Great Apps Start with Great Experience Design

How do you create a dynamic, engaging experience for customers and employees with apps? It’s much more than just visual design, understanding customer demographics, or compiling extensive user research into elaborate journey maps, though all of these play a useful role.

Instead, it’s about bringing those moving parts together and using technology as a tool or enabler while always focusing on the experience first by employing solid experience design strategies. Joel Osman, Managing Director, Experience Design at Maven Wave, who also serves as the company’s app development lead, walked through the importance of experience design during one of Maven Wave’s booth sessions at Google Next ‘19.

“When you look at all the technology and everything happening here today, getting it right as far as the end-user and the experiences that you’re trying to create… is, from my viewpoint, what it’s all about,” he said.

Not only are customers’ attitudes around technology and their actual use of technology evolving, but, “employee engagement is almost a new battlefield in the race for talent,” Osman explained. So, from both perspectives, creating the best modern app experiences is critical. And, by the way, this conversation includes desktop apps, mobile device apps, and voicebots/chatbots. “Conversational design is every bit as important as visual design,” Osman pointed out.

Across the board, “we’re very focused on behaviors,” Osman said. If you’re trying to get customers to go online for services instead of calling the call center, for instance, that’s a business outcome that requires a change in behaviors, which are driven by underlying motivations. While many enterprises can pull together excellent vision statements, buyer personas, journey maps, etc., they struggle to connect user motivations to outcomes.

“Where we focus is how to sit in the middle,” Osman explained. “How can we connect the dots between all of this great user research and actual designs?”

That’s where Maven Wave comes in. The team has developed its EXcelerator process to connect the dots and used it to build dynamic, engaging apps for Fortune 500 companies.

Click on the video below to learn about the 4-step EXcelerator methodology and watch the entire booth session.

Maven Wave’s Experience Design team helps clients envision and define outcome-based experiences that feed the creative and technical design process. This ultimately enables Maven Wave to design, build, and deploy innovative solutions that drive real value for your company. Contact us to learn more about our Experience Design services.