When you fall in love with a brand, purchase a product, use a service, or get help from an advisor—each of those moments has been carefully crafted by experts from a number disciplines. To better understand “what is experience design,” start from those lived experiences of purposeful interactions that generate positive outcomes. At its most essential, experience design is a process that defines the moments that matter when people engage with a company.
At Concentrix, we’re all about putting people first. We believe the key to successful experience design lies in understanding and serving the humans at the heart of it all. Instead of getting caught up in the problem as it’s framed by the business, we take an “outside-in” approach, which means we step into the shoes of customers to truly understand their needs and desires. Our experience designers play a critical role in this process, balancing values, costs, tools, and interactions, and, most importantly, serving as informed advocates for the customer. By adopting this approach, we’re able to break down barriers, foster collaboration, and create products and services that are not only efficient, but also sustainable.
Methods Behind Experience Design
As designers, we use a variety of different perspectives to understand the people we are designing for. User experience (UX) is useful when considering the flow and function of a product or service. Customer experience (CX) is a broader perspective that looks across a journey to define the value that a company, product, or service can provide. And at the highest level, we look to understand how our clients can earn a role in the customer’s “big life”—not just the customer experience, but their life experience—by creating meaningful associations and experiences.
Together, these methods provide us with a set of human-centered design methods that enable us to understand problems, frame opportunities, and inspire ways of designing, building, and running experiences that create value and meaning.
Complex Problems Require Human-Centered Design Thinking
One example of the challenges that human-centered experience design can address is in the healthcare industry. Healthcare practitioners are dedicated individuals, but the infrastructure—think of the layers of appointment setting, referrals, paperwork, patient data, claims processing, etc. required for care—between providers and their patients is often complicated and creates significant impacts and disadvantages. We’re working with clients to create smarter, easier connections across this complex ecosystem, making it more logical, more empathetic, and less burdensome for all involved.
To help drive change in a complex environment, we bring together a variety of human-centered methods. Research-informed personas, detailed customer journey maps, and service blueprints combine to give us a way to understand how a customer experiences a variety of interactions and touchpoints. In healthcare, we can map physical and emotional outcomes from the journey down through the enabling processes—such as patient education, care coordination, case management, and community outreach programs—and technology platforms to understand root causes and areas of opportunity.
What Is Experience Design in the Future?
We’re entering a new era of integrated experiences and interconnected ecosystems, with the opportunity to create new forms of value for customers—and there’s an urgent need to manage and control the influence of AI on customers and businesses. More than ever, an ability to step back from the technology and see things from a human perspective will be critical to safely getting the most out of new technologies. It’s rapidly becoming easier to weave together data, intelligence, systems, and solutions that can empower people and deliver amazing experiences and outcomes. But these emerging experiences still have to resonate authentically with customers, stay true to the brand vision, and exist safely alongside traditional modes of engagement.
We’re working with clients to help define the new rules of engagement for the next wave of digital customer experiences, understanding how they can empower people, and be personalized, relevant, and useful across the customer journey. As human-centered experience designers, we help bring insight and empathy to these engagements—and provide methods to consider the intended and unintended impacts of new experiences. The future is accelerating rapidly and human-centered experience design can be a powerful tool in making good decisions and delivering great experiences.
Watch our webinar on rethinking your CX ecosystem for the new era of digital engagement.
Colin O'Neill
Senior Director, Design
