Better Experience Matters
UX and Service Design becomes an integral part of ableneo’s strategy, tactics and operations.
Easier to use technology is no longer a nice-to-have.
The more satisfied your users are, the more likely they do whatever it is you are encouraging.
Useful, usable products and services make money.
Besides, the impact of good User Experience is not wasting time and money developing the wrong solution.
Those are some of the reasons why ableneo is building its competence in UX and Service Design.
This responsibility is under Peter Meluš, our new Head of CX & UX, bringing expertise and learnings from more than a decade of UX and product design, management and organisational change projects.
He has been responsible for driving mobile app design and product management, design system, building collaborative intranets, leading designs and redesigns of webs and big B2C and B2B customer portals.
But also kick-starting and managing agile transformation, implementing UX/CX best practices within a large organisation and building an internal design team.
“My goal is to make UX and Service Design an integral part of ableneo’s strategy, tactics and operations”, explains Peter.
“I want to enhance ableneo’s competency stack and help designing products and services that are even easier to use and bring more value to the business. It means focusing on customer-centricity, usability, better experience and outcome-based goals and data-driven decision making.”
What does ableneo do from now on?
Some of the key activities enhancing all ableneo solutions are Product Discovery, prototyping, usability testing and UX Copywriting:
1. Product Discovery at the beginning of projects to foster shared understanding
First, we need to achieve consensus on the problem to be solved and what are the desired outcomes.
Why are we doing this project? What problem do we solve with it? What is the primary user benefit? When are we going to be successful? Based on what data? Where do we want to be in six months, a year, or even five years from now? Last, but not least: how could we fail?
These are some of the questions that will help to ensure that any solutions proposed later are:
1. desirable to users,
2. viable for the organisation,
3. feasible with the technology made available.
The cost of fixing an error after development is easily 100x that of fixing it before development. The amount of time spent on reworking it is 50%.
So doing the Product Discovery Phase properly not only reduces the risk of wasting time & money developing the wrong solution, but also reduces overall development time by 33–50%, by improving decision-making process and task prioritisation.
2. Mapping and Wireframing
Product Discovery also involves mapping and choosing the most important elements of the experience and which points to solve.
We build these maps on whiteboards and from post-it notes, but quickly turning them into wireframes in tools like Figma.
So that we can start testing the idea early in the process.
3. User Research & Usability Testing — reducing risk through testing with real users, on real tasks, in real life business situations, as ASAP as possible — or as often as possible
If you learn more about the problem, a better solution will likely present itself.
“Talking to 4–5 end users/customers for 40 minutes each, with a clickable prototype in hand, is enough to spot 80% of the problems”, describes Peter.
Also, usability testing doesn’t apply to fresh projects only.
“I suggest testing your ‘thing’ as often as possible, with 2–3 customers and bi-weekly.”
4. High fidelity prototypes
Artefacts might quickly grow up into interconnected webs of pages and concepts.
What is the ableneo way?
Preparing multiple core pages concepts — to ensure differentiation and product vision.
All pages have interaction details — to ensure/facilitate seamless communication with stakeholders. You want useful feedback from them, don’t you?
Interaction documentation: popup, animations, scrolls, etc… — to get along well with devs and save time = ROI increase.
Multiple concepts of hierarchy/information architecture and navigation — making important content and functions a priority.
5. UX Copywriting — no lorem ipsum anymore
“Well written text and microcopy is 50% percent of design, so I’m going to put strong emphasis on UX Copywriting.”
Data Interlude: Impact of UX & Service Design in Business
35% of money is left on the table because of bad UX in e-commerce
Another set of data:
- 87% of design-mature companies believe that design leads to higher sales,
- 60% of companies claim that design brings higher customer retention,
- 83% — higher customer engagement,
- 60% — faster product cycle.
Failure to invest in UX design is an internal resource issue as well. Projects take longer to deliver, use more people-power both during and after completion, get stalled by avoidable faults and issues and are more expensive to alter or improve.
Conclusion
At its core, design means solving problems and it is far more than pretty pixels. It means constantly looking for ways to make that end-to-end experience, across every touchpoint, better for our customers.
But it is worth it, because design-driven businesses have outperformed the S&P by more than 200% over the past 10 years. Good design = good business.
Now, ableneo can help you belong to design-driven businesses as well, by avoiding
- badly defined requirements — doing Product Discovery,
- poor communication among customers, developers and users — doing user research & usability testing, prototyping,
- scale your team, hire, and nurture a design culture — sharing and teaching best practices.
Better Experience Matters was originally published in ableneo People on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.