The new grail for companies is user experience. Hyper connectivity has made us impatient people and demanding consumers. We want to have memorable and unique experiences at all costs. We have even entered what is called the experience economy. So how do you deliver a successful experience to your customers?
Did you say successful? In short, the user must reach his goal simply and quickly but not only. The experience must also be rewarding. It must reenchant the act of consumption. This is the first step towards loyalty. To achieve this goal, we must be vigilant at all stages, from the design of the product or service to its digital transformation. Indeed, it will allow the staging, the distribution, the sale and the follow-up of your products or services. From website to software to applications, the quality of the digital ecosystem will condition the user’s experience.
Careful design: user experience design
But let’s start at the beginning. The first step is to study the customer beforehand to design a successful experience: surveys, workshops, observation of the environment, route mapping, identification of obstacles, etc. The data collected allows us to establish functional specifications that will be used in the design of the project architecture and its associated interfaces. This methodology, called UX Design, targets the technical, ergonomic and emotional aspects: ease, accessibility (technological), desirability (emotional impact), reassurance, utility. Once this work is done upstream, it is time for the digital transformation. CIOs are then responsible for evaluating the user experience.
Evaluating the user experience: how?
The turnover of companies can be strongly impacted by defects of the Information System. This is why application performance analysis checks all aspects impacting the user experience: response time, network fluidity, cloud availability, customer interaction analysis (CRM), etc.
The fluidity of the experience is essential in e-commerce… but not only. Indeed, there are also « internal customers », in other words the employees of a company. Application performance has a direct impact on employee productivity and well-being. For example, if 100 or 200 people are going to connect to an application at the same time (conditioned by security layers related to authentication, network, etc.), it is essential to assess its reliability. In short, customers and employees are the keys to good development. Thus, the business scripts navigate through the applications according to a pre-established visit scenario based on the identified usage, i.e. thanks to a good knowledge of the user (who was well targeted at the time of design).
User experience: until the climax?
The user is sometimes so well targeted that his desires are anticipated. Indeed, thanks to digital ubiquity (permanent access to the information system via smartphones), we can capture the user at every moment of his life. He types the beginning of a word on his smartphone and his secret desires are formulated by the digital tool in the form of answers, products, services, suggestions of various kinds… because artificial intelligence is able to link a desire to a whole ecosystem of underlying needs that include your products and services. And this is the climax of the pleasure!
For an impeccable pro-activity of the information system, it is therefore necessary to achieve perfect fluidity. You need to allow all this intelligence to flow from the digital core of your system to your users, wherever they are, to satisfy them. A permanent evaluation of your tools, applications, software, websites is necessary to create the ultimate user experience, the one of (even unconscious!) satisfied desires.
