Karl Smith User Experience Architect (UEA) It's all about making other peoples experiences good ones

Holistic user experience (ux), Customers (users) don’t think or interact along channel lines

Business management does not reflect customer (users) activity

The management of a businesses online presence is broken up into various channels in order to simplify the management, responsibility and accountability for overall effectiveness and value. However customers (users) are unaware of these business rules and are only focused on their task or tasks, which will cut across several channels.

Holistic customer (user) experience is cross channel

Given the behaviour of customers (users) it is clear that effectual user experience is cross channel as well. This creates some problems for business, however with the advent of Agile, user stories it may be time for businesses to at last really focus on their customers (users) by changing their online management to reflect key user pathways rather than holding on to legacy notions of management.

Customer experience an example (not everything)

1. Engagement > 2. On boarding > 3. Payments > 4. Servicing > 5. Supporting > 6. Retention > 7. Up/Cross Selling

1. Engagement - how the customer finds out about the company, where their expectations are set (also includes brand identification) and they self filter based upon personal tasks and ojectives

2. On boarding - agreement that the company provides the service required, through written and visual material, social media, personal reccomendations, reviews, sign up routes

3. Payments - payment or funding pathways related to e-commerce, m-commerce (including micro payments)

4. Servicing - providing the goods or services, delivery and tracking

5. Supporting - providing help and support both online and telephony (can complete servicing)

6. Retention - managing potential loss of customers, analytics, advanced planning

7. Up/Cross selling - data mining existing customers to up or cross sell other products and services to existing customers

For a customer this process can take hours, days, weeks, months or years and contains three key user experiences;

1. A transaction (engagement, on boarding, payment, servicing, support)

2. Customer relationship management (on boarding, payment, servicing, support, retention)

3. Marketing (engagement, on boarding, retention, up/cross selling)

These experiences cross relate as can be seen by their components.

Managing the web in a holistic manner reduces risk and lowers cost

The problem remains at present that the customers (users) experience is supported by multiple sub-systems with owners and their own agendas. This costs a huge amount of time and money and creates a great deal of risk that valuable customer activity will become secondary to internal politics.

There needs to be an importance given to the customers overall experience and the need to join it up in terms of user experience, visual appearance and standard interactions across multiple platforms and systems.

Related

• Information Architecture (IA)  the classification of information
• Information Architecture (IA)  the classification of information Part 2 - Educational publishing and courses examples

• Definition of User Experience
• User Experience as a process
• Getting UX done the engagement process
• Getting into User Experience Part 1
• Getting into User Experience Part 2