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Myth 1: Experience can’t be measured.

Measuring experience may not be intuitive, but it’s certainly possible. The reality is that all it takes to measure experience is a clear understanding of solution goals and a selection of metrics and targets that are good indicators of those goals. The organization can then measure experience design effectiveness by examining the outcomes of these goals. We refer to this business return-on-investment (ROI) in user experience as the “return on experience,” or RoX.

In addition to business outcomes, UX professionals employ a host of direct metrics to better diagnose experience design flaws and prioritize areas to improve. These range from behavioral metrics – quantifying consumer activity through instrumentation and observation – to subjective metrics that quantify end-user reactions to the experience.

Myth 2: Design standards yield success.

There’s no question that sticking to a set of well-crafted design standards is an important part of usability. In fact, we regularly review and analyze digital solutions whose user interfaces comply with well-regarded standards. Yet many of these solutions offer extremely poor user experiences. These solutions might superficially look familiar, but when it comes to actual usage – they just don’t deliver.

In addition to consistency, effective user experiences rely on a deep understanding of the user model – that is, how end users think about the world, and their associated needs and motivations. Smart brands acquire this understanding through a combination of direct research and know-how, and then choose where to improve the experience by building well-crafted experience frameworks and content taxonomies reflective of the user model.

Myth 3: Analytics alone reveal user needs.

Activity and site logs illustrate what end users are doing, but not why. User behavior is a response to what users encounter in the current solution ecosystem. For example, if users are following ineffective or misleading content and navigational cues, or neglecting to follow potentially valuable but visually obscure links, then the site logs could be merely reflecting these poor design choices.

To gather valid insights about user needs and motivations, analytics need to be supplemented with consumer research and insights methods, such as contextual inquiry, digital ethnography, and participatory design. These methods are structured to elicit design-relevant input from end users that, in combination with quantitative analytics, can lead to deep insights that will improve the overall experience as well as specific, tactical UX elements. 

Myth 4: Consistency across devices leads to good experience design.

Propagating look and feel, as well as tone and voice, across devices makes sense. But a consistent experience across devices also entails explicitly tuning the interactions to the device, and further varying the experience to address the changing context of usage. Experience between channels is simply not transferrable. Brands must consider each channel individually while ensuring that the overall experience is consistent.

Myth 5: CX leaders create great user experiences.

A leading user experience demands a focus on learnability, ease of use, and productivity. The key principles of interaction design also include ensuring that users are aware of what actions are possible and how to select those actions. Yet the leaders aren’t always delivering against these best practices.

For example, Apple (the widely proclaimed master of consumer product design) leads the way in balancing form and function to appeal to both the core needs and emotional drivers of its customers. However, the founding fathers of Apple’s human interface design guidelines recently published a critical review of how Apple has abandoned user-centered design principles in favor of aesthetics like flat design and over-simplification. Where Apple products once embodied key principles of interaction design, they now seem to be heading in a different direction.

So, what’s next for brands?

Achieving breakthrough experience design relies on a strong, flexible, user-centered research and strategy process, as well as the right mix of talent. Our new report, entitled Dispelling 5 Myths About Experience Design, explores these myths in greater detail and offers practical recommendations for how brands can design better experiences for their customers.

For these brands – and many of their fellow disruptors – success comes, in part, from the ability to better meet customer expectations. In today’s always-on age, consumers want brand interactions to be instantaneous, seamless, and personalized. This requires software delivery to be transformed into an outside-in function that plans, builds, and runs technology based on customer behavior and expectations. By extension, enterprise IT professionals must deliver software in an iterative and continuous manner.

The benefits of continuous delivery, as powered by development and operations (DevOps) and other methodologies, are significant. This model has been shown to enable business transformation and improve business results by delivering software products to market faster, cutting downtime costs, and reducing risk. And yet, many companies – particularly established, large organizations – are not embracing modern development best practices or adopting an experimentation culture.

To that end, SapientNitro surveyed senior technology leaders to better understand organizations’ enterprise IT practices and the current state of enterprise IT. As a result, we’ve developed and refined our “enterprise startup” approach – a new mode of operation that helps clients embrace a culture of experimentation and better organize around the customer. To create an enterprise startup, we believe there are three things that businesses need to do differently from the traditional approach:

1. Build Clean, High-Quality Code.

Our research found that clean, high-quality code at every stage in the lifecycle helps provide timely feedback to work groups, enables real-time adjustments to projects, and helps optimize overall results.

Building clean, high-quality code involves two steps. The first is making sure the code is of production quality from the start. The second step is to build and use a DevOps toolchain and ensure that it is adopted by enterprise IT teams. To help companies overcome this gap, we have designed and built our own continuous delivery DevOps toolchain, which builds in high levels of quality using mostly open source tools that help engineers test and perfect quality during the development process rather than waiting until a future, separate testing phase.

2.  Automate with a NoOps Mindset.

In our study, 92 percent of digital leaders agree or strongly agree that clients want to “automate all enterprise IT processes.” However, just 16 percent agree or strongly agree that clients have been “very successful” in doing so across their organizations. In other words, companies recognize the value of automation, but are struggling to make it widespread.

We encourage organizations to look at automation with a NoOps mindset – which is to say that “no operations” team will be needed to manage and maintain the product. Few companies – be they startups or large enterprises – meet this standard today, with just 13 percent of our IT experts agreeing or strongly agreeing that companies “regularly” use a NoOps mindset. In our experience, the inability of IT teams to set up and maintain the test environments needed to run different experiments is a key challenge. There are occasions in which environment creation is so manual and error-prone that it takes weeks or months to create test environments.

3. Think “Small and Frequent”.

As leading companies transition to continuous delivery, thinking “small and frequent” is one way to minimize risk. We characterize this activity into three main categories: 1) adopting microservices, or breaking applications into small functional clusters to fuel automation; 2) thinking beta, or releasing changes to a small group of customers before expanding; and 3) rethinking measurement, or establishing key performance indicators to chart progress.

For many businesses, this step requires the biggest shift in mindset. In the end, it basically comes down to having the right architecture, right processes, and proper data in place to effectively inspire change.

As companies look to compete in a digital world and adapt to customers’ always-on mindset, the “enterprise startup” approach – embracing journeys, focusing on building quality code, automating wherever possible, and adopting a “small and frequent” mindset – can help drive change.

Today’s digital world requires organizational agility in order to remain competitive. Agility is what enables the change of processes, speeds the delivery of new products and services, and even allows internal cultures to evolve. It is what helps an organization respond to rapidly changing marketing dynamics and, more important, address the ever-evolving demands and preferences of its customers.

In our work with global clients, we often use three organizational agility frameworks to enable this type of continuous transformation: the Built-To-Change Model; the Agility Path Framework; and the Evidence-Based Change Framework. Our recent paper, Continuous Transformation: Frameworks to Assess Organizational Agility in the Retail Industry, explores these three common approaches to organizational change, as well as how organizations can assess the state of their business and prepare for change.

Here, we will explore the Built-To-Change model in depth and also identify several specific questions that organizations can ask to determine which framework may be best for their business. To read the full paper – and explore each of the change frameworks in greater detail – please download our recent POV.

The Built-To-Change Model

One of the most common agility frameworks is the Built-To-Change Model, which is designed specifically for organizations that are experiencing a crisis, such as declining sales or addressing a new competitor. This model enables an organization to embrace the mantra of “continuous change is business as usual” by focusing on a series of short-term competitive advantages rather than a single sustained advantage.

For example, we instituted Built-To-Change with a large department store retailer in North America, who, after a failed “big bang” transformation, was struggling to survive. The organization was facing issues with antagonized customers and shrinking sales. To ensure that they did not fall behind the competition – or even cease to exist – we helped this company experiment with small, incremental ideas and then adopt the ones that had a significant impact on both their customers and bottom line. In a year’s time, this company was on a solid path to recovery.

The Built-to-Change model forces organizations to break away from traditional design assumptions and focus on how a solution can be designed with flexibility and scalability in mind. The model challenges organizations to embrace change and plan for it instead of around it.

Organizational to-do’s: A practical approach to change

Retailers must be aware that the simple introduction of a transformation strategy will not necessarily lead to success. Instead, the transformation strategy must utilize a framework that is well-suited to the organization. To perform an assessment of an organization’s capabilities, and to determine the best strategy and roadmap for utilizing an organizational agility framework, we often start by examining the organization in the following four areas:

1. Analyze key end-to-end business processes and existing service design

2. Map out how information and data are managed across the organization

3. Review organizational structure and determine its current operating model

4. Review its innovation strategy

Based on the information gathered above and our subsequent analysis of the data, we determine the agility framework that will best enable the organization to reach continuous transformation.

In assessing the organization, it’s important to remember that continuous transformation is, in many cases, a cultural shift for an organization. Companies, their leadership, and their employees must be willing to adapt, embrace innovative thinking, and react to changing consumer needs and wants by getting products and services to market in increasingly shorter timeframes. Innovation alone cannot accomplish this – a framework, such as one of those highlighted in our report – may be necessary in guiding the organization.  

In the past, brands have relied on self-reporting and direct observation to gauge their customers’ emotional reaction to content and experiences. But these methods can be imprecise and are subject to interpretation. However, advances in biometric technology have allowed researchers to directly measure an individual’s emotions, making it possible to more accurately measure a consumer’s authentic response to brand communication.

Despite the tremendous potential that emotion insights hold for marketers, many brands still hesitate to utilize these new technologies. Here we explore three reasons why businesses should consider incorporating emotion insights into their creative process.

1. Emotion insights provide deeper and more specific information for marketers.

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the value of emotion insights is with a real-world example. SapientNitro recently worked with a financial services brand to determine which of three brand videos it should use for an upcoming campaign. While the creative team highlighted the same customer benefits and brand promise in each video, the three options contained variations in script, music and voiceover.

Without emotion insights, we might have conducted survey, interview, or even focus group research to allow participants to self-report the emotions they felt about each video. We might have also directly observed people watching the videos. These methods would have given the company a general sense of the way participants felt about the videos and may have even given them ideas for how to optimize the top performing video to maximize the brand’s desired response – but we could not do so with any scientific certainty.

However, when we added facial coding to our strategy, we suddenly had deeper, more specific insights to work with. Using this technology, we discovered that the female voiceover in one video was the most emotionally resonant, driving happiness up and fear down. We were also able to identify that visual representations of the tagline drove further increases in positive sentiment. Finally, we realized that certain content types (photos) and themes (churches) showcased throughout the video were causing happiness and engagement dips – thereby informing further edits of the selected video.

Using this information, we were then able to optimize our communications. We could test the emotional response to the revised video to make before-and-after comparisons. We could also leverage the emotion scores from the facial coding exercise and correlate them with the engagement generated in response to the video. With that information, we were able to know exactly what mix of emotions to target in future videos and other types of brand messaging.

2. Emotion insights allow marketers to capture and create authentic experiences.

In keeping with our digital brand video example, it’s important to consider the authenticity of our results. A common challenge for marketers is to understand what their target audiences are really thinking. There is often a vast difference between what people can articulate and their actual experience. In our example, it’s unlikely that the financial brand would have discovered that one female voice drove happiness because participants were probably unaware of their response. Facial coding made this insight possible.

This is the true value of emotion insights: they allow us to tap into authentic, unconscious experiences with brand environments, thereby unpacking the complexity of emotion that is present and what the conscious mind cannot share. They can be used to create emotionally resonant moments through responsive environments that deeply connect with our target.

3. Emotion insights drive up-to-the-second outcomes.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for marketers to generate up-to-the-second insights on emotions, particularly around isolated components, such as brand promise or tag-line. Without the use of emotion insights, consumers are more likely to report their overall feelings on the video once it concluded, as opposed to the individual pieces that marketers wish to assess.

Marketers know that when it comes to digital branded content, every second matters. By using emotion insights techniques to detect changes in emotional response to marketing experiences, we are able to determine the customer’s feelings from second to second and isolate their reactions to key points, such as the value proposition and messaging. They also allow responsive environments to act on changes in emotion, driving experiential changes in the moments when specific emotions unfold.

SapientNitro’s recent point of view, Leveraging Emotion Insights to Drive Experiential Return, explores the mechanics of some of the leading emotion insights applications, such as facial coding, galvanic skin response, and electroencephalography. It also offers recommendations for how businesses can begin to incorporate this technology into their creative process. To download the report, click here.

As brands continue to invest in responsive environments, the demand for more precise and holistic emotion insights will only increase. That’s something that our clients are very excited about… We can tell.

While this news is surprising, it isn’t entirely unexpected to the financial services industry. The digital customer has consistently demanded greater convenience and access, imploring their banks to transform to meet their needs and wants.

Few banks have risen to the challenge as well as RBS, one of the industry leaders in the UK. Understanding the evolving needs of the customer, RBS has taken significant steps to change both the structure and culture of their organization to deliver on the brand promise of “Helpful Banking.”

“Helpful Banking” is exactly what it sounds like: a commitment from RBS to deliver the products and services that customers want and need with the goal of helping them live better lives.

Going mobile: RBS gets to know its customers…quickly

Given the rising popularity of mobile payments in the UK, one of the areas where RBS decided to focus its efforts for “Helpful Banking” was on the mobile experience. They knew that the UK economy had the highest digital payments usage in the world, with the number of electronic payments (52 percent) in the UK market exceeding cash payments (48 percent).  

However, despite the sheer volume of mobile transactions, the login process on handheld devices remained cumbersome. Customer comments on RBS’s “Ideas Bank” called for a simplified login process that would streamline purchases, without sacrificing security.

Partnering with Apple, RBS set out to solve this issue. They created Touch ID, a new tool that allowed customers to use their fingerprints to log in to their account in just a fraction of the time as the previous process. With the launch of Touch ID, RBS became the first UK-based bank to offer a bank login solely with biometric identification.

Just five days after the launch of Touch ID, 72 percent of all capable iOS logins were via Touch ID. App reviews went up from three to four stars on the Apple App Store with the release of the update and there were over 8,000 references to RBS and NatWest on Twitter in the first twenty-four hours after launch, including recognition received from both industry and national media.

Go home: RBS takes the guesswork out of mortgage lending

Another tool that RBS introduced as part of their “Helpful Banking” promise centered on mortgage lending.

The UK housing market is notoriously competitive, and tighter standards have created further uncertainty for mortgage approvals. RBS heard from customers that in the time it took to receive mortgage approval, the property they were considering would be sold to another customer.

To address this issue, RBS introduced Intention to Lend. This digital tool gives consumers a personalized mortgage quote within five minutes – allowing customers to show their real estate agents the bank’s “agreement in principle” for a specific property on the same day. This means better chances for users to win a bid for their dream home, all without any impact on their credit scores.

Since its launch, Intention to Lend has delivered £5 billion worth of lending potential to 32,000 users. Moreover, RBS saw a 20 percent increase in first-time buyers, with 60 percent of Intention to Lend users being first-timers. And, if that weren't enough, over 9,000 working hours of mortgage application processing have been saved each year by automating the process via the web tool.

RBS: What’s next in consumer banking

Touch ID and Intention to Lend are just two of the many innovations that RBS created to fulfill their promise of “Helpful Banking.” Our recent point of view, Case Study: Reimagining Banking at RBS, further explores some of RBS’s product and service innovations, including Get Cash, which allows users to make withdraws at their network of ATMs through the use of a temporary access code and a groundbreaking Apple Watch app that lets users do much more than simply check balances. For more information on these features and how RBS is revolutionizing banking in the digital era download the full report here.

RBS continues to see strong results for its initiatives, and has embraced a culture of innovation and change in order to maintain its momentum. Consumer banking may be changing, but so is RBS.

Flurry, a mobile analytics firm, says that messaging app sessions saw a 103 percent rise globally as far back as 2014, and sustained a 51 percent rise in 2015. General-purpose chat app WhatsApp had 50 percent greater traffic than all global text message use. And Snapchat, once the domain of Millennials only, now has a daily average user count of 100 million. Furthermore, 50 percent of the top eight downloaded apps in the UK are messengers, while two out of the top three are chat apps from Facebook.

This evolution of messaging platforms and the rise of chatbots represents a paradigm shift in our always-on world. Marketers now have the opportunity to be more plugged in to their target consumers’ conversations. And, as a business today, it is critical to understand this mega-trend and respond in short order. This is the dawn of the “post app” era and will be as transformational for businesses and consumers as apps were a decade ago.

Chat UI has a zero learning curve

A chat user interface (UI) can work in a variety of situations. But why is it preferred?

First, there’s a similarity across the user interfaces of chat apps, so there’s no need to learn a new UI or pattern. Chat boils down to text on the right/left and input on the bottom – it's digital second nature now for many. This instinctual understanding gives brands a head start when designing an engaging experience for their consumers. As Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, puts it, “We already know how to chat, so making requests is easy.”

Second, chat can be instantaneous or asynchronous. If you want a bus time, then bots, artificial intelligence (AI), and schedules can share a schedule in real time. If you want to buy luchador finery, then humans can take some time to find you the best deal.

Unlike the telephone or web, messaging affords us constant communication. For example, it gives customers quick access to information while on the go and can grant them answers even when brand representatives are not available. Brand service, therefore, becomes even more continuous and dependable.

Third, it’s an ideal medium for customer service. If social media has taught us anything, it’s that people love to engage with brands for everything from satisfied reviews to customer service complaints. Chat apps allow customers the same opportunity, but in a discreet venue that's more personal for the consumers and less damaging to brands. It's also just more helpful to have a one-on-one service experience.

Last, in a post-Snowden era, messaging apps seem to be the last great refuge for privacy. Messaging apps, when compared to social media, pose a safer communication stream for consumer data. Most major chat companies now have encryption enabled by default. For example, while Telegram’s encryption has long been lauded by privacy advocates, competitor WhatsApp recently made headlines when it enabled end-to-end encryption on all communications.

Infinite chat integrations into branded ecosystems

Brands have always fished where the fish are. Today, that means expeditions into messaging apps. Facebook Messenger has successful integrations with Uber to reserve a car, and KLM to provide boarding passes and flight updates, among other brands. Thanks to these advances, consumers who need to get to the airport can now do so without ever leaving the Facebook app.

Millennial favorite Kik has seen over eighty “promoted chats” with bots for brands like MTV, the Washington Post, and Skull Candy. Perhaps its most successful bot campaign was with NBCUniversal to promote the horror film Insidious 3. A bot with the personality of the haunted main character Quinn exchanged on average sixty-nine messages across nearly 350,000 participants.

These integrations will only increase as each of the major players creates its own “bot store.” Kik and Skype both launched their own versions of bot stores in early 2015. WeChat is already home to over 10 million “official accounts” which are thin apps (light versions that don’t require installation) or bots. More so, there’s a third-party opportunity here (as we saw with app stores) for new businesses to emerge. For example, you can play poker, explore restaurant menus, and receive travel advisories via chatbots.

Facebook is anticipating this explosion of bot development. At the most recent F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s entrance into the bot store arena. Media and commerce were the dominant examples, including demonstrations from CNN and 1-800-Flowers. While people are sharing less on Facebook, they are talking more than ever before on Facebook Messenger (900 million people per month, to be exact). In fact, this platform will be the first experience that many people will have with bots.

Branded chat personas at work

Many people already use services like Nike+ or Moves for fitness tracking. But it’s easy to imagine those apps becoming more like real coaches via the addition of chat behaviors and bots. Likewise, your banking app could become a financial advisor that answers basic questions about mortgages. While it won’t take the place of your real banker, the chatbot offers more intuitive and efficient ways to answer standard questions, filter requests, and gather more information for a customer service specialist.

The requirements of designing a successful chat experience are different than building websites or delivering apps. Figuring out the personality of the brand is key. Is your brand voice funny, smart, or authoritative? How is the bot going to behave when a customer asks an unrelated question or isn’t able to clearly communicate his/her issue? Those are questions that we’ve always asked when creating branded experiences, but now they take real prominence.

The rise of chat gives marketers the unparalleled opportunity to align what their brands do with what they say. The right chat strategy, when executed well, will merge a brand’s persona with consumer expectations to create a seamless, intuitive experience. Whether that means adding chat functions to proprietary apps or creating branded bots on big platforms, organizations can now have more personalized conversations with their customers.

To find out how conversational UI is ushering us into the era of mainstream artificial intelligence and how these themes apply to other industries (such as retail, consumer packaged goods, automotive, and travel), download the extended PDF here.