User-centered design aims to understand the goals and motivations of customers, and how people think as they go about meeting these goals.
These insights are then used to design interactions between customers and touchpoints that influence customer behaviour and result in satisfying customer experiences.
Touchpoints are the
moments of engagement between a customer and brand. They can take many forms, including:
- a page on a website or intranet;
- a conversation with a contact centre agent; and
- an email or a SMS message a customer receives.
Touchpoints that are appropriately designed with consideration to customer goals, motivations and mental models from the basis of satisfying customer experiences.
The desired response from a customer depends on the individual situation, but some common objectives are to create touch points that are:
Easy to understand
With either a self-service ecommerce website or an information rich website, it's essential for the interactions to be simple and intuitive.
If customers find themselves confused, at the very least it will be a negative impact on your brand, and at the worst: customers may need to seek help creating a higher cost of service; customers may simply give up; or customers may turn to another competitor!
Through user-centered research, we can gain insights into the language and expectations customers have and design touch points that match customers' models of thinking.
Customer satisfaction
When a customer starts out to meet some goal, they will often have expectations.
- One customer may intend to visit a retailers website, to find out the current specials and opening hours of their nearest store for the upcoming sale that has been advertised.
- Another customer may phone a bank contact centre to discuss their current account set up to make sure they are using the best services for their needs.
- Yet another customer may walk into a camera store with the intention of gaining advice for the purchase of a new camera.
In each case, the customer is entering a situation with some expectations about what is possible. Unfortunately, many businesses have not fully identified, or provided content or functionality that meets customer expectations.
Through user-centered research we can identify what customer expectations are, and design experiences that meet these expectations.
Surprise and delight
A step above simply meeting customer expectations is understanding what customers want, but are not yet aware of and then using this knowledge to exceed customer expectations.
Through user-centered research, we can identify gaps that both business and customers may not even be aware of, and design experiences that surprise and delight customers with exceeded expectations.
These objectives all help in creating:
- Higher conversion - because customers are satisfied with their experience and any barriers that might hinder conversion are minimised.
- Decreased cost of service - because customers can easily find what they need and don't require any help.
- Increased customer loyalty - because customers are delighted with the service that they recieve.
User research with interviews, surveys and brainstorming workshops can all be methods to gain insight to your customers. Generally, this process will start with an internal audience of customer stakeholders or advocates and then progress to working with actual customers.
Depending on the individual requirements of the project, the deliverables from this process may include:
- the project strategy, which acts as a high level compass for the goals of this project;
- personas and scenarios, which serve as reminders to the findings of this user research; or
- a mental model, which documents the goals and possible solutions and gaps in the customer experience.
Prototyping by sketching, wireframes and user-flow development are all methods of prototyping potential solutions to customer experiences.
Card sorting and usability evaluations are methods of gaining feedback on a potential solution. These steps combine elements of both design and research, and it's essential at this step that real customers are recruited and involved in the evaluations.
The outcomes of this step are reports that describe both the positive elements of a potential design, as well as shortcomings and suggestions for improvement.
Generally, prototyping and evaluations are repeated as an iterative process to better improve the quality of the solution.
I've been applying user-centered design to projects for the last 6 years.
Most of my experience has been working with consumer/ecommerce websites, but have also worked on several strategic projects working with employee internets and contact centre applications.
References are available on request