Nov 7, 2020
The 5 Rules for Designing Great Digital Experiences
A lot of Behavioral Economics can feel intimidating. However, it doesn’t have to be. The Five Rules Podcast Series is our attempt at giving you an easy entry point into the complex and messy world of Behavioral Science.
In 2020, we have all been doing many more online customer experiences than we thought we would. Some of these digital experiences have been excellent, and others were not.
Suppose these are the only experiences that your customers have with your organization this year. How important is it to you that the digital experience is as easy and convenient as possible? We would be surprised if you said anything less than "very important."
This episode of The Intuitive Customer shares our five rules for designing great digital experiences. Follow these directives, and you will deliver the kind of online experience that your customers appreciate, leading to the customer-driven growth you need.
What Are The Five Rules?
The Five Rules for Designing a Great Digital Experience
- Design in a digital "nudge."
- Analyze how customers really behave.
- Design your experience to anticipate your customers' needs.
- Plan to evoke emotions and measure them.
- Humanize technology.
What Should You Do With Them?
- Design in a digital "nudge." The term digital nudge refers to the book Nudge by Nobel-prize winning economist Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They suggested that the way you present a choice can influence how people choose. The subtle clues you include can affect how people behave. For example, if you make it seem like the normal thing to do is to participate in the company's 401(k) plan by making people who don't want to opt-out, most people participate in the program. The same concept can apply to your digital experience. We recommend using any number of psychological concepts that are part of the behavioral sciences in your design that nudge people toward the online behavior you want them to have.
- Analyze how customers really behave. A significant plus to working in the digital space is that you can measure everything. From how long people stay on the page to what they load (and unload) from their carts to what they look at the longest, you have a plethora of data, enabling you to understand how customers behave—in real life. Moreover, you can test what happens to customer behavior if you change things, and analyze that data, too.
- Design your experience to anticipate your customers' needs. Knowing what you know from the first two rules, you can now design into your digital experience features that anticipate your customers' needs. It could be that you make it easy for them to find their past orders. Perhaps you ensure that you have a shipping calculator available to them or other information necessary to decide. Whatever you choose to do, you must make it easy for them and present an experience that doesn't take up too much of their attention that they would rather be giving to something else.
- Plan to evoke emotions and measure them. Just as you should with your in-person experience, your digital experience should have specific actions that evoke a particular feeling that drives value for your organization. We would recommend that you participate in your digital experience as if you were a customer or have someone from the outside do it to provide a fresh perspective of the emotions your present experience evokes.
- Humanize technology. People respond differently to technology than they do to people. Moreover, people sometimes don't like it when they feel like they can't interact with other people. Suppose you use technology to interact with your customers at any point in the digital experience. In that case, we recommend that you ask yourself if that interaction would have a more positive emotional outcome if handled by a human.
To discuss this further contact us at www.BeyondPhilosophy.com
About Beyond Philosophy:
Beyond Philosophy help organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). We then capitalize on this by improving your customer experience to meet these needs thereby retaining and acquiring new customers across the market.
This podcast is produced by Resonate Recordings. Click here find out more.