How User Experience Can Help Bridge the Gap Between Marketers, Developers, & Customers

Last Updated: December 16, 2021

User experience design focuses on how the end product will look and feel to the customers. The key elements of user experience (UX) include product usability, aesthetics, and how the customers ‘feel’ when they use a product. A good UX will enhance the customer experience (CX), which in turn will motivate customers to use it again, driving loyalty and building trust.

Positive user experience is essential for your customer experience strategyOpens a new window . Your CX strategy involves all brand-customer interactions across touchpoints and channels. The UX design deals with how customers use (or interact) and feel about a product (or website or app, etc.).

Therefore, to create an exceptional user experience, marketers and developers must work as a team and incorporate customer data and feedback into the user experience design.

Learn More: Is Your User Experience Keeping up with These 8 UX Trends for 2019?Opens a new window

In this article, we look at the key elements of user experience and how they bring marketers, developers, and customers together.

Key Elements of User Experience Design

To understand why a good user experience design is crucial for any product, let’s look at the product development life cycle.

To ensure a product is received well by customers and meets expectations, it goes through the following stages:

  1. User Research: A comprehensive user research is conducted to identify user needs, behavior, spending pattern, online (or offline) history, and user challenges to uncover user requirements and expectations.
  2. Data Gathering and Analysis: Data is collected from multiple sources, across touchpoints and channels to glean end-user(customer) insights. This helps determine product usability and inform product design choices to create a seamless user experience.
  3. Product Design and Prototyping: The design teams brainstorm to design the product, which involves discussions and decisions on product features, aesthetics (look, touch, and feel), and user interface. Sometimes, a product prototype is built to validate the product idea, determine feasibility, estimate cost and effort, and gauge user interest and pain points.
  4. User Experience Testing: The prototype or product is tested for its usability, interface, and aesthetics. User (or customer) feedback is incorporated to fix the problems that an end-user might face.
     

Once the product is launched, the above steps become an iterative process to continually improve the product to better-fit user requirements.

Learn More: Designing an App? Golden UI/UX Rules to RememberOpens a new window

Bridging the Gap Between Marketers, Developers, & Customers

Traditionally, marketers and developers have operated in silos where marketers were responsible for capturing customer requirements and driving sales, while developers function at the back end to design the products based on those requirements.

But more often, it has resulted in either the designers prioritizing the aesthetics over functionality or missing out on a key user requirement.

Example: The WhatsApp delete feature lets you delete a message but the purpose to be able to delete something sent accidentally is not being adequately met since the app leaves traces behind that often cause curiosity. In the screenshot below, by deleting messages, I have managed to confuse (or alarm) the recipient.
 

comp_example_of_poor_user_experience_design_5dbaf84bc2152 image

Poor User Experience Design Example

It is therefore vital to involve all the stakeholders – customers, marketers, and developers when designing user experiences.

User experience is a continuous process, and it is evident that it’s not just the developers who are responsible for exceptional user experiences. Marketers and even customers, given a chance to provide feedback, can play a crucial role in good overall UX.

Marketers need to understand market dynamics, capture customer requirements, gather customer data, and analyze it to identify important product features. More importantly, they need to communicate with customers to investigate and resolve customer problems.

Marketers need to also collaborate with the design and development teams to share and discuss customer data findings and requirements to identify focus areas and design issues while developing the product.

Customers form a pivotal part of the feedback loop. When they uncover design and usability problems, they help brands identify the requirements. User experience testing, therefore, helps evolve the product to better fit customer needs. By participating in user experience testing, customers directly interact with developers and outline the issues faced while using a product.

Example: During Alpha TestingOpens a new window , customers visit the developer’s site to use and test the product in a controlled environment, where the developer can observe and identify critical issues before the product launch. While Beta TestingOpens a new window , which happens in real environments outside the developers’ purview helps gather customer feedback, evidence-based recommendations for product improvement, and to gauge user (customer) satisfaction with the product experience and features.

Let’s look at the role of marketers, developers, and customers in brief for effective user experience design, across the product development and launch stages.

  1. Marketers contribute to the user experience design across all stages of the product development, i.e. from gathering requirements to identifying customer problem areas, communicating with developers, to gathering UX feedback from the end-user.
  2. Although developers enter during the design phase, they must collaborate with marketers to understand the requirements before charting out the product design. They, too, might need to interact with customers in the user experience testing phase to capture UX issues they are facing while using the product. If product development is iterative, with improvements and new features added at later stages, the role of developers, too becomes constant in UX design.
  3. Customers through their data, feedback, and reviews share valuable insights on how they ‘feel‘ about using the product, challenges and room for improvement, and their expectations.
     

Learn More: A Quick Guide to UI and UX for Your Marketing PlatformsOpens a new window

Over to You

User Experience plays an important role in your customer experience strategy, and a product is only as good as a customer sees it and feels about it.

Therefore, thorough research and communication must be conducted before designing the user experience. Marketers and developers must collaborate to uncover key features, challenges, and interface issues before freezing the user experience design. Inviting customers to discuss their expectations, test the product, and share their ideas, feedback, and reviews will help you create exceptional user experiences.

How are you bringing marketers, developers, and customers together? Share your tips with us on TwitterOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window ; we’re always listening!

Vandita Grover
Vandita Grover

Contributor, Ziff Davis B2B

Vandita is a passionate writer and IT enthusiast. She is a Computer Lecturer by profession at the University of Delhi. She has previously worked as a Software Engineer with Aricent Technologies. Vandita writes for MarTech Advisor as a freelance contributor.
Take me to Community
Do you still have questions? Head over to the Spiceworks Community to find answers.