What is a seamless user experience?
User experience design (UX design) is a major part of any digital offering for your customer but it is often forgotten in the scope for getting online. UX is the “process of defining the experience a user would go through when interacting with a digital product or website”(Wikipedia, 2022). Businesses often know the user experience better than anyone, especially in the building supply industry because they are bricks and mortar first. The digital offering for their customers is more than likely a reaction to a competitors strategy or pressure from peers. This leads to a foray into the complex subject of software ,design and ultimately trying to run a successful e-commerce business, as well as managing the relationship between online and offline. The personal experience between a human interface and machines (Huffduffer, 2016) is not easy to get right and with 90-96% of product innovations failing, it is easy to see why UX is so difficult for companies to master.
This is where a ‘seamless’ or ‘frictionless’ phrase might enter the conversation. The user experience would have failed to address all the points of pain and the customers or users can achieve what they want. Huffduffer (2016) suggests that it is a ‘bottom up’ approach, twined with a ‘top-down’ one. These are great terms but how do they work in the real world and how do companies apply these approaches to digital? Strangely enough most ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses know what good looks like because they have been in business for years, especially if we look at the building supply industry. The UX has already been mapped but just needs to be applied in a digital way. It is imperative to understand how to translate this and also choose the right solution, because often there is not one that does it all. This means that you will have separate platforms for each part of the user journey. This then takes a real strategy to integrate all these platforms to achieve the required ‘seamless user experience’.
The complexity of achieving the goal also increases with trying to include legacy systems and system architecture that is dated. This could be in the form of where your platforms are hosted or how acceptable the software is to integrations or incoming or outgoing data. Gartner (2021) suggest that ‘most organisations struggle to deliver seamless digital experiences across the touch-points of the customer journey’. Is this because the touchpoint are not understood or is the technology and solution just not up to the task. It could be a number of issues but this is why having a different perspective from one of
experience can apply the bigger picture and develop something that is a much better experience. This would be where a technology partner that has an integrated solution that supports key business processes, e-POS, Inventory Management, Sales Order processing and Warehouse management. This is where you start to see a really joined up user journey which is also beneficial to the companies processes. Why would it not be important to also make sure that your company benefits from any user benefits, because in theory they are the ones using it day in and day out!
This is where grow forward can help you to make the correct decisions and choose the right solutions and give your customers the best user experience. Grow forward has partnered with a series of leading technology providers, tailored to the building supply industry.
References
Gartner (2021) Drive seamless digital customer experiences with composable UX. Available at https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/4007527 [Accessed online October 2022]
Huffduffer (2016) Peter in conversation with Don Norman about UX & innovation| Adaptive Path. Available at https://huffduffer.com/clagnut/370516 [Accessed online October 2022] Wikipedia (2022) User Experience design. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ User_experience_design [Accessed online October 2022]