Achieve Unified Design Experience With Customer-Centric Approach

In today’s business scenario there would be hardly any consumer related brand that has not adopted ‘design thinking’ as the core of their business strategy keeping user experience the prime focus of product development. The more you say about customer experience, the less it is as it is the driving force of your business.

However, the tremendous pace of innovation and highly increasing customer expectations are putting business organizations to get their products and services designed and developed faster than ever. To meet up with these ever increasing customer expectations organizations chose to shift from waterfall software development to agile software development approach to handle new problems and opportunities within shorter timeframe.

Although enterprises with agile development approach could respond effectively to market changes yet it lead to autonomous teams with working on project simultaneously nearly blind to each other and to management even. This in turn leads to experience design process fragmentation. Consequently, delivering an overall better experience seems near to impossible as no one including the product team can, in fact, view the big picture relating to experience during the design process as work in fragments.

However, there is a solution to this chaos i.e. achieving unity among the teams which is aptly called as unified experience design (UXD) and to realize it you need to follow certain experience design practices discussed below:

• Appoint experience architects (XAs) to lead all the small agile teams and bring them together as XAs possess the necessary skills like human behaviour, interactive design and user-centric design. Also make them responsible for authoring, planning and designing the UXD deliverables.
  
• To avoid fragmentation of user experience, let all the teams speak the same common design language.
  
• Give the teams a common blueprint through shared experience architecture to which they can align their work.
  
• Let the agile teams share their lessons in real-time via a common network so that organization can create better user experience and at the same time save time and money.
  
• Keep in mind that the experience architecture has to be flux, i.e. it would change as per the norms of agile development so that it makes way for ongoing innovation carried out by the teams.
  
• During the entire process your only focus must be your valued customer as your primary goal is to achieve intuitive customer-centric experiences.