By Nick Spooner for Digital Pulse
Key takeaways
Always design with the user in mind
Get senior level support for your project. UX must be considered part of business strategy
Metrics matter. Regularly testing user experience will help you focus investment in the right places.
How can you leverage the potential of UX to achieve tangible success? And what UX strategies should organisations put in place to retain their competitive advantage?
We put these questions to the speakers from PwC and UX Alliance’s forthcoming UX Masterclass in Sydney, a global conference that brings together some of the world’s leading user experience and design firms.
Their key advice focuses on people, from the customer to the board and the UX team. But there are other strategies around technology to consider, too:
Are you innovative enough?
Are you implementing too much technology?
And what measurements are in place to set you apart from the competition?
Frederic Gaillard, Managing Director, Axance (France)
“To leverage the potential of UX, you should involve the user at each step of the design process. Always focus on the customer; never design alone. Like Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos says, ‘it is because we have been customer focused that we still exist today’.”
Bob Schumacher, Executive Vice President, GfK User Centric (US)
“Companies that succeed in the market, get UX. They focus on the customer’s experience. They know what delights and excites and they ferociously embrace it.
“With innovation comes the overhead of managing all these technologies, but technology is at some level getting beyond our ability to keep up. Without paying relentless attention to the user and their capabilities, we run the risk of creating classes of digital citizens that are more exclusive than inclusive. In my view, designing for simplicity is hard. Very hard.”
Kris Nygren, Partner, PwC’s Digital Change services (New Zealand)
“World-class organisations don’t compete on price, products, or features. They compete on experience. Great experiences are the ultimate drivers of preference, loyalty, and advocacy.
“‘Doing UX’ or having a ‘UX team’ will never provide a sustainable advantage for any organisation – you have to get broad and deep buy-in to the human-centred design ethos from very senior levels and have it permeate the organisation’s culture before you can really gain a true advantage.
“Traditional UX can’t be a stand-alone thing if we really want to move big boulders. We need to combine it with data and analytics, smart and new technology, and other methods for innovating to have a truly fundamental impact for our clients, society and all of us as citizens.”
Francis Fung, International UX Business Manager, Mitsue-Links (Japan)
“The clients that set aside a UX testing budget and regularly conduct user research are the clients that perform the best. They are most connected with what the latest set of participants want. They can adapt to new cultural changes more quickly, or discover new ways to improve their product, faster and earlier than their competitors simply because they test more. Everyone else is playing catch-up – and when they do, they have already been left behind.”