3 Truths About User Experience

With the world going digital today, user experience is playing bigger role in affecting how people perceive and interact with a brand. While digital marketers inherently focus their energies on delivering their communication in the most pristine form, it’s the user experience designer’s responsibility to create a receptive and engaging design. Although the funding for both these aspects falls into the marketing budget bracket, the final output of each of these tasks is extremely distinct. For the benefit of all the digital marketers out there, let’s get a better insight into the fundamentals of user experience and how it contributes to the overall selling: 1. Interfaces are a subset of user experience While most digital marketers conceive user experience as a way to create beautiful interfaces, we need to understand that beautification is but a small facet of the entire design creation. User experience is nothing but the relationship that people share with technology. Identifying and designing this relationship can make your users come back to you or dislike you forever. With the recent advancements in technology, the nature of this relationship is constantly changing. Wearable gadgets and the Internet of Things are increasingly becoming popular leading us to the fact that user experiences, very soon will not be limited to screens. 2. User experience directly influences the product’s reception The main difference that radically separates user experience and digital marketing is this: Marketing makes people want things. Design makes things that people will want. That’s why, while digital marketers are busy finding ways to drive more sales and engagement, user experience designers are constantly questioning product decisions. Because of this, there may arise many situations when the two may be at loggerheads with each other. Nonetheless, as designers work in tandem with the marketing team, optimization inevitably becomes a part of their responsibility over time. This is a boon as they can invariably challenge the experience-based assumptions made by marketers while offering insightful recommendations to ensure productivity. 3. The double advantage in user experience research Research in digital marketing does not amount to much in terms of numbers. This is because most of the research is heavily focused on deriving results that are typically quantitative. Obviously such research would employ a quantitative method of evaluation often limiting the interpretations of the results. On the other hand, to understand how well your user experience fairs, you need to implement a more qualitative research discipline, as you are keen on evaluating real human needs that can be sufficed by a perfectly designed product. This way you are not just focusing on numbers but can gauge the actual receptiveness and infer a future loyalty attributed to your product or service. We can’t deny the fact that these two research approaches work hand in hand to help you ensure your product is doing well among your prospects. Evaluating user experiences helps you understand your brand at a personal level, as it connects with your target audience, as well as on a business level by generating numbers.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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