Best practice strategies for Digital Product & Marketing Leaders.

An optimised customer journey is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for Digital teams.

In fact, suboptimal customer experiences that are rife with ‘friction’ due to poor product design can have a significant commercial impact.

We need only to look at the sheer volume of activity now taking place online to understand that impact. A staggering 87% of shoppers now begin their product hunt online (Salesforce), and an equally high 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research online before making a purchase (Forrester).

87% of shoppers now begin their hunt via digital channels
Salesforce

With such a significant shift in consumer behaviour, it’s no surprise that customers expect a seamless and frictionless customer journey across all channels. In fact, research by Salesforce also shows that 80% of shoppers will abandon a retailer after just three bad experiences.

As a result, senior Digital Product and Marketing Leaders are facing a minefield of challenges in the race for share of wallet.

Many will turn to new digital channels to reach new markets, some will also grapple with Customer Engagement Platforms to try and unify their communications.

This is, however, overlooking a fundamental factor in the customer journey, one that savvy Digital Product and Marketing Leaders know to fix first – good product design.

Indeed, those who invest in product design and what is often known as ‘design thinking’ are already reaping the rewards.

A report by McKinsey shows that companies that consistently follow design thinking practices generate roughly 32% more revenue and 56% higher returns for shareholders than those that do not.

A similar study by Forrester for Adobe shows that nearly half of design-led companies identify the following benefits to having advanced design practices:

• 41% report greater market share

• 46% report a competitive advantage

• 50% report more loyal customers

And finally, the Design Management Institute echo these numbers with a study carried out over a period of ten years, showing that design-driven companies outperform the S&P Index by a whopping 228%.

So why is product design so important for the customer journey?

The frictionless customer journey – why it’s important

Firstly, let’s take a step back to understand why a frictionless customer journey is so important.

Friction in the online customer journey, i.e. moments in the digital journey that cause difficulty, frustration or inconvenience for the customer, can have a significant impact on your business – it can lead to stress, dissatisfaction, and ultimately, abandonment. Customers who encounter too much friction are less likely to complete tasks, less likely to return, and less likely to recommend your brand to others.

Take the world of banking as an example.

When was the last time you encountered a confusing interface when trying to log in to your banking app? Or perhaps you recently experienced accessibility issues when trying to find your latest statement? And for those of us who have recently signed up to new banking apps, we’ll be all too familiar with some of the unclear instructions provided in the onboarding process!

Then there’s online shopping. Every minute of every day, consumers are ‘abandoning carts’ due to complicated checkout processes, limited payment options, or inconsistent interfaces between e-stores and payment pages.

The list goes on…

The question is, however, what can we do to reduce this sort of friction and, as we know from our own consumer experiences, ultimately increase sales and retain loyal customers?

Best practice product design strategies to reduce friction in the customer journey

There are a number of strategies that Digital Product and Marketing Leaders can deploy when it comes to product design. The good news is that there are plenty of brands out there already reaping the benefits of this to reduce customer journey friction, so leveraging from these isn’t as difficult as it once was.

From years of working with leading brands ourselves in this domain, we’ve picked out our top three. We’ve selected these three because:

• they’re relatively easy to grasp if you haven’t yet embraced design-led principles;

• they’re perfect for Digital teams to deploy as part of a wider implementation strategy.

1. Learn from smartphone heuristics to reduce friction in the customer journey

Customers interact with a smartphone on average over 3 hours a day
RescueTime

As consumers increasingly use smartphones for more and more of their daily tasks, it’s makes sense that we’re becoming attuned to the way in which they work. In fact, we’re becoming so acclimatised to these ‘mental shortcuts’, for example, swipe gestures or colour recognitions, that babies and children now even mimic these behaviours.

As we explain in our article – How behavioural science can boost your mobile app performance – these shortcuts are what customers now expect, not just on mobile apps, but in website page design too. Familiar experiences or situations allow users to default to a state of mind that they have experienced before. This reduces what’s known as ‘cognitive load’, which in turn requires less effort for the customer to interact with your site or product, thereby reducing the likelihood that they’ll bounce or churn.

When it comes to examples of these heuristics, you don’t have to look far.

Implementing these approaches from a product design perspective is also becoming easier with the likes of Google publishing guidelines and even online platforms such as Coursera and Toptal creating easy-to-access resources on the topic.

2. Implement a consistent design system to minimise friction across sites and apps

69.57% of online shopping carts are abandoned
Shopify

‘Shopping cart abandonment’ is now a well-known phenomenon – hence the tricks many online stores now deploy to get customers back online to complete.

But what if there was a way to reduce that abandonment in the first place and to make it more seamless for customers to complete transactions in just a few easy clicks?

One of the ways in which this can be done is with a ‘consistent design system’, i.e. the core principles that group all your online elements into a cohesive whole. It’s this cohesive whole that allows your customer to recognise your brand and style when moving from one device or page to the next.

A consistent design system not only helps to create a strong brand presence, but also helps users become familiar with your product’s interface and navigation, reducing cognitive load and friction, and making them more likely to return to your product or site again in the future.

Here at Adrenalin, we like to talk about the ‘persistent and consistent customer experience’ and there’s a reason why – this experience is founded on a consistent design system.

3. Establish your product principles as a basis for frictionless UX

The ROI of a good UX ranges from $2 to $100 for every $1 invested
Wharton

One of the key things you can do to create a consistent design system is to start with your product principles. As we set out in this article, these principles can help your organisation add structure to the design process, without losing agility and efficiency. Product principles also help focus your Digital teams on the customer – intensely scrutinising what it is they want and how they want it displayed.

Software companies such as Atlassian are well-known for leveraging product principles, mainly because they allow for:

• Experimentation and innovation – Product principles provide a framework for experimentation and innovation. By outlining the product’s core values and principles, product principles can inspire designers and product teams to push boundaries and explore new design solutions that meet the user’s needs in new and unexpected ways.

• Alignment – Product principles provide a shared understanding and a clear vision of the product’s purpose, goals and values. This helps to align your Digital team around a common goal, ensuring that all design decisions are consistent with the product’s overall direction.

• Scalability – Clear product principles make it easier to scale your product, app or site over time and across different platforms, as the same design elements can be reused and adapted to fit different contexts and use cases.

• Quality control – Consistent product principles help to ensure the quality and consistency of the product’s visual and interactive design, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies that can negatively impact the user experience.

It goes without saying that the outcomes of all these benefits also result in a more seamless and frictionless online customer journey.

Customer journey optimisation and the ‘Zero Moment of Truth’

If ever you need a reminder about just how important the customer journey is and why it makes sense to invest in the right design strategies to optimise it, then look no further than Think with Google’s ‘Zero Moment of Truth’. This concept fundamentally describes the moment in the buying process when the consumer researches a product prior to purchase.

We all know that every customer is unique in terms of how they do this. The challenge for Digital Leaders is therefore to be ready to meet customers in their own way, at their preferred time. The main guidelines issued by Think with Google on this topic are:

• Ensure you’re present – and optimised – for multiple channels and devices.

• Ensure information is easy to find – via search engines, social platforms and on your website.

• Be transparent with your pricing and product/service availability.

• Go local (if your product or service fits with this strategy).

• Have adequate support in place or make sure your FAQs are easy to access and search.

With so many customer journeys now taking place online across all product and service types, it’s imperative that the digital pathway for customers to find, engage with and buy these products and services is seamless. The smallest obstacle in the customer journey is enough to put someone off engaging and buying – and then telling their friends, family and colleagues to stay away from your brand too! However, reducing friction in the customer journey can lead to a more positive customer experience, increased engagement, and distinctly improved business outcomes.

Adrenalin is a leading digital product and technology agency for Australia’s leading brands and organisations. If you’d like to learn more about best practices for digital product design, user experience and customer journeys, then be sure to subscribe to our monthly newsletter below.