experience that’s limited to a specific task, system, or device. It’s logging into an app, ordering your lunch, or completing a form for work. This is frequently called the User Experience (UX).

These are all vitally important to the day-to-day users of your app and if they don’t work, then your digital product suffers. But we can’t rely on them to tell us the whole story. 

The Customer Journey

The Customer Journey begins to piece together all the single interactions to begin building out a more complete picture. So, the user’s goal is typically more complex than a single interaction and will likely span multiple tasks and even several systems or devices. More often than not, the Customer Journey is spread out over time. 

The goal of Customer Experience in this regard is to begin to draw a line between all these interactions so we can get a more complete picture of the user and their overall experience. 

A Lifetime Relationship

Once you have a better understanding of your customer, their interactions, and journey, then you can begin to get a sense of what their relationship with your digital product looks like over the lifetime of their time using your product. So, every interaction your customer has had with your company and your app from the first download to the most recent form fill. 

By its nature, this is a dynamic and ever-evolving look at the customer. There will always be new interactions to consider and to inform your approach to both your users and your digital product. And, ultimately, that’s the goal—to get as complete a picture of how your customer uses your app as possible so you can make the best decisions for both their experience and your bottom line. 

Why does Customer Experience matter?

In short, Customer Experience matters because it can be the difference between a digital product that works and one that doesn’t. 

Not that long ago you could create a great-looking app full of amazing functionality and features and then release it into the world, never to think of it again. Now, the expectation is that companies provide an amazing digital experience, which means you have to look beyond the performance and UI/UX of your app to learn the how and why behind the customers using your app. 

So, why does Customer Experience matter? It matters because there is so much to learn from your users that can better inform not just how to best meet their needs but to attract even more users down the road. Want to learn more? Read about the five principles of customer experience. 

Your users are talking about you. It’s time to start listening. 

Here at the Ranch, we take a measured and informed approach to Customer Experience. Since there are often multiple ways of solving a challenge, we use an iterative approach of proven CX strategies to help you validate your assumptions or offer a new path to success. 

Are you ready to start listening to your users? Check out our blog post on the four things you must look out for in a customer experience (CX) agency or reach out to us and we’ll get started

 

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