Next-level UX design — creating a Brand Experience
We are living in an Experience Economy. You might not have thought about it this way, but look at brands and trends, and you will see it.
Netflix, Instagram, Disney? It’s all about fun and entertainment. Travel, interior design, food channels, or SUVs — whether you’re looking for adventures or something to make your home cozier, safer, or more delicious, we don’t want the simple product. We want the one that feels a certain way (in fact, it’s not about the product itself; we want a product that makes us feel in a certain way). We even are looking for seasonal variety. Take Pumpkin Spice Latte to spice up our fall. We don’t buy a cup of something. We buy a moment in time that makes us feel (that is: get an experience).
The winning strategy
New technologies made products more and more similar and interchangeable — similar in price, production, and availability. Everything is just one click away, and you can order it 24/7. Our brain despises decisions but loves everything that triggers its reward center. The brain isn’t amazed by technical stuff like some more gigabytes or a new function. But it loves everything that makes us feel: feel comfy, excited, surprised, cool, or special. If we have to decide between two similar products, we will always go for the one that promises the better experience. That means that brands that are strategically creating better experiences will always win. Here’s where UX Design (user experience design) or CX Design (customer experience design) come into play: making the customer’s point of view the baseline of what a brand is offering.
Experience design (EXD, which is both user experience design/UXD or customer experience design/CXD) is a thing for a while now, but mostly pretty misunderstood. EXD is not a feature or an add-on. It’s not an additional layer of customer-friendliness that you put on top of what you’ve done all the time anyway (at best some icing on the cake, but oftentimes just a lonesome undefinable bit that is loosely attached to something minor). Experience is where your potential customer or user or client makes the decision to buy your product, subscribe to your service — or love or hate your brand. You can either use EXD and design this experience or leave it to chance.
From customer-oriented to experience-centric
To be honest, a customer-friendly approach was a big step in understanding what all this is about in the first place. Making customers happy is always a good idea, and it showed that it also paid out.
But let’s look at what really makes this experience. It’s not just a click that sells someone your offer. It’s the sum of experiences along all touchpoints they have with your product (or service) as well as with your brand. Each ad or social media post, the person in the call center that answers the phone (but not always the questions, and don’t let us start talking about bots at all). It’s also the design of your app or homepage, the way customers are guided through the shopping process, the payment, and the delivery. If it’s a physical product, it’s the way how it’s wrapped, how it feels when you take it out of the box for the first time and how long it takes to understand the manual. It’s whether you like to use it, if it makes you happy or frustrated or at a loss. Basically, it’s the complete life cycle of the product (if it’s digital or a service, you can apply the same principle to the experiences: how does it feel every time you touch, start, or use it?).
This is why a simple layer of Experience Design doesn’t work. It’s not an add-on, it’s the whole experience, all along the process. That’s why next-level Experience Design is not customer-orientated (which means that you as a brand or company are looking at an oftentimes not further specified customer from the inside-out). It’s experience-centered from the very core, which means, you start with the (amazing, fulfilling, unforgettable) experience you want your customers to have, and build the entire process of delivering the experiences around that center — your complete organization and your brand DNA.
The ultimate brand/organization experience
Any bad (or just normal or dull) experience at any of the touchpoints can break the magic of the user experience. Some facts? On average, 69.99% of shopping carts are abandoned (Baymard Institute, 2022). 96.5% of users are done with an installed app on day 30 (Statista, 2022). Users don’t care about how much thought or effort you might have put into a detail or whether — considering the constrictions you’ve faced — you’ve done a great job with a project. They just judge from a few seconds of experience with what you’re offering. Take any disillusionment or disappointment of any customer, client, or user as a broken brand promise.
But how can you deliver a seamless, enjoyable, and memorable experience all along every single touchpoint without failing? This is only possible when you’re aligning your brand or organization around the experience itself. What do you want your customers to experience? From this point, start backward and “reverse engineer” the steps you’ll need to create the desired outcome. This means that you have to wrap every single part of your organization around delivering the experience. This involves each department, each decision, and each person in the company.
I think you’ve got the point I was trying to make. Brand Experience is the “next-level”, holistic approach to Experience Design that centers the complete organization around the desired customer/user experience. In an Experience Economy, you’re in the “Experience Business”, whether you want it or not, and brands that take that lesson to heart will have a huge market advantage. User/Customer Experience Design delivers the toolbox to understand where the story has to begin: with the user. Go just one step further. Level a user persona up to an experience persona. Create experience journeys instead of user journeys. And, most of all, stop thinking that customer experience is a matter that should be handled by the customer department of your company. It should be the crystallization core around which the complete organization evolves, grows, and transforms. It’s not a duty or must, it’s the chance to inspire not only your customers, but also your employees, your leadership, your revenues, and a bright future for all of them. This is what Brand Experience can achieve. Are you in?
