In the case of user behavior on the web, digital experience design is as vital as ever. When customers can easily shop by buying another brand or switching from one app to the next, making a lasting impact is paramount.
Linearity studies indicate that up to 88 percent of customers won’t return to a site if they haven’t had a good experience. Considering that design influences a visitor's first impression of a website 94% of the time, digital experience design becomes crucial to a site's success.
In this blog, we’ll learn more about digital experience design: how it works, why we do it, and how you can use it in your organization.
What Is Digital Experience Design All About?
Digital experience design involves creating experiences in a single digital environment planned thoughtfully and enhancing the company’s engagement with every customer touchpoint. An excellent digital experience design will, in most cases, encompass three interconnected factors:
User Interface (UI)
Points of engagement between a user and brand, from content to typography to fonts, photos, videos, graphics, etc.
User Experience (UX)
Digital footprint optimization aims to maximize user experience by eliminating obstacles that hinder users from quickly and intuitively accessing what they need.
Customer Experience (CX)
Customer experience fuses UI and UX yet has a broader view of how customers engage with a website or app. Specifically, it is the entire experience toward the goal, be it a purchase, filling out a signup form, or landing on a targeted web page.
Why Does Digital Experience Design Matter?
Digital experience design must make people want to engage with digital content, to do so for longer, and return to it in the future. SharpSheets says 73% of mobile app users quit after 90 days, so maintaining and converting users must be a constant priority.
If done well, digital experience design can assist:
- Increased Engagement and Retention: When users feel like the experience, they will want to revisit the website/app and feel attached.
- Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction: Related to the above, that link makes it more likely for a customer to return to the brand in the future than to go to a competitor.
- Boosted Conversion Rates: The more you engage, the more loyal you stay and convert, which drives a more significant bottom line.
Understanding the Basics of Digital Experience Design
Behind the three design concepts that fuel digital experience designs lie various values that support best practices and orient you toward the best outcome. These include:
- Design for people: Designing, planning, and decision-making should never be about business goals or bottom lines but instead be based on the user’s needs, wants, and challenges.
- Information architecture: Making content structure and arrangement well enough that users can move freely around the site or app and to the intended goal.
- Permanent user research: Trying to learn user mood and likes, preferences, and so on via interviews, surveys, usability testing, etc, especially as these become ever-changing. It lets you make the right design decisions based on facts and not arbitrary intuitions.
- Quick iterative process: Rapid prototyping and agile to rapidly prototype, get feedback, and iterate designs in short timeframes. This means more leanness, flexibility for changing requirements, and less time to market for enhancements or new features.
- Do not fall into the “dark patterns”: Such tactics as nudges that nudge users into doing what you ask them to do when they didn’t set out to do it can be highly effective in building a successful business. Yet they’re also the ones users don’t like, who need to feel in charge of their online presence, so staying away from them is critical to trust and, hence, brand loyalty.
The Process of Designing Digital Experiences
Real-world digital experience design involves four main steps that must be followed in order:
Strategy and planning
A well-defined plan for what to design and how, as well as the larger business goals and results.
User research and analysis
Accurately identifying what people are looking for and assessing today's marketplace can guide design decisions.
Design implementation
Design digital pieces according to the design intent and user journey to meet the user's needs and fulfill the business goals.
User testing and optimization
Use user feedback and market and consumer changes to improve and maximize interaction constantly.
Best Practices for Designing Exceptional Digital Experiences
Among those actionable steps are some excellent practices that you can implement to make a digital experience design process as successful as possible, for example:
- Customer needs-oriented design: It will be critical in every design choice so that the digital experience is authentic to value and relevant to the user.
- User experience refinement: There is no such thing as static digital experience design, and we should never stop aiming to improve.
- Keeping up-to-date: Content, design styles, and compliance with standards and guidelines.
- Integrity and ethical considerations: The user should never feel that they do not have a digital experience that is respected, accessible, and inclusive to as many different users as possible.
Future Trends in Digital Experience Design
Linearity has found that if you have a better UX design, your website’s conversion rate will increase to 200%, so it’s worth taking advantage of its potential. This is especially true in the future when AI-based personalization will play a key role in providing the user-specific experiences that they demand. Similarly, such personalization will need to be linked up with omnichannel plans and sustainable design to make it feel like users are receiving experiences that align with their needs and the needs of the world at large.