#3 Key points and #5 Common Mistakes
To compete in the post-2020 world, it’s not good enough to have a good product or service. Your digital experience needs to shine.
The last two years of digital disruption brought about by COVID-19 have highlighted the importance of the digital experience. Your customers are not paying attention to the style and layout of shops and offices anymore. They decide to buy from you based on the look and feel of your website, if they can easily find all the information they are looking for, delivery time, and most importantly, customer reviews.
Users are eager for simple and fast interactions when it comes to their digital experiences, and they will compare you with Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The bar has been set high, and you have no option but to offer a great experience if you want your product or service to succeed.
67%
of mobile users would rather buy from a mobile-friendly site than from its competitors.
(Think With Google)
88%
of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.
(Amazon Web Services)
On the flip side, you also have to consider your employees. Delivering easy to use interfaces also improves workforce productivity and satisfaction by reducing complaints, improving turnover and making your team more efficient.
How can you turn this threat into an opportunity?
Focusing on the following key points and avoiding these common mistakes is a great place to start.
1. User and experience comes before technology
When building an application, it is vital to understand the end-users expectations and desires. Historically, a project application’s success was determined by the sponsors’ satisfaction. Now, your goal also includes exceeding the user’s expectations. To achieve this, you need to get to know them, listen to them,”walk in their shoes”, and design something simple and intuitive that they will love to use.
55%
Only 55% of companies currently conduct any UX testing
(Skyhook)
85%
of issues related to UX can be detected by performing a usability test on a group of five users
(MeasuringU)
2. Choose technology that can deliver an extraordinary experience
Using traditional development approaches, building and maintaining web and mobile applications can compromise agility, increase cost, and lead to poor results. Low-code solutions provide a visualbased, integrated development environment (IDE) that allows developers to design and build software applications faster and with minimal hand-coding. However, not all low-code platforms are equal. Only a few platforms can deliver enterprise-grade applications with unique and sleek interfaces that can connect to your core systems and serve millions of users, so making an informed choice is key. With 20 years of experience and financial backing from Goldman Sachs and KKR, OutSystems is the pioneer and the leader in the enterprise low-code market.
Gartner predicts that 70% of all custom applications in the enterprise space will be built using low-code platforms by 2025.
If you would like to learn more about low-code platforms, click here and download our e-book:
Low-code Explained
A definitive guide to help you select the right low-code platform.
3. Proper UX work requires specialists
UX Designers analyse the end-to-end journey of your users and how they interact with your applications. They find opportunities that were previously not captured and develop concepts to achieve your business goals. This requires specific skills and a deep understanding of human psychology, vital to understanding your audience.
Design methods, such as design thinking, can improve business metrics, but it is a human science, and the quality of the output is related to the quality of your team. Involving UX designers in your application development helps you jump ahead of the competition. This work is ongoing and needs to be continuous as the digital solution, and the business evolves.
Deliver meaningful user experiences: find out about our UX Team and how they can help.
5 mistakes to avoid
1. Assumed knowledge and poor end-user involvement in the project life cycle
You are not your user. How often has IT delivered an application or an MVP (minimum viable product), and the user isn’t satisfied? If the user is involved throughout the project, the team can work based on their expectations, rather than relying on what developers, BAs and business stakeholders think the user wants.
2. Expecting the user to tell you what they want
Sharing your dreams with an engineer isn’t going to get you your dream home. If you’re going to build the house of your dreams, you need an architect to translate them into technical drawings. The same can be said when building applications. UX designers can translate user expectations into a well designed User Interface (UI) through a series of methodologies.
3. Thinking that UX will cost more money
Great UX is great for business. According to a study by Forrester, companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support costs, increased customer retention and increased market share.
- Resolving problems in the development phase costs 10 times as much as fixing them in design. This cost blows out to 100 times if you’re trying to fix the problem in a product that’s already been released (UX Planet).
- Forrester research shows that, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return. That s an ROI of a whopping 9,900%.
4. Thinking that UX will slow down delivery
Many software projects cut out the UX portion of development and go directly from requirements to build. They think they don’t have time to wait for the UX team to research, interview users or design UI. Time to deliver is crucial; however, delivering an application that does not meet the users’ expectations and has to be rebuilt takes longer. Build and rebuild is expensive; it generates tech debt and doesn’t cross the finish line any faster.
50%
of development time is spent on rework that could have been avoided
(Source IEEE)
5. Thinking Employee Experience (EX) is not essential
There’s never been a more critical time to focus on your people, especially with the shift to work from home, employee experience matters. They use your applications all day, and technology is a key contributor to staff satisfaction and productivity.
90%
of C-suite executives believe their company pays attention to staff needs when introducing new technology,
53%
but only 53% of staff say the same.
(Source PWC survey)
Digital Experience case studies
You know your business and ideas better than anyone. We are the experts in designing meaningful and exclusive experiences that shape new business models. PhoenixDX has an expert team with all the skills you need – UX designers, business consultants, solution architects, software engineers and industry specialists that know how to work in sync with your team. Imagine what we can create together!
Global enterprise business
Replaced an Android legacy and delivered world-class mobile application experience to 30,000 community members
- Engagement KPIs increased after the launch of the new app
- Application loads in less than 1 second.
- New app expanded services, increased subscriptions and introduced new revenue streams.
Leading commercial property
New e-procurement platform replaces legacy and exceeds employees expectations
- A 60% reduction in the time taken to complete key tasks
- The UX success of this application convinced them to adopt
- OutSystems as their default frontend for all customer, supplier and tenant apps.
