How can you bring real value to the people who care about your brand? Experience design helps brands understand human thinking and activate emotional responses.
Here’s a thought-provoking question: What do your customers get out of choosing your brand instead of the competitor? Do they get a mere better price, or do they get something that’s even more important, yet intangible?
User experience is about value, and value is more than the cost of a product or service.
Of course, there’s value in your product, but Experience Design elevates the value by creating a friction-free experience.
A lot of moving parts go into that friction-free experience, like:
Developing experiences from the beginning, not as an afterthought
Constantly measuring value from the customer’s POV
Innovating new sources of value by measuring the gap between what customers expect and what you offer
Identifying “stutter points” that create friction and replacing them with smooth-flowing solutions
Embracing CX, UX and more
Customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) are both critical parts of Experience Design.
UX is the emotional reaction that customers experience when interacting with a product, system or service. When you think about UX, you should be thinking about how you can improve upon those experiences to increase brand value and trust.
On the other hand, CX is the emotional reaction that follows interactions with the brand and the overall opinion of the brand.
If you have a great app that’s easily searchable, runs fast and looks beautiful, then you’re excelling at UX. And if users rave about how easy it is to contact customer service or how easy order pick-up was, then your CX is looking good.
But effective and competitive Experience Design goes way beyond CX and UX.
For it to work, Experience Design needs to focus on constant inspiration, purposeful innovation and meaningful implementation.
Here’s how The ExperienceBuilt Group can bring your customers the value and experience that they want.
What is Experience Design?
Experience Design is a purposeful approach to building services, products, systems and solutions that transforms the experience to a higher level. You want your audience to pick up your product because it makes them feel good on some level, not because it’s a useful tool in a lackluster package.
Emotional reactions dictate how your customer responds to the experience that you provide. You can’t control an emotional reaction, but you can absolutely understand, anticipate and influence it.
What makes your customer tick? If they could change one thing about your website, app or service, what would it be? And what’s their worst pet peeve? This requires close observation of customer behavior so your brand can understand what they really want and need.
Experience Design produces meaningful experiences so users trust your brand and grow into loyal followers. “Meaningful experiences” as a metric may seem like a hard thing to measure, but part of successful experience design is systematically identifying experience outcomes so you continue to learn, evolve and improve the design process.
The idea of constant improvement is an important concept in experience design. Not only should you accept failure as a possible outcome, but you should also embrace it so your brand can continue to learn from customers’ changing priorities and desires.
Experience design goes beyond CX and UX by involving every customer-facing component of your business in planning and strategy. And The ExperienceBuilt Group takes it a step further by helping brands become truly ExperienceBuilt.
Earning a Share of Heart
At The ExperienceBuilt Group, we bring a holistic approach that enhances customer experiences and brand value, focusing on the great experience as a critical part of every single customer-facing interaction.
A design-centric culture breaks down the often siloed, but important, efforts of a CX department or UX team in recognizing that customer experiences are not limited to a single department or discipline.
The true experience is an expression of the collective effort your business makes as it lives and breathes. Every touchpoint with the customer is an opportunity to enhance and measure experiences.
Think about finance companies, which don’t offer a real product beyond capital. Users only experience those brands through touchpoints like payment systems, so why aren’t those systems built from a customer-first POV, versus based on the constraints of back-end systems? After all, they’re one of the only opportunities those brands get to provide an experience. Everything communicates, not just marketing.
Focus on what kind of real, measured impact your experience design will have on your current customers and people who could be customers tomorrow.
The Share of Heart that you earn among your customers is a true indicator of brand loyalty.
Share of Heart is one of our Key Experience Indicators™ (KEIs). Earning Share of Heart status means you’ve established rapport with the customer on a real and personal level.
It’s when your app is on their phone, your sticker is on their car and they use a water bottle with your logo on it. It means your brand is important to that person on the same level as their values, relationships and other critical parts of their identity. You’re essential to them, and they turn to you first when they have a need.
ExperienceBuilt brands have earned their customer’s Share of Heart — something that can actually be achieved by embracing our LIVE 8 principles.
How to become ExperienceBuilt
To become an ExperienceBuilt brand, The ExperienceBuilt Group helps you implement the LIVE 8 principles so the way your people work is centered around Experience Design ideals. This is a truly design-centric approach to business operations.
The LIVE 8 principles include:
Begin with people: A people-first approach means that your goal is to make lives easier. The people who care about your brand deserve the best experience you can give them — and that’s how you get a Share of Heart (and wallet!).
Consider micro-moments: Small details make up the big details. When nothing falls through the cracks, the big moments start making themselves.
Anticipate the what-ifs: You’ll never be caught off-guard if you start with Plan B already in your pocket. Being prepared lets you pivot quickly when you inevitably figure out that something’s not working.
Integrate sensory needs: People are individuals when it comes to sensory input. If you can individualize the experience visuals and audio, you ensure everyone gets the experience they prefer.
Communicate clearly: Your messaging is at its best when there’s no question about what it is. Everything communicates, so what you say and how you say it has to be a top principle.
Appreciate audience attention: Nothing matters more than your audience, and it’s harder than ever to capture their attention among a mess of competitors. Treat audience attention like a rare prize to be cherished.
Include relevant value: Your audience feels valued when you reach out with something that they actually need and want. A little extra goes a long way.
Revise based on feedback: Listen, listen, listen to what your audience has to say. Hearing it from their own mouths is the best way to gather feedback, but that feedback means nothing if you don’t make changes based on it.
If you believe in putting customer experiences at the heart of your business, then The ExperienceBuilt Group can help you get there.
We help transform businesses by integrating user research and implementing changes that promote a design-centric company culture. And we work with those companies through all stages of the transformation process, from ideation to actualization, giving them the blueprints for operational success.
Becoming ExperienceBuilt isn’t a one-time program or gimmick — it’s a lifelong operational change that will follow your business to success.
Contact The ExperienceBuilt Group today to learn how to truly become ExperienceBuilt. Earning Share of Heart with your customers takes time, so it’s important to start the journey without delay.