The Cone Trees Experience Design Principles

Reprinted from my website on user-centered design, Cone Trees- https://www.conetrees.com/articles/the-cone-trees-experience-design-principles/

I think the best way to introduce my design principles is by first getting us all on the same page of what I mean by principles, and then experience design principles.

Before we go ahead, here they are listed without detail:

  1. Think services, not products
  2. Design with empathy
  3. Customers are co-creators
  4. Iterate, iterate, iterate
  5. Design through data, not assumptions
  6. Consistency builds trust
  7. Customers should feel in control
  8. Improvement is continuous

What are principles?

Oxford defines a principle as “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning.” Principles help guide a person in making decisions in life as they face different circumstances.

What are experience design principles?

There’s customer experience and there’s user experience (I’ll soon publish my thoughts on what they are, and how they fit into each other). I choose to have a single set for both customer experience and user experience design because both departments should ideally be combined, with both working alongside with each other as a team.

Like principles, these experience design principles are meant to help guide your team in your customer experience and user experience design approach to ensure that your services that consist of multiple touchpoints (including digital) come together to present a seamless, consistent experience for your customers.

The Cone Trees experience design principles

So here they are; the eight principles of my experience design studio that will set you off on the right path to designing solutions that your customers will love. I hope they serve your teams well.

1. Think services, not products

Your solution, be it offline or online, is one of the many things your customers will interact with in order for them to accomplish their goals. It’s thus important that you understand the existing and to-be customer journey and know what channels are users coming from and going to so you can best serve them in context of their situation.

A solution being will not work well if you build choosing to ignore where it fits and out of the customer journey because it is  is one of the many touch points your customers will interact with.

This means that you need to work together with the relevant owners and teams that are part of the customer journey to ensure that impacted processes are updated across the board so you can ensure a seamless customer experience.

2. Design with empathy

Design from outside-in rather than inside-out. This means to not review customers from inside of the shop window watching them as they come and go by and then deciding what they need. Go outside the shop and walk in your customers’ shoes to understand precisely how they experience and view what you’re selling- talk to them, observe what they do and triangulate.

Do this because you are not the customer, and you can’t build a truly useful solution for the customer if you don’t feel, think and experience as they do, in other words, empathize. This also means that customers needs come first, and that technology and business processes should be built around them rather than the other way round when possible.

3. Customers are co-creators

Solutions should be built with our customers, all the way starting from research, conceptualization to creation, from beginning to the end. You are finding and validating its usefulness and experience for your customers all throughout the way, thereby never getting too much out of alignment with what they really need at any given point.

4. Iterate, iterate, iterate

Like mentioned in the above principle, start of with a limited working simulation, or a prototype use a continuous loop of prototype-test-refine right from your concept to development so you can discover issues through your customers even before it is even developed. We ultimately save time and money while delivering solutions that our customers are satisfied with.

5. Design through data, not assumptions

Data rather than assumption should inform your design. Assumptions are something you will have to make. Go right ahead- make a list as long as you like of them. It’s not bad to assume, but only if you validate.

6. Consistency builds trust

Your solutions should be consistent across your touchpoints and within themselves. They should look, talk and behave consistently across your touch points.  This makes them easy to learn and interact with, which will increase your customers’ trust and confidence in using them.

7. Customers should feel in control

Your customers will feel in control when they they are confident of what is happening when they use your services. Always keep your customers informed about the information they need in order to use your services through appropriate communication channels within your solution and through other touchpoints that form your service.

8. Improvement is continuous

Like Kaizen (the practice of continuous improvement), once a solution is built, it will need to be continually refined. This is not only because your customers evolve and circumstances change. This is because you now have the chance to get feedback on a massive scale as it is being used and fit it to your customers needs a lot better than you could when it was being developed.

Do keep in mind that if you follow these principles, there won’t be the possibility of having a glaring gap when your solution is ready because you would have validated it all across the way while it was being built. This is simply about making it fit better to their needs. Constantly monitor against your success metrics and customer behavior to identify areas for improvement.

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