Experiences: Customer Experiences

In today’s fast-paced world, we can measure a brand’s success by the quality of the user experience it provides to its customers—the company’s key stakeholders. Both the way in which a brand or company interacts with its customers and the impression its Web site’s user experience makes on those customers determine the brand’s success.

Designing an appealing Web-site user experience is an important marketing strategy for reducing the bounce rates for any Web site. The user experience guides the company’s potential customers through the Web site—from the first landing page to the final page the user sees. The goal of UX design for the Web is to ensure that the user experience appeals to potential customers, increases conversion rates, and reduces a site’s bounce rates. Read More

In this article, which is Part 4, the final part, of my four-part series, I describe how customers would hypothetically experience Delta Market—a fictitious chain of more than 500 medium-to-large, high-end grocery stores and an organization at the highest level of UX maturity. This article also describes how customers might experience the gap between Delta Market’s high UX maturity and the low UX maturity of Delta’s biggest competitor, Alpha Market. The outcome of this comparison demonstrates how organizations can justify the substantial costs that are necessary to increase and maintain their UX maturity.

This series has presented Delta’s journey from low UX maturity, the UX Swamp, to high UX maturity, the UX Paradise. In Part 1, I described Delta Market in 2012, including the personas and the UX maturity model they had decided to use. Part 2 related the story of Delta’s journey from the UX Swamp to UX Paradise. Part 3 described Delta Market in 2020, after the company had attained UX Paradise. Read More

The world we live in has become disconnected. We have easy access to all the people we could ever want to interact with, but many would argue that communications have become shallow and less authentic as we rely more heavily on digital communities for social interaction. How can we avoid this shallowness and design more depth into our interactions with others?

Brené Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness takes an in-depth, research-based approach to exploring this topic. She has conducted grounded theory research to learn what makes people feel like they belong. She found that trust is a key component of belonging. What makes people trust? Brown created the BRAVING framework, which comprises the following elements that must be present for people to trust one another:

• Boundaries
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Vault
• Integrity
• Generosity Read More