Journey Toward the Business Value of Experience: Part 2

An immediate focus on modernization of the user experience, in conjunction with technology upgrades, coincide to establish the global standards and core of your product suite experiences. Companies do this through buying, building, or partnering with the right vendors to modernize their digital platforms and experiences.

Start by scaling your technologies to the cloud. This provides your customers, partners, and vendors with uninterrupted access to products and services, enabling seamless experience upgrades and providing your business with strategic demand-base cost optimization.

Next, it's key to upgrade your cumulative product UI and UX across the board. Use the right strategy so you can establish a baseline of your current product UX and prioritize the areas that are the most beneficial for both your business and your users.

You’ve most likely heard of DevOps and perhaps you’ve even heard of DesignOps. While DevOps has multiple varied definitions and no doubt that every organization has their own style and flavor of it, at its core, it’s all about getting things done, and releasing software more often and at a higher quality.

Similarly, DesignOps concentrates on craft, problem solving, speed, scale, and impact. It embodies an iterative approach to rapidly scale and replicate successful design processes across teams, while also focusing on impact and the business value of design. It empowers designers and helps bridge gaps of understanding across your business. When done correctly, it provides standardizations and a common design language that creates a better handshake between design and development teams via Design Systems, Design Specs, UX-focused features, epics and stories, as well as referenceable libraries of front-end code.

ExperienceOps goes a step further and provides a method and means for cross-functional team unification covering design, development, product, and business. While that may sound complicated or even come across as a pipe dream, ExperienceOps focuses more on the common thread across these teams without compromising the integrity of the differences between the teams. The principles of each practice and line of business are preserved but ensures product experiences are a shared responsibility for all, with each practice reflecting the needs of the other through coordination, communication, collaboration, and accountability under a shared vision with shared metrics.

Measuring the business value of experiences does not need to remain stuck within the purviews of design and product teams. In fact, when asked to name their organizations’ single greatest design weakness, the largest percentage of senior level executives surveyed by McKinsey indicated employing design metrics. Companies that truly excel in today’s market with exceptional experiences, maintain consistent line of sight to what their customers need, want, and how their current product experiences are benchmarked and performing. Experience performance metrics are critical to making objective decisions on design, especially ones that can have a significant impact on revenues and costs. Small but meaningful changes to the usability of a product experience can have dramatic increases in engagement and sales, but without the proper measures in place, well, you know the saying…You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Experience Performance needs to target and accommodate the C-Suite with senior leaders and include key metrics such as Net Promoter Score for measuring customer loyalty, the System Usability Scale (SUS) score for measuring the perceived usability of a product experience, and the Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank (SUPR) for measuring the overall quality of an experience that includes usability, appearance, trust, and loyalty.

In addition, providing measures on SUS and SUPR impacting KPIs are useful and could be supplied by UI, accessibility, learnability, complexity, and a host of other useful KPIs. Including metrics and KPIs that connect the dots across Reach, Acquisition, Conversion and Retention will help create a more complete picture when including the ROI of UX and design projects. And finally, including metrics and KPIs for key ExperienceOps areas is also important and may include such measures as UX Debt, average design projects per designer, average research project per designer, UX team member retention, and average age of open UX, Product, and Dev positions.

When you have established modernization, operations, and performance, then you have the infrastructure needed to create ongoing experience innovation for your business. Every organization is different and the new ways of working you implement along this journey will no doubt be specific to you but should also challenge you to grow along new pathways. Your business should be enabled to outlearn the competition, organized for speed and adaptability, and above all, informed by your users at every level of the organization. Senior leaders will be able to support management and boots on the ground teams with an annual vision and strategy refresh, empowering their teams with north star measures and motivations. In turn, Design, Development and Product teams will deliver exceptional experiences launch after launch, through crisp iterations of customer validated design prototypes and an ever-expanding library of customer insights the business can draw from for growing and scaling product experiences.

Sound too good to be true?

It’s not. And now more than ever it’s within reach. Coming up next, we’ll drill into each part of the Business Value of Experience journey and discuss how you can get started.