Albert Fourage

We are living in ultra-globalized market where everything is more connected than
ever before. There is so much competition on the market that it's hard to
differentiate your company offering through all the noise. One of the key levers
to grow your business is to invest in customer experience.

Historically, companies used to invest in physical stores and train call centers
to be empathetic. Think about Amazon. But today the biggest customer experience
challenge is in digital channels.

On Google Search, competition is one click away. Your website takes too long to
load? Is someone struggling to filter by price? It doesn't matter, the user
presses the back button on their web browser and check out the next link. The
digital experience of a customer is now becoming a priority to grow a successful
business.

On top of that, COVID-19 completely disrupted all the businesses reluctant to
digital transformation. During the time where everything becomes digital, it's
even more crucial to provide your customer with a great experience on your
digital touchpoints.

In this talk for the Butterfly Effect series BE in focus, I discussed three main
topics:

 1. what is UX
 2. why it matters for your company
 3. how to start doing it

If you're new to UX or you would like to know a bit more about it, this is the
perfect introduction you need.

Webinar: UX now or never. An introduction to UX by a UX designer Albert Fourage

Walter Lima

This September, it was also back to school for me and my colleague Kika. We flew
over to rainy Barcelona for a week-long conference where each day you take on a
specific in-depth workshop. They focused either on best practices, proven
methods or practical skills in UX design. Let me help you boost your innovation
toolbox with some interesting tips that appeared in our endless notes.

Work on them big ideas with Design Thinking
The buzz about Design Thinking has died down lately, I think mostly because
people believe that they already know what it is and use it every day. There's
some truth to that, but I question if people actually move from knowing what
Design Thinking is, to actively practicing it. Design Thinking is about getting
your hands dirty. It is about not being afraid to explore your users and iterate
your ideas even if you eventually get attached to your concepts.

This workshop had us use a lot of sticky notes and our facilitator encouraged us
to crumple and throw them away. Just like that, our cool ideas were gone. The
physical act of simply trashing our ideas was very liberating and gave us the
courage to keep bettering our work. Once you get past all the basic ideas, you
start to get to the true innovating ones.

Use journey mapping as an innovation tool
Most of the times, we use customer journeys as a tool for mapping out existing
processes. But after one of the courses, Kika pointed out an interesting
thought: "We can also use this methodology as a tool to help foster innovation."



Just try to think of how your ideal customer journey should look like and then
put it side-by-side to your current customer journey. Don’t hesitate to go nuts
with it. Think big, think anything! And make it a part of your innovation
toolbox.

Simple trick to improve your workshop facilitation
Here is how we tend to facilitate a workshop: we ask the project lead UX
designer to build an agenda together with the team and stakeholders; then we
meet one day and have an intensive workshop moderated by the lead UX designer.
The problem there is that a facilitator needs to be impartial and only moderate
the discussion, not to give their opinion. However, if you are the lead of a
project, you also want to be part of the discussion and co-create with everyone.

From now on, we want everyone in our team to be able to facilitate workshops.
This way, if I am the lead in a project and want to participate, I can simply
borrow a facilitator from another project and work together with my team,
instead of working for them.

Getting one step closer to innovation with service blueprinting
Service blueprinting is one of those methods you don't hear much about in the
Slovak design community, so we don't get to take a peek behind the curtain of
the customer's experience. Clients hire us to take care of what's happening on
the front stage, but often it's in the backstage where we can find the biggest
bottlenecks.

If you think of a theatre play metaphor, the customer experience has 3 parts:
the front stage, the backstage and the behind the scenes. The journey maps we
build, only cover the front stage, the visible contact the customer has with the
service (e.g. going to an e-shop). However, it neglects both the backstage, or
the activities that supports the stage (e.g. a CRM system that deals with
clients requests); and the behind the scene, or the internal processes that help
employees deliver the service (e.g. delivery of products from the depot to the
store).

As Kika told me after her workshop: "Imagine how we could make the whole
experience much better if we uncovered opportunities outside of the contact with
end-users. It could help us design not only what is made, but how it is made.
This is a crucial tool for innovation!"

Keep sharing your knowledge with the community



Our week in Barcelona left us with a few more kilos and an incredible feeling of
accomplishment. Getting lectures from big names in the field, such as NN/g, is
very encouraging, but meeting new people who face the same struggles as you do
is just as satisfying.

Our UX design community in Slovakia is still in its infancy and we often compare
ourselves to more mature communities around the globe, but just as Kika puts it:
"No matter the country, the size of the company or its UX maturity we are all on
the same boat. We can all be more innovative if we have the right toolbox, focus
on real user needs and keep sharing our knowledge."

Stay tuned, we will be preparing a few more articles about the things we've
learned in the conference.

Get inspired!

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Webinar: UX now or never. An introduction to UX by a UX designer Albert Fourage

Easy UX innovation hacks we have learned at the NNg conference

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Your journey
starts here

Get inspired!

All Stories

Podcasts

Events

Tools

Newsletter

Webinar: UX now or never. An introduction to UX by a UX designer Albert Fourage

Easy UX innovation hacks we have learned at the NNg conference

‌‌

‌‌

‌‌

‌‌

‌‌

‌‌

‌‌

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‌‌

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Your journey starts here

Your journey
starts here