User experience as an online competitive strategy

The fact remains that a savvy competitor can visit your website or download your app and emulate your usability innovations. This means the usability is not a strategy for long-term competitiveness. So how do you differentiate?

User experience design approach

The answer lies in the understanding that usability is only one of several crucial factors that make up the experience people will have when they visit your website or use your app.

A holistic approach to user experiences design uses research-based insights to balance usability with, usefulness, 'findability', accessibility, desirability and credibility. "If you focus on and balance all these factors in your design there will be a quantifiable difference between your offering and your competitors'.

This means going beyond things like LSMs and market segments and into the realm of ethnographic research and mental modelling - where you gain a deep understanding of your customer's goals, motivations and behaviours allowing you to create a product that meets their needs.

Understanding a market segment might help predict your site's visitors, but it will not tell you what they think or how they will behave when they arrive. Without this knowledge, how can you meet their expectations and satisfy their true needs?

A proactive approach

NATIVE's approach to user experience design involves ethnographic research to create persona and mental models based on the target market's behaviour in a specific domain. For example, when it comes to banking you have a range of different clients: new account holders, long-time account holders, private clients, etc.

We would then model the needs of, say, a new account holder, by following how people conduct their banking. We watch them create bank accounts, set up cellphone banking, etc. Through this process we get a clear understanding of the entire experience to determine what online features, functionalities and content we need to support the user experience.

This is a proactive approach to gaining insights that are focused on what users need, as opposed to those that are slanted towards the business' existing knowledge and biases.

Create something or the user, not the business

This approach is key to NATIVE's devolution methodology. It's not about creating something for the business; it's about creating something primarily for the user. If the user is happy with your product or service they will spend more and develop a closer relationship your organisation, which ultimately benefits the business.

Business doesn't always know what their customers want. To create solid user experiences that add value to the bottom line, it makes perfect sense then to involve their customers in the design process. User experiences based on these insights are much more difficult for your competitors to emulate and form a good basis for long-term competitive advantage.