Delivering Seamless Experiences: Unleashing the Potential of Cohesive Design

21 Jul, 2023

In the digital age, cohesive experience design has become an indispensable element of successful digital products. Most businesses and organizations are focusing on creating a cohesive customer experience, with a robust strategy in place. With the rise of omnichannel engagement, hyperpersonalization, and immersive technologies, the demand for a seamless and integrated customer experience has never been higher. It is critical for businesses across ISVs, Retail, Healthcare, BFSI, and Media & Entertainment, to embrace cohesive experience design because user experience, brand consistency, and visual communication are key factors for achieving business goals in the competitive digital market.

To gain insights on the rapidly evolving landscape of cohesive CX strategies, best practices, and challenges faced in the UX industry, Zinnov sat down with a couple of experts – Sandra Vazquez, Head of User Experience and Design, and Flavia Negrao, Experience Design Studio Manager at Encora. The conversation delved into the intricacies of cohesive CX design and explored the cutting-edge strategies that drive success.

Manali: What is Cohesive Experience Design? How are designOps and scrollytelling defining the norms of hyperpersonalization to meet end-customer needs in the digital environment?

Sandra Vazquez: A cohesive design experience is one where the user can navigate a website/app in a smooth, continuous, and intuitive way. It aligns with user-centered design principles, understanding user needs, preferences, and behaviors to create consistent experiences across touchpoints and channels. Hyperpersonalization has become an important design trend with the rise of cohesive experience design. As SaaS grows in popularity and as vendor platforms are increasingly adopted, these cohesive experience design aspects are becoming crucial. At Encora, designOps teams and micro-frontend strategies are maximizing the value of the design team as personalization strategies are shifting from the basic understanding of a target customer to real-time consumer data.

Flavia Negrao: Scrollytelling is gaining popularity in the UX design space as it enhances the engagement between consumers and products through animations and micro-interactions. With increasing consumer expectations and demand for digital services, it has become an essential approach for designers to stay connected and interact with users effectively. Encora’s user-centered design techniques, in-house design systems, and design frameworks help prioritize project objectives, identify personas and touchpoints, map user journeys, and create cohesive and scalable design solutions.

Merlin: How has AI become an integral part in optimizing customer journeys along with customizations that define empathetic/emotional design and cross-application design?

Flavia Negrao: AI is revolutionizing UI design by offering valuable insights on user behavior and patterns. It can monitor user behavior and patterns, record user sessions on websites and mobile apps to track how users interact with the product, and can also detect usability issues. Designers are harnessing AI to generate heat maps for usability assessment, create color palettes and backgrounds, and enhance images. The integration of AI enables designers, clients, and users to benefit from an intelligently informed and enhanced user experience across all touchpoints. With AI’s ability to capture visceral, subconscious reactions, that closely align with actual consumer behavior, personalized user experiences can deliver greater efficiencies and elevate the overall user experience.

Manali: With an ever-growing list of devices, operating systems, and technologies, it has become crucial to ensure that the user experience is tailored to each one. What are the fundamental UI/UX strategies that are helping Encora build a solid platform-agnostic design?

Sandra Vazquez: Cross-platform experience design is now a vital aspect of product development, eliminating the need for platform-specific conventions that can be expensive and time-consuming. Cross-platform designs transfer a particular product design across different platforms, effectively catering to the user base across various devices. Encora’s services are built on a solid understanding of user wants and preferences intended to improve the customer experience and spur market expansion.

Flavia Negrao: Similarly, design systems also play a vital role in creating cohesive, consistent, and effective user experiences, especially as technology and digital platforms continue to evolve. They enable the scaling of user experiences across multiple platforms and devices. Encora leverages design systems to provide a consistent visual language, enhance productivity, and foster collaboration among cross-functional teams and ensure inclusivity in product development.

Merlin: Emotional experience is becoming an indispensable part of user interaction as these designs increase engagement. How are firms enhancing emotion-driven UI/UX designs, especially with the rise of the online marketplace?

Flavia Negrao: Emotional design aims to deliver an exceptional user experience by tapping into users’ emotions. Retail businesses, for example, are leveraging an emotional design strategy to align with brand values and influence decision-making. Minute aspects such as reducing wait times, implementing dark themes, utilizing micro-interactions, providing in-app guidance, incorporating gamification elements, and personalizing onboarding for different user segments are creating positive emotional responses. Encora leverages augmented analytics and data democratization to significantly enhance emotion-driven user engagement.

Sandra Vazquez: We also recognize the significance of the interfaces of the future and leverage innovative technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) to transform real-world experiences into interactive digital experiences. These technologies enhance functionality and usability by building intuitive and user-friendly interfaces that are easy to navigate.

Manali: What are the challenges faced by design-led digital organizations in the continuously changing UX industry? And how is Encora addressing the challenges in this space?

Flavia Negrao: In the product development process, the alignment between designers and developers is critical for success. However, challenges arise when there is a lack of alignment, leading to negative impact on both the process and the product. In addition, with new technologies, design trends, and best practices emerging so often, hiring engineers with the right skills has become challenging. To bridge these gaps, Encora is assembling development teams with the right skillsets, reducing operational inefficiencies, and ultimately enhancing the user experience and improving the brand experience for enterprises.

Cohesive experience design is an integral aspect of user-centered design and will remain relevant as businesses prioritize providing seamless experiences to users across different platforms. As technology advances and user expectations evolve, cohesive experience design will continue to evolve while staying true to its core principles. It is a vital approach for businesses to create engaging and satisfying experiences for their users in an ever-changing digital landscape.

To harness the potential of cohesive design in your engineering workflows, connect with our team of expert consultants at info@zinnov.com.