All posts in UX

The Service Experience Design – What Is It?

Service experience has become essential to businesses that want to succeed in today’s global and highly competitive market. Service experience is basically the customer experience, or the level of service they receive from a company during any transaction. Service design experience, then, is the process by which a company organizes its structure, employees, and communication efforts to create a positive customer relationship from beginning to end.

Without a positive customer experience, business suffers. Even the largest companies in the world have learned the harsh lessons about customer service. Those that tout the lowest prices have discovered that even being the least expensive brand on the market isn’t enough to retain customers and keep business growing (an essential component to long-term goals).

Take a Moment to Consider Your Favorite Brands

Each person who has any level of interaction with a company, whether it’s purchasing products, shopping for goods in a store, or contacting customer support, will inevitably have a list of their favorite brands. Looking at your list of favorite brands, what is it about them that puts them at the top of the list? For most consumers, it’s a combination of the best products at a fair price (notice ‘cheapest’ is rarely ever a consideration) with quality service.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on The Service Experience Design – What Is It? / Category: Design Thinking, UX

The Long Wow

The Long Wow is a means to achieving long-term customer satisfaction through systematically impressing your customers again and again. Going a step beyond just measuring satisfaction, the Long Wow is an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating it through innovation, focused product development and service design.

First, A Little Context

Businesses have begun to realise that the lofty goal of customer satisfaction might in fact be a red herring. A satisfied customer isn’t necessarily a loyal customer; today’s satisfied customer might find even more satisfaction in your competitor’s offerings tomorrow. And so we’ve started to see the rapid diffusion of tools like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Experience Score (CES) and Voice of Customer (VOC) which try to quantify loyalty and satisfaction. Such measures are popular because they track behaviours that create economic value: a customer recommending your brand to a friend, or a customer returning to buy from you again. But measuring loyalty and satisfaction doesn’t create either.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on The Long Wow / Category: UX

Sales Personas Provide a Better Picture of Your Target Audience

Who is your ideal customer? Do you understand his or her needs? Do you know their personal history, what motivates them, or the concerns they may have about the products or services you have to offer?

A buyer persona, also known as a sales persona, is basically a made up representation of the typical customer whom you would target. In order to effectively create a buyer or sales persona, you need to understand what motivates them, the demographic or your target market, and purchasing behavior. In today’s business climate, that also means you need to understand their online behaviour.

Why Would You Need a Buyer Persona?

When sales and marketing teams within an organization don’t have a clear picture, a unified understanding of the target audience, the people whom they will be targeting, then how can the organization develop a message that will create the deepest impact?

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Sales Personas Provide a Better Picture of Your Target Audience / Category: Design Thinking, UX

Google Fit vs Apple HealthKit: What’s the difference?

The tech world has seen many competitions and battles amongst brands and Apple especially seems to get a extra share. Not only Android but Google too is a regular rival of Apple and with the Google Fit going up against Apple’s HealthKit, we have another competition on our hands. While both these health apps are similar, let’s look at their differences to compare.

Data

Google’s data categories include activity times, calories, pedal rate, distance, heart-rate, height, weight, produced power, steps, and elevation and what seems to be missing is sleep tracking – however, the custom data type option should be good enough to cover anything left out.

However, Apple decided to go a little ahead for HealthKit’s data types. Categories include gender, blood type, sleep routine, activity times, workout intensity, body temp., heart-rate, blood sugar and alcohol levels, pedal rate, walking, etc.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Google Fit vs Apple HealthKit: What’s the difference? / Category: Mobile App, UX

How Feedback Innovation can Improve Product Development

Do you know the true value of customer feedback when it comes to product innovation? When a company begins to develop new products or services, the end user is the target market for it, but sometimes when you invest a great deal of time and resources into research and development, it can be a frightening concept to them rely on feedback from that target audience.

Yet it’s the feedback that you can, and should, receive from your potential customers that can improve overall product development, pushing your business ahead of the competition. You should acknowledge that feedback is something that can be feared, but only if you view it through the wrong type of lens.

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on How Feedback Innovation can Improve Product Development / Category: Design Thinking, UX

Barclays Bank Uses Design to Deliver Innovation

When one considers the use of design, they might not often associate this with the banking industry. The banking industry has long been revered as an entity unto its own, which would answer to only regulators and not customers. However, in light of the financial collapse that forced a major recession, and with the crumbling of some major financial institutions around the world, customer service and the brand of banks became something to consider.

Barclays has been involved in the banking industry for more than 300 years and has been responsible for some of the most popular innovations in use today, such as the credit card and ATMs (they designed and put into use the first ATM).

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October 13, 2015 / Comments Off on Barclays Bank Uses Design to Deliver Innovation / Category: Business, Design, UX

Using App Push Notifications to Engage Your Customers

Mobile apps have become an integral part of many consumers’ lives, to the point where they would rather give up some basic necessities in life than any of their apps. And while that provides an incredible opportunity for app developers and marketing, there is a balance that needs to be achieved when it comes to push notifications.

The stream of alerts that pop up for particular apps are an effective tool that can increase usage of the app by as much as 540%, according to research by Urban Airship. That’s quite the incentive for mobile app developers to engage in push notifications. But here’s the catch: app users certainly appreciate push notifications, when they are useful. However, the moment they aren’t useful or might be considered spam, they will turn notifications off, which effectively stunts the prospective power of those push notifications.

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October 12, 2015 / Comments Off on Using App Push Notifications to Engage Your Customers / Category: UX

Ryanair aims to improve customer experience

Apparently, Ryanair is changing. The ‘brand’ we love to hate has recognised that cheap fares are not enough and in the face of enduring its toughest year in history, it has gone on a charm offensive to woo disgruntled customers that have switched to other airlines. For a company that has continually grown for the last 20 years, suddenly the realisation of profit warnings and stationary passenger numbers, they know things have to change.

Ryanair has always had a bad reputation with a certain section of its passengers and a terrible relationship with the media, however these have been exacerbated over recent years thanks to the rise of social media. No one will forget the story of Ryanair charging a grieving father charged £160 to change his flight at Dublin airport to get home quicker. This story spread on social media and by the time Ryanair resolved the matter, it had already being reported by every major news channel, damaging the company further.

If you were to look at a look at customer journey map of the Ryanair experience it doesn’t make for good viewing

Online

The experience of buying online on the old website was appalling; flights from Manchester to Barcelona would be advertised £9.99 each way, but once taxes, luggage fees and tax has been added on you would end up spending over £100.

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October 12, 2015 / Comments Off on Ryanair aims to improve customer experience / Category: UX

Apple’s Design Philosophy: Simple Design, Simple to Operate

When Steve Jobs and the other original founders of Apple first began working on what would become the Macintosh line of personal computers, the idea of “personal” computers hadn’t really even been created. Computers were used mainly by large businesses and the government, and they were so large it took one room to house a machine that wasn’t nearly as powerful as the first iPhone. No one ever imagined that computers would become a household item, much less that they would become so small that they could be carried in a standard backpack or briefcase. But from the very beginning, Apple’s philosophy has been to design their products with the individual user in mind. Their computers and other devices were intended to make people’s lives better, but at the same time, they were also aimed at the standard user. Jobs and his team wanted devices that were simple in both design and in use.

Apple’s “battle” against complexity led to some design decisions that some might call counterintuitive or just plain wrong. One example of this is the iPod Mini, which actually has less hard drive space than the larger iPod. The iPod itself was already very simple and did nothing more than allow users to organize and play their music. Most people would immediately assume that because it held less music, fewer people would want a Mini. However, the smaller size was a hit, as was the smaller price tag. There’s also the fact that the Mini’s case was made out of aluminum instead of stainless steel. This allowed Apple to make the Mini in different colors, which was a huge hit.

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October 12, 2015 / Comments Off on Apple’s Design Philosophy: Simple Design, Simple to Operate / Category: Design, UX

Basics of empathetic design

The Empathic Design Process

How customers feel about a particular product can have a direct impact on marketing, sales, and even development of new products. The empathic design process is a user centred approach that places the reactions and needs of the customer at the focal point of new product development.

It is important to note that the empathic design approach is often confused with and referred to as the empathetic design approach. While the two words are actually interchangeable and have essentially the same meaning, empathic design is the proper term in business environments.

Aspects of Empathic Design

In order to utilise empathic design in product development, observation is one of the most important aspects involved. The ultimate goal is to determine what the basic needs of customers happen to be so that the company can address them in an appropriate manner during product development.

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October 12, 2015 / Comments Off on Basics of empathetic design / Category: Design Thinking, Psychology, UX