CX, UI and UX

refers to a set of customer-centric guiding principles for the organizational behaviour and culture, that every employee has to embrace, especially the ones interacting directly with customers. These principles will be embeded in all training activities. Having a customer-centric company vision means aiming to create an emotional connection with your customers, in order to build customer loyalty, as emotions shape attitudes and drive decisions. Customers become loyal because they are emotionally attached and remember how they feel when they use a product or service. Recent data shows that emotionally engaged customers are 3 times more likely to recommend a product or service and 3 times more likely to re-purchase, less likely to switch brands and much less price sensitive.

ensures that the brand mission and the long-term vision of the company are used as guiding principles in achieving the current project’s goals. Matching customer expectations to business goals and comparing these expectations to what the company has to offer enables us to track and optimize the CX landscape continuously, with the help of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will help measure the impact of our activities.

(via surveys, interviews, focus-groups, and analytics) enables us to come up with CUSTOMER INSIGHTS. Why do the customers do certain things, how do they feel when doing them, how do they react to certain triggers in a particular way, these are all answers we have to explore and bear in mind while mining for customer insights that we can use to improve CX and ultimately contribute to business growth.

are fictive characters, based on research, representing different target groups. Their description includes Bio (age, gender, occupation, and location), Personality, Media preferences, shopping behaviour, buying motivations. The customer personas help everyone in the company, from marketing to customer support to immediately identify the type of person, thinking and behaviour they’re interacting with and act accordingly. By understanding customers’ needs and feelings along the path to purchase, we are able to empathize with them during their interactions with the brand and improve our CX landscape.

help track and improve the relationship the brand has with the customers. Several tools can be very helpful, by offering quantitative insights:

NPS (Net Promoter Score) - the percentage of people who would or wouldn’t recommend our product/service to others;

CES (Customer Effort Score) - how much effort the customers have to put in to accomplish a task;

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) - how satisfied customers are with a recent interaction (purchase, customer service interaction);

TTR (Time to Resolution) - how long until a problem gets solved.

consists in stating the right questions that need to be answered by the end of the project, by separating User problems from Business problems and by only looking at the challenges we’re facing, without jumping to possible solutions. The brief will state the objectives of the project and possible KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure their success.

will shape the project goals, by exploring ways of bringing together the User problems with the Business problems under the brand mission statement. The challenges addressed by the brief need to serve the brand vision and purpose, in a manner that will help the business thrive.

are profiles of typical customers, based on patterns gathered by research, representing different user categories. These profiles include Bio (age, gender, occupation, and location), Personality, Needs, Pain points, Goals, Motivations. They focus on the user’s current behaviour while navigating the website/using the app rather than their shopping or media preferences. These psychological profiles enable empathy while making assumptions and looking for solutions to improve UX, by using tools like EMPATHY MAPS (checking what’s the user Saying, Thinking, Doing, Feeling during a certain task).

are visual representations of the series of steps took by the user when interacting with a website/mobile app. The smaller sequences of steps describing the completion of different tasks (within the larger UX map) are called USER FLOWs. These flows - the various ways users are going to navigate the website - explore different USER SCENARIOS, based on hypotheses (IF this THEN that BECAUSE this and we’ll measure this with this KPI). Analysing the variations of USER FLOWS generates answers regarding new content or functionalities to be included in the UI (User Interface) to solve a user problem or make the experience more pleasant. The better we understand the USER PERSONA’s motivations and pain points, the better the UX MAP gets.

observing (directly, remotely, via screen recording) the way different personas interact with the online platform or mobile app. This enables UX designers improve the site/mobile app usability and optimize the experience. Unexpected difficulties encountered during the testing phase are eliminated and this helps prevent an unsuccessful launch. UX OPTIMIZATION METHODOLOGIES are: A/B TESTING (comparing the experience offered by two versions of design, to see which works better for the users), Task Analysis (breaking down task into subtasks, determining how they fit together, restructure them in a more efficient way), Heuristic Evaluation (based on criteria like usability, efficiency, consistency, aesthetics).

the results of the tests will be implemented into the website/mobile app, which will then be tested again, generating cycles of continuous improvement or iterations

by measuring the Key Performance Indicators, the quality of the UX design and decide on possible improvements along the way. UX KPIs: Task Completion Success rate, Time on task, Error rate, Experience satisfaction score, Awareness scale.