interactive stories ::

Experience Design  by MA Neff

User experience design or UX refers to designers, and increasingly, to teams of cross disciplinary collaborators who seek striking solutions to difficult problems in the world today.

Applying usability and human factors criteria to experience design is about ease of use. Designers look for ways to induce clarity, meaning and understandability in urban planning, retail marketing and display and of course, digital tools and websites. Designers connect the brand experience in the world to technology and places. Design can inspire conversation with users. As business brings designers into increasingly strategic roles, they lead by widening the dialog between users and producers.

The goal behind experience design manifests in streamlined ecommerce check-out processes, improved product page design, more effective marketing campaigns, clearer online training and educational programs, simplified business processes, smoother site navigation and contextually pertinent and better organized content.

chatter ::

Customer experience is about turning interaction into dialog. The aim is actionable dialog that can evolve and recur in many places, many ways. A customer, in a store or on a website, to a great degree depends on store design or site design that is explicit and "understandable" at first sight. But well-thought out design stimulates interaction with customers only so far. Online website analytics give a bird's eye view of your customers' entries and exits. Still, between the two is where customer experience happens — what customers browse, click on to review, download or purchase. What do they like? Why did they lose interest, get lost if their visit didn't translate into a transaction? One company, Overstock.com, is using new analytics and live agents who monitor real time activity and initiate customer dialog before visitors give up on the site and click away. It's working and the upside and implications are a breath of fresh air to web experience pioneers. Sales of high ticket luxury items increased. The redesign chiseled the checkout process from seven pages to three. Conversion rates during the check-out process shot up and calls to customer service dropped. Read more...

[CMO Magazine, April 2005 ; DestinationCRM.com, October 2004]