Customer evolution not marketing revolution
Designing with customers in mind has recently started to gain momentum. Last year CADinteractive hosted a usability round table and as practitioners my peers and I all felt that clients still struggled to justify spending on usability and agencies only paid lip service to it.
Since then some of the biggest businesses in the UK have taken on usability agencies to run projects, end to end, with some extremely successful results.
Full service, creative agencies are also seeing the light. A slow down in spending has seen clients demanding quantifiable measures of success for campaigns and website redesigns.
A couple of months ago saw the biggest move forward yet. I was asked to run a training course for a top digital agency, teaching their project managers how to apply User Centred Design to digital projects through an agile methodology.
In short, how to deliver websites with customers, not awards in mind.
The most striking thing about this baptism of usability disbelievers was that everyone looked at the sites that they were working on in a completely different light. Shouts of, “I can’t believe it’s that hard to book a test drive†and “why do the animation take so long, they don’t actually do anythingâ€.
I was truly in the company of converts, but for how long?
The bigger problem faced by clients and agencies alike is the how to keep developing sites to meet changing customer needs and expectations. Most are running just to keep up, let alone being able to pre-empt customer trends.
Customer insight intelligence gives you the ability to observe and understand your customers as they interact, giving you such a competitive edge that 6-12 monthly site re-launches are becoming a thing of the past. The future is iterative updates, testing multiple versions in real time and launching in days not months.
The time has come to make suppliers measure success through ROI not D&AD.