Nowadays, there are plenty of professionals in charge of creating these experiences. Moreover, their goal is to seek the transformation of user-focused solutions. As expected, in such a competitive market, those who make the best UX are the ones who achieve success.
In this article, we will unveil Digital Experience's most basic concepts. We'll go from its definition to its ideal software. There are many reasons why the digital experience is vital today. Do you know what these reasons are?
What is a Digital Experience?
Digital Experience (DX) is the interaction between users and online entities. Today, these interactions are possible through popular technologies. But, the experience developed goes beyond the products' simplicity for users. The aim is to study the needs of users. Thus, besides an optimal monetary return, this guarantees higher loyalty.
It's necessary to mention Sean Van Tyne to understand more. He's an international moderator, speaker, and facilitator on various topics. These topics include Design Thinking, technology, innovation, and Customer Experience. Moreover, Van Tyne is the author and contributor to many writings, with Easy To Use 2.0 being the most notable piece. According to this book, there are four levels of development in the management and design of DX. Its base level highlights, "We don't know that we don't know." In short, the documentation does not exist now, and the actions are reactive. Digital Experiences focus on several fields and steps:
1. First Level. Here, teams adopt the wireframes or the visual skeleton that defines the structure. Yet, this stage doesn’t repeat in all projects.
2. Second Level. At this point, the team starts to manage the Customer Experience (CX). This process includes various standards, like resources and task management.
3. Third Level. Here is where the development of quantitative goals comes in. Further, companies integrate DX as part of their corporate strategy.
4. Fourth Level. In the last stage, the focus is on users as protagonists of continuous improvement. In short, the final user is "in charge" of shaping the venture plans.
Each of these stages is highly relevant to understanding UX strategy and design. Digital Experiences are on an unparalleled scope thanks to digital products' advances. But, this experience must adapt to all types of users. For this, it's essential to consider all users' edges. These aspects go from daily life as consumers to prototyped professional profiles.
Tools, software, and platforms help develop successful UX processes and designs. In this sense, User Maps are great for testing and acknowledging User Experience. In a nutshell, these are useful for understanding user journeys. These journeys encompass starting points and cons that may interfere with engagement.
What is a Digital Experience Platform?
When talking about Digital Experience, platforms refer to integrated technologies. These tools support the composition, management, and delivery of optimized Digital Experiences. A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) promotes engagement through content and data. Among the benefits of these platforms there is Integrated Control Center, Improved Customization, Content Flexibility, and Better Adaptability.
These platforms enable easy adaptability to Artificial Intelligence. AI allows content identification, ongoing trends, user segmentation, page modification, and machine learning. Also, it drives business productivity and user insight, creating better experiences and ROI. The million-dollar question is: when do I need this type of platform? The answer is now. In 2018 around 70% of companies had a Digital Transformation strategy. In this case, as technology rises, non-prepared companies will be behind.
Digital Experience Platforms vs. CMS
A Content Management System (CMS) is essential for the creation of Digital Identities. Further, it provides tools for the conception of a strategy. It promotes a website through the necessary tools for content delivery. At the same time, CMSs include organization, security, and user administration. On the other side of the story are Digital Experience Platforms. These are a set of tools to develop personalized experiences. Moreover, DXP encompasses connections across channels, languages, and geographical locations. These two tools can overlap.
Why are Digital Experiences Relevant?
Recognizing what conceives a good DX is simple. Further, it's unnecessary to have profound knowledge to identify its importance. The digital world is in constant motion, and new software is here to stay every day. Nowadays, practically anyone has access to any existing software. What's more, success or failure will partially depend on each product's use easiness. And that's where the importance of the digital experience lies.
The first step in this process is contemplating a clear and precise interface. But limiting yourself to accessibility, usability, design, or usefulness is a mistake. Furthermore, it's essential to adopt exploratory behaviors. This search includes the feelings and emotions that connect with the brand consolidation. A good experience translates into fidelity. Also, it'll lead users to follow expansions and updates. Otherwise, besides being counterproductively, it can also compromise brands’ reputations.
Why is it Important to Have a Digital Experience Strategy?
The world is changing its perspective and how users relate to a product or service. We rarely talk about passive consumers now. Instead, prosumers get more attention. The prosumer concept refers to consumers who take a role in designing and conceiving a product. It is a two-way communication style that has an exit point and a return point. For this reason, the user must be like the sun in the solar system: all planets must revolve around it.
Three Strategies for a Successful Experience
A good DX strategy follows a familiar path: meeting users needs, getting scalable initiatives, and building interactive relationships. Every business today needs to have a good experience management strategy in place. At the same time, the management needs to extend throughout all digital services. In the short term, this helps to consolidate the brand identity. For this reason, there are three key strategies to improve the Digital Experience:
1. User Opinion Analysis. The first point is necessary to define weak aspects of digital channels. So, it's essential to collect information. This data can come through social networks, personal interviews, and surveys.
2. Charge Time Decreasing. At least 50% of users think webpages should not take more than three seconds to load. Thus, an essential factor is to reduce the web load time. For this, are many ways to reduce the loading time, among which are having the latest and fastest hardware for web hosting and checking regularly the CPU, disks, memories, and others. Teams can also add image compression to all pages within site, as well asenabling cache within the browser.
3. Mobile-Device Performance. In 2021, around 73% of retail eCommerce purchases were via mobile devices. Because of this rate, it's a vital aspect of guaranteeing pleasant digital experiences.
How to Design a Digital Experience Strategy?
It's necessary to design stages that guarantee the triumph of the software in the market. Among these are:
● Research. Study the targets and topics that the product development will cover.
● Organization. Analyze where the result becomes more palpable to the eye. Designers handle different technical, cultural, and scientific criteria in this stage. As a result, the research puzzle is being assembled.
● Design. Take the ideas on paper to another level. In this stage lies the combination of previous investigation and technical needs. In consequence, this eases users' understanding.
● Test. At this level, there's a test period to approve all proposals.
Digital Experience Design also encompasses three elements of great importance.
● User Interface (UI). It defines the visual appeal of the interface. It admits some basic principles: cleanliness, compressibility, and attractiveness.
● User Experience (UX). It focuses on the quality of interaction for each medium and channel. Its goal is to seek speed and efficiency in carrying out the planned tasks.
● Customer Experience (CX). It defines the general experience that consumer users will have. The aim is to create consumer loyalty and a close relationship with the user.
The goal is to reconcile a design strategy to create an end-to-end experience. Besides, to get the user moving through different channels and stages.
What is a Real-Life Digital Experience Application?
Digital Experiences in Retail
Digital Experiences are an essential part of technology. Moreover, these allow companies to surpass the limits of digitization. DX has two key components: engagement and digital technologies. Yet, technology is not the only essential ingredient to turning an experience into a digital one. A clear example of this is reading a scanned document. This action is not a digital cataloging experience. That's because it doesn’t provide digital experiences.
Companies should consider DX as a process to build the things that physical processes cannot. To define a Digital Experience, we can take notice of some examples. A digital PDF is an example of an improved Digital Experience. It can include cross-references to other documents, digital signatures, self-translations, and more. An event registration software that allows to download guest list info is another example. The digital process outstands, for instance, paper sheets. In both examples, physical processes get upgraded into digital ones. As a result, these actions optimize time, resources, and money.
Digital Experiences in Healthcare
Digital health can include many categories, like mobile health (mHealth), telehealth, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. The health field relies on medical software to support different clinical decisions. In short, these technologies, software, and sensors allow forging optimal DXs within healthcare. Technology allows a holistic view of patients and provides greater control over health. According to the FDA, the benefits of digitization include inefficiency reduction, costs optimization, results quality increment, and more personalized diagnosis
In the USA, healthcare digital devices need verification and approval by the FDA. This office is in charge of tracking and updating its functionality. The promotion of technological progress in health is imminent. For this reason, the CDRH has created a Center of Excellence. It aims to empower any party interested in the digitalization of healthcare.
Digital Experience vs. User Experience
At first glance, both concepts sound the same, but the reality is different. In this context, there's a long list of aspects to analyze. Digital Experience refers to distinct individual interactions. But, User Experience is about the sum of all the digital interactions. When a company emphasizes improving User Experience, it relates to interface improvement, responsiveness upgrade, mobile design focus, and real-time data reception
UX focuses on the interactions' capacity and quality beyond individual aspects. Users tend only to seek to get what they want in the most comfortable way possible. Yet, companies keep imposing themselves on the place of users. As a result, this strategy helps understand digital channels' impact and relevance.
Conclusion
Creating Digital Experiences doesn't precisely translate as a technology-driven initiative. Yet, it's crucial to meet customer needs. The conventional use of technology is one thing. But taking advantage of it to improve experiences is the next step. It's no secret that constant research is vital for an excellent digital experience. This way, you will always be at the forefront and one step ahead of the competition. Not only you'll be applying the most recent methodologies, but it will also offer added value. Also, building a good experience must always keep the importance of the company or project in mind! We hope that this article has been of great help, guaranteeing a complete panorama. Further, we hope it aims for you to apply these concepts beyond a simple experience!
A Digital Experience is the final sensation users will take from a digital ecosystem. This intangible element has a close relation with Software Development. As you might know, their match point is what we call User Experience.
