Every business will become a technology business, and the ability to innovate your products and services at pace and scale is the difference between being a disruptor and being disrupted. Yet innovation requires time, resources, and budget. It’s never ideal for a company to invest in something with uncertainty. Research can give us important insights and fuel an enterprise’s innovation strategy. Putting UX at the center of innovation helps validate ideas, new products and services, and even broader digital initiatives. This validation gives us the confidence to continue investing in innovation.
In a survey, PwC found that consumers are willing to pay a +16% price premium to enterprises that deliver a great experience. Forrester research shows that on average, every dollar invested in UX brings $100 dollars in return. Stated differently, UX design delivers an average ROI of 9,900%.
We see the most innovative companies adopting UX-centric digital innovation to drive business outcomes—leveraging multi-disciplinary teams, agile methodologies, design thinking, and deep domain expertise in next-generation technologies. Devtech recently acquired Saturized, a leading UX and creative design agency, to ensure that UX is always at the center of our digital innovation initiatives. When done right, UX-centric digital innovation enables businesses to deliver world-class experiences—while simultaneously driving revenue and industry disruption.
When businesses get it right, the results speak for themselves. One client, a leading cloud service provider, disrupted their market by helping small and medium-sized businesses with their software infrastructure needs by adopting a digital innovation approach with UX at the center. The cloud provider accelerated innovation and their product roadmap, while simultaneously modernizing the underlying solution architecture and improving the software development lifecycle—all through the lens of the user journey. The approach enabled the provider to move faster and deliver a high-quality, robust cloud platform capable of millions of transactions and supporting hundreds of thousands of users.
When moving to a UX-centered digital innovation approach, the following principles are helpful:
Place users at the center of digital innovation process. Early in Google’s history, their number one rule became “focus on the user and all else will follow.” Maintaining a relentless focus on the user requires a deep understanding of users’ needs, desires, use cases, and the context in which they’ll be interacting with the company, its products, and its services. Prioritizing users, ideally early in the product development process, can minimize rework, improve speed to market, and ultimately create better user experiences and product success. The Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) found that observing and/or interviewing just five users during the design process typically uncovers around 85% of all usability problems.
Leverage multi-disciplinary teams: UX-centered digital innovation requires a multi-disciplinary approach with a mix of strategists, technology domain experts, business and operational executives, designers, and risk, compliance and legal experts. This ensures that new products are developed through the lens of the entire enterprise versus a specific function or a sole objective. For instance, a fintech might end up with an award-winning user interface—but the Chief Revenue Officer considers it a failure because it doesn’t integrate into channels where the largest opportunities for growth reside. Multi-disciplinary teams enable innovative market-winning solutions that drive business outcomes.
Leverage qualitative and quantitative data: Too often, technology teams develop products in isolation and try to leverage the latest new technologies—versus focusing on what customers really want. From the outset, leverage both qualitative and quantitative data—combining both contextual ‘human’ observations with insights from data. Also, look at user needs not only on the front end but across the middle and back office. This is one reason why data analytics and customer experience research has become a center of innovation. Informed decisions based on data analysis make companies more efficient in today’s dynamic market environment.
All enterprises must continue to innovate through a user-centric lens, and enterprises like American Express, Amazon, and Disney are just a few that do so with excellence. Take, for example, American Express’ Digital Receipts, a feature that gives U.S. card members access to additional information about their purchases with certain merchants, such as the merchant’s name and logo, order number, date of order, item(s) purchased, details of cost and merchant description.
American Express surveyed both U.S. consumers and merchants about the benefits Digital Receipts would provide to them. A large majority of consumers surveyed said Digital Receipts would help them more easily distinguish legitimate vs. fraudulent charges on their card account, improve their overall customer experience, and make them less likely to dispute a charge.
A successful UX-centered digital innovation approach includes the right mix of capabilities—spanning digital user experience, creative design, expertise across the software development lifecycle, and constant attention to the end business goal. This approach enables enterprises to innovate and accelerate product roadmaps—and deliver scalable future-ready solutions that open new revenue streams and drive market share.
Those that put the user front and center in their innovation process will be those that dominate their markets. Those that don’t risk becoming disrupted.
