Improve User Experience via Empathic Design

Delivering great experiences starts with empathetic design, research and strategic insights, with the ideas flowing through conception, design, development, production and quality assurance.

The digital era upon us is people-centric. Being customer-centric becomes the mantra for forward-thinking digital organization to out beat competitors. It’s very important to consider user experience (UX) in the designing process. Empathic design is a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product or service, incorporate user experience at both strategic and design level to present great business value, delight customers and build the company brand cohesively.

The idea is to understand the Customer Experience in order to refine the Customer Journey: Customer Experience is how you feel about the whole process of being a customer. It is the sum of all thoughts, attitudes, experiences, feelings, reactions, etc, The Customer Journey is a representation of the touch points a customer engages with a brand. You might produce the most-sophisticated-in-the-market products, but no one needs and buys it. That will waste the talent and resource. Therefore, you have to put the customer and the employee at the heart of everything that you do as a business. To improve customer experience, the customer (including prospects) should be studied and observed and gain insight upon, to gain an empathetic understanding. Customer Experience is not just the sequence of events, but a seamless continuum. It provides the “WOW” concept as the necessary success factor to ensure you stay ahead of the game, particularly with your peers in business.

Always train to take a step back, put yourself in the customers' shoes and think as they would like to have: After understanding of customer needs; you need to show design-driven empathy to dig beneath articulated solutions, recognize underlying needs and wants. You can also look at the company’s technical capabilities to optimize customer experience and build unique organizational competency. Train to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You should always listen and build understanding by imagining what it could feel like, and acknowledging that experience - especially when it is much different than your own. Empathy needs to be foundational in the design thinking process, ask insightful and compelling questions of the people. Your design will serve as you seek to understand their wants, desires, and needs. It’s about the technical abilities to weave the architecture of empathy for self, others, and nature into a vibrant and coherent whole.

Customer Journey Map: The human-centered design begins from deep empathy and in-depth understanding of needs and motivations of people from different perspectives and applying design to increase the level of empathy in customer experience. Customer Journey Map is a visual interpretation of individuals’ relationship with an organization, service, product or brand over time and across channels. 

You need to understand the journey before you can focus on the experience. The journey is the path customers take; the journey is for awareness, the journey is for service received, and the journey is for retention, etc. The customer experience is the fulfillment of a need that keeps them on the path to you. The deep look of customer journey uncovers the nuance and emotion of each touch point and the transitions in between. The way that the strategy and findings during discovery phases and customer journey map can be applied to not only creative but possibly other customer touch points in the business.

The good Customer Experience management is a norm, but a great Customer Journey with exceptional Customer Experience offers the 'WOW.” 'The empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. Delivering great experiences starts with empathetic design, research and strategic insights, with the ideas flowing through conception, design, development, production and quality assurance.

Posted in: Customer Service,IT Innovation,UX/CX