Delivering a persistent and consistent customer journey

From omni channel to multi experience As the digital landscape continues to evolve, omnichannel, i.e. having a presence across multiple channels, can no longer be considered a point of differentiation. Multi experience is the new ideal, and requires a persistent and consistent customer journey centred around people rather than technology. Regardless of what device or channel your customers engage with your brand, they should never feel like they are jumping from one experience to another. 

The application of multi experience requires organisations to:

• Sync customer information 

• See customers: understand their behaviour, preferences and goals 

• Know customers: through predictive analytics 

• Be customers: Act on a customer’s behalf to execute the best action based on their goals 

These can all be achieved with the right DXP, however, to be a leader in multi experience it’s also necessary to have in place a solid foundation of usability. As organisations look to deliver great UX across touchpoints, design principles and UX patterns can be useful in ensuring UX and UI resources are being leveraged effectively whilst empowering design and development teams.

Frameworks to ensure a foundation of usability 

Human-centred design (HCD) 

Simply put, HCD revolves around designing digital products and services by placing people’s needs and experiences first. Designers that use this approach aim to solve important problems by looking at them from a human perspective. This means they consider a wide array of essential psychosocial parameters surrounding whom they are designing for, their needs and behaviour, and the circumstances in which they encounter specific problems. This is particularly useful in terms of multi experience as it allows organisations to view the entirety of their customer journey and make consistent decisions across touchpoints. 

There are three central pillars of human-centred design: 

• Approaching design with empathy: Designers should genuinely care about the people they create products for. Ideally, they should seek to study them and immerse themselves in the group of people that they will be designing for. 

• Fostering creativity: Simple solutions have probably been explored already. It’s essential to seek design decisions that are creative. 

• Addressing business needs: It’s critical that the designed solutions are profitable and can be executed. 

To really design with people in mind, designers must: 

• Interact with the people they design for. To fully satisfy a user’s needs, it’s important to not only design with them in mind but have them involved whenever possible whether it’s via user research or usability testing. 

• Keep context in mind: A critical part of creating a truly useful product is taking into consideration the circumstances and the context in which it’s used. 

• Prototype, prototype, prototype: After you empathise with your users and understand the problems they face, it’s essential to come with a variety of solutions and shortlist the ones that work. Having people from your product’s target audience review and validate your prototypes is instrumental in ensuring that their needs are actually met.

Double Diamond: Old and New 

The Double Diamond is a design model crafted by the Design Council back in 2005, but its roots can be traced back to the 60s. Fundamentally, the framework allows designers to structure their work by organising their tasks in four major categories: 

• Discover 
• Define 
• Develop 
• Deliver 

The Double Diamond model emphasises the importance of cyclical or iterative design and popularised “divergent” and “convergent thinking” among designers. The model is particularly useful to help designers regularly generate ideas and narrow their choice down to the best ones. For organisations looking to deliver a great user experience at every touchpoint, this ensures that teams deliver and improve experiences at speed. Workshops such as Brainstorming sessions may be used to promote creativity and generate, compare, and discuss ideas. Brainstorming styles such as brainwriting ensure all voices are heard by combining individual brainstorming followed by group collaboration. Once ideas have been laid out, frameworks like S.C.A.M.P.E.R allow you to prioritise and improve certain ideas by evaluating them from different angles as below:

• Substitute (What would happen if we switched A for B?) 
• Combine (What would happen if we combined A and B?) 
• Adapt (Can we adapt this to a different context?) 
• Modify (How can we modify this idea/product to add value?) 
• Put to another use (What other uses does this project have?) 
• Eliminate (What can we eliminate?) 
• Reverse (How might we reorganise this project to make it more effective?)