What activities to plan? What is important? When would you need to have them executed?
The science of user experience is older than software application development. While in application development every component development code is deeply scrutinized, tested, evaluated and it’s functionality is developed to sustain all sorts of use cases.
Since the process of User Experience and customer experience is older, let us take a look at how we can bring the context of it’s priority to the software application development cycle, or better known as “Software Development Life Cycle” (SDLC)
There are many User Experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) activities prior to any software development. Every product or application is developed from a user needs perspective and a strong alliance within the stakeholders. Every one of the internal stakeholders must know who the actual end users are? What problems are being solved or what user needs is the new solution addressing? How will people use the product? How might we better understand the customer journey and make the experience delightful? What is the value to the user and to the business? Will the solution be successful? These are just a few of the questions that every application designer thinks through about before handing off to the development team of any product or service. The procedure for creating one’s product or service is quite thrilling.
Every solution owner dreams of creating a marquee solution, generate user excitement, leading and ultimately turn them into long-term customers. But, to understand user needs better, a UX researcher spends time to define a persona that fits the criteria of an end user, carry out deeper research and build journey maps for every possible scenario the user needs to face or may face. Usually the developers were not deeply involved in these pre-solution activities. . A user’s perspective by practical application of UX methods is important to to reach the business goals.
One of the most important steps is to understand the journey of user’s experience and what steps are to be taken to plan and achieve the desired results.
The UX journey of a solution and the alliance with a core development team plays an important role. The various stages of UX are typically,
- Discovery of the concerns and needs
- Definition of the problem
- Explore possible solutions (prototyping them along the way)
- Evaluate the prototype outcomes
- Build the final winning solution and deliver/ launch it
Post launch the UX team continues to find out and measure customer success through every step of the journey, following a blueprint and collecting user feedback, errors and needs that need immediate attention and those that come in as new requirements for the next update or next version of the product or solution.
The core Application development team is usually away from many of the UX phases briefly described above. However, the trend is changing since the advent of agile, lean UX and most recently the Design Sprint that involves everyone in the creation of the solution from discovery to delivery and post launch experience tracking.
The application development team should be made aware of every step of the phase and “involved”. For example: During “discovery phase” the developer team can step in to provide feasibility checks, how far to push technical prowess and help build concept prototypes during the “concept solutioning phases” with short code snippets that if discarded don’t punch any hole in time and expense of the project wallet.
Let’s walk along the journey then and learn more.
What is a user or customer journey?
User Journey or Customer journey are interchangeable and used contextually while the core remains the same. Let’s take one of the most easy to understand definitions, that of the Nielson Norman Group, which is “A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal” in other words it s defined as the interaction between the product or service and the user’s experience from the beginning till the end while using the product or service. The process is is also known as User / customer Journey Mapping. A user’s journey consists of a series of steps. It helps in finding out about the needs and what to avoid while developing the application. Moreover, the journey can also create a frustration-free atmosphere for creators and users with clarity right through the steps.
For example products like Omniscopy is able to visualise the journey in different ways, from planned or designed journey to actual user behaviour generated journey by looking through ten of hundreds or thousands of user behaviour as they navigate through the digital experience of a product or solution and help improve the digital product’s journey map tremendously in real time. It pays attention to all aspects of the journey from a UX perspective and provides the development team with real time analysis, documentation and change needs avoiding expensive process overhaul or additional development costs or investment in tools. r
What are the steps taken for the planning of a User Journey Mapping?
As a business or product owner, you should have a detailed plan about the goals and outcomes you would want to achieve for a specific user towards a specific task and define actions for each task and identify on those components that are essential in each of such actions, call to action or the smallest micro action trigger on the screen of the user. This will help you in understanding the user’s priority of actions and alignment to the business goals of your product. To understand the process more, let us discuss the steps of a successful customer journey that one should follow:
Create your buyer’s persona
It is essential to recognize who your user is first, one who will invest and buy your solution or service and subscribe to become a delightful end user. A buyer’s persona should be created along with an empathy map to understand the needs and expectations of real-time customers, this is true for B2B, B2C, B2B2B or B2X where x can be a buyer stakeholder variable, in short every buyer needs to be addressed. This will be a good start to have in-depth knowledge about the details of buyers.
Identify the user’s goals
As a brand owner, it is important to recognize and prioritize the goals of your users and the phases or stages the user might need to take to reach those goals, being very specific. At the stage of planning out the user mapping, make sure to set up activities that will help you have a better understanding of the user’s goals. Logically arrange these in a structured way so that it can be easier to understand them conveniently for every stage of the journey. After the complete planning, we can move on to the building of a hypothetical user model with relevant user stories, scenarios and expectations.
Creating the list of touchpoints
Touchpoints between the user and the product or the service describing specific Actions, Mindsets, and Emotions of the user along the journey are important to address. It is vital to identify all of the points of online and offline situations and contacts that will occur when the user is introduced to your brand through all digital avenues, including, Apps, website, etc. For example: If a user has a bad experience with the experience of a product delivery application, it can ruin the brand’s image.
This is applicable for any consumer facing digital product or service. In order, to keep the customer’s delightful journey in mind it is best to define of all the interactions that could happen between the user and the product.
Recognizing the customer’s frustrations
In this step, it is important to realize the frustrations and negative impacts that can happen while developing the process. You need to ask yourself a few questions to understand the difficulties the customer may face. This is where a product or service owner should sketch the emotional phases of the customer’s journey, high points and low points and let the system be programmed to alert in case of a drop in the expected journey behaviour.
List of obstacles and ways to eliminate them
Immediate identification of the problems will help in recognition of the obstacles and eliminate them beforehand. This helps in further improvement of the digital journey of the product with clarity to all stakeholders whose job is to put together all the components that go on to build the customer loyalty for the brand. No customer will complain about a problem before the actual experience. Synchronised Application development will better enhance the experience by communicating and commenting any observed user issues via predictive journey analysis as Omniscopy provides. Such proactive measures in Application development to work in synch with the UX team and be providers of the technical prowess to ensure timely elimination of any possible error situation.
Improve and Modernise
Customers are evolving every day in today’s digital age. It is critical to monitor the satisfaction levels of the customer and improve their user journey in real time. Traditional Application development approaches do not provide clear pathways to working in silos. The rise and fame of lean systems, approaches and most recently the Design Sprint approach are clear that the need of the hour is to have the Application development teams integrated into the UX processes and vice versa. It is wise to update and improve the user journey at the earliest notion of journey problems and fix them in real time. .
The new paradigm for the Application Development Cycle is a multi-disciplinary, constantly connected and appropriately integrated development environment. Right from understanding the users through the well-defined persona, empathy, aligning all development activities to prioritize the key touchpoints of the user and fine tuning the backend code to deliver on the promises of the journey of the user is sacred. Ticking off a functional module or working of a feature from a technical standpoint is not sufficient. How each developed functionality works in tandem on the screen and helps enhance the experience touchpoints is important. It is vital for the Application development process to add to its tasks the deeper understanding of the user experience requirements as a very important part of the development cycle within the organization.