Experience can take many forms. Experience is all around us. Experience is the product. Experience is the best teacher.
Experience is everything
Whether it’s conscious or fades into the background, an experience is the totality of many parts coming together to create a perception that is sensory, informational, useful and observational. We learn from experiences and gain experience. Meaning once we experience something, we are knowledgeable on the topic and able to form a studied opinion, and if positive – return with the knowledge to navigate it again.
Taking into consideration the all-encompassing nature of an experience, it’s no wonder that multiple types of experience strategies have taken hold in the digital environment. It is one thing to create an in-person experience that can be controlled but quite another to take a user down a path that truly reflects the brand or organization it represents without seeing the user in the flesh. A digital experience implementation works to proverbially ‘hold the hand’ of the user, providing the optimal tools and elements to create engagement and, ultimately, a conversion.
Many brands may already have some of the parts and pieces to create an experience strategy, but to create a sustainable and scalable implementation – there must be a cohesive plan in place with which to work. All to often, these elements fall into a big melting pot labeled ‘brand strategy’ or similar, but its important to differentiate each in order to successfully leverage their benefits.
User Experience (UX)
If experience itself is the sum of many parts – user experience could make up the majority of the parts. Seemingly invisible, user experience is the backbone of a company’s experience strategies. Involving insights, research, design and development – UX is the engine making the connections happen. While it was a less understood need for some time, more companies realize the importance of focusing on user experience design (or UX design) and investing heavily into it to make sure that their websites are optimized for UX. In fact, companies are making it a central part of their strategy as it affects everything that happens on their websites.
Customer Experience (CX)
A website can look great and function well technically – but it’s a customer experience strategy that can help to ensure longevity and a better ROI for the company and the site itself. Consumer engagement marketing is of high importance to achieve adequate ROI. With increasing importance placed on user experience and expectations, it has become a requirement for businesses to understand and respond to the needs of their consumer deeply. The use of data is well intended, providing high-level insights necessary to make a conversion and offering increased detail as technology develops. Despite this information at the fingertips of an organization, customer experiences often remain unchanged as most data is unable to communicate the true feedback and emotions of the audience.
Digital Experience (DX)
A digital experience works to align the technology within a company with regard to brand, business strategy, goals, services and customer needs/expectations. A cohesive digital strategy can help an organization identify where they provide value to the user and help the team move forward to further optimization. A DX strategy can be tricky as it requires the union of both tech and sales/business side stakeholders to collaborate, deciding on the requirements that are needed to meet and exceed the needs of the user and align company goals.
Brand Experience (BX)
Brand experience is the realization of vision, value and promise that a brand represents. These elements should ideally stem throughout each of the experience strategies to create a cohesive and consistent message to the audience. A successful brand experience brings meaning to the user and allows the opportunity to connect.
It’s important to note again that most companies have elements in place for each experience strategy – however, to fully cash in on the benefits of each, it can be helpful to work with a creative strategy team to provide the structure and implementations needed to grow the brand in a meaningful way.