Maximize User Experience Teams

UX and CX: Establish and Maximize Value of a User Experience Team

As organizations position to win in the digital age, the lines between online and offline channels, and front-office and back-office functions, are blurring. Investments must maximize value to target customers across all channels and touch points: the entire end-to-end “customer experience”(XD/CX/UX).

A major contributor to a successful customer experience, especially in digital environments, is the user experience (UX). The expert input of a user experience team is essential to the success for digital experiences. However, UX input is under-valued in many organizations, where research and design deliverables are rarely seen or leveraged beyond a single project. In some cases, CX initiatives overlap or even appear to be in competition with UX initiatives due to lack of visibility and coordination.

This communication is an approach outline for unifying CX and UX processes and teams by mapping research insights to a consistent enterprise view of customers and users; and linking research findings to measurable results.

Using this approach, the user experience team can dramatically increase the enterprise value of their work by making their results more visible, valuable, and repeatable. And we will be able to target, measure, and align around a unified CX/UX strategy that can gain significant advantages in market share, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

The scientists adopted a technique of trying out a series of designs which used as many different blocks and combinations of blocks as possible as quickly as possible. Thus they tried to maximise the information available to them about the allowed combinations. If they could discover the rule governing which combinations of blocks were allowed they could then search for an arrangement which would optimise the required colour around the layout. -{problem-focused} By contrast, the architects selected their blocks in order to achieve the appropriately coloured perimeter. If this proved not to be an acceptable combination, then the next most favourably coloured block combination would be substituted and so on until an acceptable solution was discovered. {solution-focused}
— Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think

The State of UX

UX practice, distilled over 50 years in the Design Thinking discipline, relies on direct observation of current or prospective users through ethnography and contextual inquiry. In most organizations, UX means digital UX, the experience of a user with applications, devices, or processes. The UX research/design/prototype/test methodology creates and tunes the interactions of specific user types over one or more digital devices, or channels.

Key tools in UX design are contextual inquiry, card sorting and cluster exploration, personas, scenarios, and journey maps. Testing tools are used to measure user interactions and report results to design/development teams.

The Rise of CX

While there are parallels between the domains and increasing overlap in best practices, CX and UX come from separate worldviews.

CX focuses on pre-sales touch points, customer challenges and satisfaction, and front-office processes across multiple offline and online interactions. Voice of the Customer (VOC) and other quantitative feedback collection tools are central. CX teams use journey maps and segment profiles (personas), focusing on process and service design more than product design and delivery.

1. Repository

Use a Repository to Manage Branded Experience Design Assets in One Place.

Create a centralized rich-media repository for customer and user data and the research, UX, and design assets derived from that data. This allows our user experience team to turn customer and user behavior data into a shared asset to optimize customer and user experiences. The repository keeps research, target customer profiles and user personas, task and journey models, designs, and user stories organized for consistency, traceability, and re-use.

2. User Models

Employ user models to create and share dynamic market segment profiles and personas.

Enable our customer intelligence platform to keep pace with our customers by upgrading customer profiles and personas from static pictures to dynamic online assets. Establishing an enterprise-level program to create and manage personas will ensure that there is a consistent focus on customer needs.

3. Task Models

Task Models help clarify Customer Goals through real-life scenarios. Implementing systems for robust scenario and task modeling to capture and communicate customer priorities and preferences:

• Understand and communicate user goals, tasks, and scenarios for our applications
• Map combinations of devices and contexts, especially for multi-channel applications
• Build task models to understand and prioritize the complex array of user interactions.
4. Journey Maps

Bring customer experience to life with interactive journey maps—providing our whole organization with a high-impact visual understanding of our customers’ goals and touch points.

Use scenarios to create a shared understanding among our marketing, development, and service delivery teams. Link journey stages dynamically to tasks, devices and channels, personas, and design projects and deliverables for a shared business context across the organization.

5. Dashboards

Dashboards provide role-based visibility for each business stakeholder. This allows us to tailor specific insights and needs for each department and area of responsibility.

Customize permissions and views to highlight insights and actions for every member of our team.

6. Story Maps

Visualize and communicate prioritized user stories to our development team by integrating with agile development platforms.

• Organize scenarios and tasks into user stories and release packages—unifying research, design, and development for agile delivery with world-class UX.
• Keep design and development synchronized using a Story Map for visual navigation.
• Create a system of record for design deliverables and supporting research.
• Integrate UX with application lifecycle management tools with seamless traceability and deep context at the story card level for better communication among product owners, designers, and developers.

Conclusion

Employing a unified approach to XD, CX and UX design and research is essential for linking activities and investments across the customer value chain. Using this approach, a user experience team can maximize the value of their work by making their brand centric results more visible, valuable, repeatable and delightful to customers and employees.