Part 2 — Harnessing the Power of Experience Design & Strategy

image by author and Midjourney

Welcome to Part 2 of the series. In the previous episode of Harnessing the Power of Experience Strategy & UX In A Time Of Uncertainty (Part 1) we covered two ways businesses can get the most value and ROI from Experience-led Strategy & UX Design-driven work.

Before we get into our new UX Strategy and Design tips, let us first explore the current lay of the land.

Industry insights

Expectations for company performance, by industry.

Based on the recent McKinsey Survey results, private-sector participants are feeling positive about their companies’ future. They expect profits to rise in the next six months, the highest level in two years. Most also anticipate an increase in customer demand. Interestingly, 60% report price hikes in the last six months, up from 53% in the previous survey. Companies in advanced industries like automotive and aerospace are more likely to have raised prices and are generally most hopeful about the months ahead.

Design a delightful experience continuum:

According to Accenture’s life centricity playbook, to make things simpler and better for customers, we should take a “life-centric” approach. This means making sure all the different parts of a company, like product, marketing, sales, and customer service, work together smoothly. They should all share information and work from a single platform. This way, the company can understand what customers need in real time and use that information to improve their experiences. Broadening your canvas for value creation, 26% more likely to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

Elevating Experience Design Tips:

Alright, let us pivot back to the topic at hand: UX Design & Strategy. Let’s dig deeper and unearth two new tips:

1. Integrate Lean Design Sprints as an extension to Strategy projects in order to manifest practical solutions.

According to statistics, over 70% of decisions made at the moment of purchase are driven by value and purpose, supported by usability and ease of use. This gives businesses an opportunity to come up with tangible solutions crafted through rapid prototyping — as part of time-boxed design sprints — an intense 3 to 5-day process where user-centered teams tackle design problems and ideate on “solutions” to the problems. Working with expert insights, UX teams ideate, prototype and test ideas on selected users.

The main value of these sprints is the inclusivity and speed at which design teams can concentrate on one or more user needs and sharply defined goals. Under time-boxed conditions, team members work first to understand these and then progressively ideate, critique, and fine-tune their way toward a testable prototype. Leveraging GenAI image tools in these workshops (e.g. Midjourney, Miro AI, Freehand AI and ChatGPT) can be quite efficient as they have the potential to carry out foundational, repetitive tasks, freeing up teams to focus on more complex and creative tasks.

However, due to GenAI’s infancy, it is not advisable to depend on it entirely to complete our job. In words of Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, “A.I. will enable anyone to get to a good first draft. But, a good first draft is not a world-class product.” It should be used ethically, and responsibly as a co-pilot, not to be treated as The Pilot.

Make sure to use AI tools as a starting point, not the finish line.

💡 Tips:

1. Learn to harness the full potential of co-ideation with clients using Design Sprints platforms such as Miro AI and Mural to craft and simplify high-level requirements, service blueprints, wireflows and wireframes as an extension to business strategy and transformation phase(s). This can further help pave the way for the “Show me, Don’t Tell me” approach, which resonates with most companies willing to make a bigger investment.
2. By using supplementary visuals, created with ethical and responsible GenAI, these design sprints can provide speedy and greater value for future state design. Try out tools like Miro AI or Freehand AI to kickstart some ideas. It can actually inspire you to stop procrastinating and avoid creative blocks.

Source: UX Matters

2. Integrate empathy and pathos into your business understanding and design solutions

A recent Forrester report indicates that while customer experience rankings decreased for 19% of brands in 2022, the highest rankings were achieved by brands that provided customers with “high emotional quality” across their experiences. This propels the significance of integrating pathos (the act of evoking emotions in the audience to persuade, originated by Aristotle) in experience strategy and design. Pathos is all about the emotional connection with the audience, creating a bond with users (think Apple, Amazon, Disney, Nike, and Channel). Storytelling is fundamental to appealing to pathos as it’s a quick way to build emotion in your audience — something that AI of today is not very smooth at (at least not yet) due to its “artificial” sense of humanizing an experience. In other words, without human-centered emotional design, current (and arguably future) AI systems cannot easily meet user expectations, exemplify eloquence in response, nor display usefulness in behaviour.

image by author and Midjourney

According to Jason Finkelstein, CMO at Glady, “Adopt technology that personalizes the customer experience — and puts the customer first, not the back-end process.” As such, Human Connection will become even more important and vital to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. Empathy allows us to fully understand, mirror, then share another person’s expressions, needs, pain-points and motivations. In the age of fast propagating GenAI, Hybrid Intelligence designers will need to stick to humanizing the experience design discipline more than ever before.

💡 Tips:

1. Invest time and encourage your teams to learn and practice the most important skill in emotional design i.e. Empathy both individually and collectively. This allows us to understand the world from someone else’s point of view (through interviews, surveys and testing) and to feel how they feel and how they think. E.g. carving time to observe participants using screen readers to empathize and validate accessibility compliance first hand.
2. Before diving into design workshops, get to learn about client aspirations, goals and constraints (preferably 1:1 first to establish trust and connection) and observe them in their natural setting with contextual inquiry. This can help you drive a deeper understanding to make collaborative decisions. Remember, Empathy is the door that leads toward Compassion. It starts with deeply understanding your customers (including business stakeholders and end-users).

Video of the month:

Discover how UX practitioners can take the lead in Design Sprints, utilizing their expertise in areas such as mapping, sketching, prototyping, and user research to elevate the art of collaborative problem-solving.

Resolution

In conclusion, harnessing the power of Experience Strategy merged with User Experience Design can manifest practical strategies for a deeper understanding of your customers (end-users and business stakeholders) and how they interact with and experience your products and services. Above all, this unique synergy can help propel your teams to meet business goals quickly, leading to increased ROI, customer satisfaction and business growth.

Congrats for making it till the end 🎉

Stay tuned for next month’s Elevate Experience Design (EED) newsletter.

Noman Siddiqui is an Experience Design Leader, DesignOps Strategist, Adjunct Professor of Design and a self-professed Usability Geek. He’s the founder and UX Director at Nomans Land Creative Inc.