Experience Design: When The Best is Not Enough

In a world of intense competition and heightening customer expectations, brands and retailers must reimagine the user experience to remain relevant. To help companies design intelligent and meaningful experiences, Infosys outlined key trends shaping digital customer experiences.

Read a summary of the trends below, or download the full report.

Trend 1: Design Research in Systems

System-focused design research embraces a top-down view of customer journeys and data flows across the entire organization. The use of data is critical for someone in a design research, making a data science skill set or data scientist collaboration essential. By aligning with all stakeholders, design researchers can support the company vision and strategy. It’s not practical to design for every customer need, so aligning with stakeholders will help prioritize design decisions based on strategic direction and what’s most important to the customer.

Trend 2: Ethics in Design

When using customer data, there’s a thin line between delivering valuable personalized experiences and being “creepy.” Brands and retailers can improve transparency and customer trust by implementing human-centered design. Human-centered design recognizes what consumers will and will not accept in terms of how an organization uses their personal information. As companies leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, they will need to ensure that the algorithms and datasets do not perpetuate biases or inequalities found in the world today.

Trend 3: Experience and Intelligence Driven Commerce

As consumers hold higher standards for the brands they shop with, more companies are investing in sophisticated commerce platforms that focus on the end-to-end customer journey. Most modern, cloud-based platforms are integration-friendly and take a headless approach to power seamless omnichannel experiences across physical and digital channels. Advanced commerce platform capabilities give companies a deeper understanding of their customers, allowing them to quickly pivot or update the customer experience based on changing behaviors.

Download Blue Acorn iCi’s eBook, “2021: Retail’s Year for Digital Transformation,” for 6 actionable customer experience strategies.

Trend 4: Gesture Commands

Touch-free controls have become more relevant than ever in today’s health-conscious world. Gesture recognition requires sensors and cameras that track hand movements and send the data to a computer. Virtual reality and augmented reality are largely popular in the gaming industry, but it’s expected to become more widely used in the business world.

Trend 5: Natural Interaction

Touch user interfaces were one of the early breakthroughs for natural interactions. These interactions lead to conversational AI, which has drastically changed the way we interact with machines. Conversational AI is what enables people to give voice commands to their smart speaker or text commands to a chatbot. The ability to give commands in a natural language without a special command or button facilitates frictionless experiences.

Trend 6: Real-Time Customer Engagement

Advances in marketing technology help brands and retailers create personalized campaigns and experiences that automatically pivot based on real-time customer interactions. Digital marketing now spans the customer lifecycle, focusing on segmentation based on customer activities rather than use cases. Customer data combined with a layer of artificial intelligence allows brands to automatically track customers across channels, analyze insights, and present real-time experiences.

Trend 7: Conversational Channels

Advances in technology allow consumers to interact with devices using natural language commands, but the responses are often generic. Going forward, more brands and retailers will invest in conversational technology to deliver hyper-personalized customer service and humanlike interactions.

Trend 8: Immersive Experiences

In the pandemic era, more consumers are embracing immersive experiences in lieu of leaving their homes. From seeing how a piece of furniture looks in an individual’s home to receiving real-time instructions to repair a complex machine, these rich experiences close the gap between physical and digital channels.

Lovesac brought their showroom experience to digital channels by creating an immersive online customer experience. Download the case study to learn how.

Trend 9: Accessibility Advancements

The World Health Organization estimates that 15% of the world’s population has some form of disability, representing a significant pool of consumers whose needs must be met when interacting with brands. Technology leaders like Microsoft and Apple have invested in accessible experiences, and it will soon become a competitive advantage. When designing a website, UX teams must comply with the ADA web content accessibility guidelines to deliver simple and meaningful experiences to this segment.

Trend 10: Privacy Protection

The more data a company collects, the more they are at risk when they experience a security breach. With the rise of data theft, some governments have enacted stricter rules for how enterprises manage customer data, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act. GDPR enforces the concept of “Privacy by Design,” which requires data protection and privacy aspects embedded across systems and processes.

Download Infosys’ report, “Experience Design: When The Best is Not Enough,” for all 13 trends shaping digital design and learn how to deliver natural, progressive, and adaptive interfaces.

If you need help creating a secure yet personalized customer experience, reach out today to find out how we can help.

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