• 64% of marketers agree that WOM is the most effective form of marketing
• 70% of marketers are looking to increase their online WOM spending 
• Most marketers (83%) use WOM marketing because it increases brand/product awareness 

This last insight is the most meaningful for product leads shepherding products through the early stages of development and user adoption. For products emerging into the marketplace, exposure is extremely important. When the market is not engaging with your solution — or, worse, if no one even knows your product is out there — a small group of eager, early adopters spreading your product’s gospel can be a boon for any brand or business.

If your digital solutions have struggled to gain traction with your target audiences, or you simply want to get a jump start on developing a dedicated user/customer base, designing an inviting, engaging, user-centered digital product community could be the start of your product’s journey to mass adoption. 

However, building an organic community to support your digital product is not quick, cheap or easy work. What are the secrets to success? What returns could you expect to gain from your investment of time, resources and patience? 

Advantages of Digital Product Communities

Product developers must be clear-eyed about the long-term commitment community building requires. A considerable amount of work needs to be done before you send out your first invitation. You should not expect to see results overnight, but the right approach and a steadfast commitment will help you realize impressive benefits. 

Short-Term Benefits of Community Building

If no one is talking about your product, just getting the conversation started is a big win. 

For product development projects in the early stages, that first introduction and exposure to real users is incredibly valuable, especially when those users are willing to describe their experiences.

Making that introduction in an environment you control offers other advantages, such as maximizing the opportunity to collect actionable feedback. With the right motivation or incentives, you deputize your community members to provide invaluable user insights that optimize, iterate and accelerate the adoption of your product. 

If your community members are willing to talk to you, they’d be willing to talk to others about your product, especially if you make them feel heard and valued for their observations and contributions. Turning your community members into product testers, early adopters and product champions helps you to spread the word (building awareness) and cultivate a natural customer base. 

Long-Term Benefits of Digital Product Communities 

Building a community not only helps with short-term product goals. The impact of positive digital interactions extends far into the future. However, it’s important to cultivate a digital community the right way, by focusing on user interests and needs and prioritizing relationship building. Committing to this approach is the best way to grow the community, drive more attention to your product and lay the foundation for future sales. 

Eventually, your base of potential customers will turn into real, paying customers, and a satisfying community experience will keep them engaged after the sale.

Continued participation in the community keeps your product top of mind and increases the chance of your community members turning into repeat customers. It always costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Customer retention is a huge bottom-line benefit of an active user community. 

Your digital community helps your bottom line in other ways, too. Users help other users answer questions about your products, explain new features or troubleshoot through known issues. These actions align with your business goals. Additionally, when your community members step in to assist, your paid customer service staff has one less problem to attend to and you realize savings on your operational costs. 

Product Communities: What They Are and Are Not

Building up a community is a solid investment. However, not every product or service needs one. 

“There are simply too many communities around today competing for a finite share of audience attention,” says Richard Millington, founder of FeverBee, a community consultancy that uses social science to help solve social problems. “Not every organization should build a community and those that do are going to struggle in the war for attention at the moment.” 

If you’re committed to winning that battle, your community will need to do an exceptional job of meeting user needs. What do users expect and want from digital communities? According to Millington, users join and stay for four basic reasons: 

1. Mutual support 
2. Influence 
3. Sense of belonging
4. Innovation and exploration of new ideas 

Notice that shopping or product exploration isn’t on this list, meaning you shouldn’t treat your community as a sales channel. To design an effective digital community experience, you must bypass your immediate, profit-oriented business goals. 

Approach community building purposefully and with empathy for your future members. A community is a network of relationships. It’s a resource to grow and cultivate, not a product or a tool to build. A digital community is an investment in people first; the tech comes second. 

How to Start A Digital Community to Support Your Product 

Establishing a digital product community takes work; as in, it’s a full-time job (we’ll return to this in a minute). It’s also not a “build it and they’ll come” proposition. It takes research and targeted outreach. 

At its core, a community is a place for conversation. Your first order of business is getting someone to talk to you (just like in high school). And like high school, you’ll need to figure out how to get noticed without appearing too eager, overbearing or needy. It helps to know what all the “cool kids” are into. 

Do Your Research and Engage with Purpose 

To get users to pay attention you need to do three things: 

1. Overcome the attention barrier
2. Define a particular purpose
3. Present clear value to your members 

“We’re slowly getting better at having a clear case for the community,” says Millington. “We’re seeing fewer communities for people to chat about whatever they like to in the morning and far more communities where people visit for a particular reason.”

To come up with a conversation entry point relevant to your users, put yourself in your target audiences’ shoes and dig into their interests, motivators, needs and concerns. Your goal is to identify a niche issue (related to the problem your product solves) that has not yet been addressed, or has not been addressed well. Observing existing social communities and digital networks is time well spent at this stage.

The Nike Run Club is a great example of filling a niche need. The app allows running enthusiasts to connect with each other, plan group runs, and track and share their performance. Runners have always done this, but the Nike Run Club makes it easier. The app doesn’t sell shoes, it provides a branded experience based on user interests. However, the resulting user interactions cultivate and sustain a relationship with the brand, which increases the chances of users choosing Nike shoes the next time they need a new pair.  

Choosing the right concept for your digital community will require time and trial and error. However, it should be easy to identify your most impactful idea. It will be the one that gets a quick response from your target audience. 

Start Small And Focus on Culture and Relationships First

Getting participants to join your community is a huge milestone and where the real hard work begins. In the early going, your community will need care and attention. You will need to continually push the conversation forward and drive engagement with and between users.  

Some product development teams make the mistake of assigning this task to a social media manager or another existing role. However, as we mentioned previously, managing a community is a specialized skill and a big job, not a side responsibility. Your community manager should develop relationships with early users to understand their core motivations and explore why they chose to engage and participate. They will also need to establish an inviting, supportive and engaging culture. 

This work should be done before any large-scale investment into technology. In fact, you may not need to design your community platform for quite a while. Take advantage of community tools wherever you find your target audience, whether it’s on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube or other digital platforms.

At this stage your most important investment is in people. Establishing a strong community culture early will help you draw users whenever/if you do decide to design a custom digital experience platform for your community. 

A Community to Help Your Digital Product

Creating a digital community achieves a number of mission-critical goals, in both the early stages of product development and throughout the life of your product. However, the process requires a long-term commitment and a considerable amount of work. 

The competition for your audiences’ limited attention is fierce. Your best bet to build an organic community that supports your product and authentically represents your brand is to prioritize relationship-building and establish a culture that exceeds user expectations.

The post How to Approach Community Experience Design for Your Digital Product appeared first on Crush & Lovely.

Banking and financial apps look and function largely the same. As do most ride-hailing services, ecommerce/shopping platforms and wellness/mindfulness assistants. No matter which brand you choose in a particular market vertical, you end up with remarkably similar, and stylistically uninspired user experiences.  

Why are these digital solutions failing to differentiate themselves from each other?

Graphic design influencer Elizabeth Goodspeed places the blame on Pinterest and moodboards in a recent article for Eye on Design magazine, an online publication of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA):  

“The way in which images are selected and placed within the context of the moodboard is the driving force behind the aesthetic monotony seen in brand photography. Art directors, tasked with sourcing imagery quickly and precisely, are increasingly turning to collective inspiration websites like Pinterest and Are.na to locate reference images. On these sites, by design, creatives are encouraged to bucket out imagery into thematically consistent folders to be shared and mined by others.”  

Instead of relying on a diverse set of reference images for brainstorming and inspiration, product designers are being co-opted into using an increasingly curated and limited set of images as “a rigid road map.” It’s not surprising, then, that the resulting creative processes end up with extremely similar outcomes. 

If your goal is to design breakthrough digital solutions for mass adoption, however, you can’t afford to blend in with the crowd. You have to find a way to combine the familiar and the novel to create something new and truly authentic. 

How can you design unique, branded user experiences that effectively capture the significance of your product and differentiate it from your competitors? Here are 5 ways to make sure your digital experience design process elevates your product above the rest. 

1. Define how your brand will manifest in your product

Before you can present (and represent) your brand to your customers, you first must figure out what it is. Many established brands have well-defined brand concepts, replete with a detailed brand book and thorough brand guidelines. Using these source materials, it should be easy to draft a creative brief that outlines an innovative approach to user interface (UI) design for your product. 

For less mature brands still looking to make their impact on the marketplace, defining their brand narratives is a critical step in the product development journey. Do not attempt to write a creative brief for UI design without at least broadly outlining the contours of your brand story first. Moreover, if your goal is authenticity, this process — defining the style, tone and voice of your brand — needs to be open, personal, and creative.  

2. Explore the marketplace 

Before designing how your solutions will look and feel to your users, it is helpful to see what the competition is doing. While you don’t want to follow the herd blindly, you should be aware of what the herd is up to. 

Much can be learned from your peers. Your more established competitors will have already spent a considerable amount of time and money researching and developing their solutions. Analyzing your peers is a great way to get a baseline feel for the table stakes (price of entry to the marketplace) and general user expectations for your burgeoning solution. This goes for all stages of product development.  

Document your observations. Then, (somewhat) forget what you learned. You’ll use these observations later to compare and contrast your designs with the current market status quo, but it’s important to start your research and creative processes (the next steps) with a clean slate. 

Focus your attention on your customers, learning as much as you can about who they are (needs, wants, motivations), the problem they’re solving, and how this problem impacts them in the real world. (In typical product development cycles, much of this information is captured prior to starting the UX design phase of the product build.) 

3. Ladies and gentlemen, start your search engines 

With your audience firmly in mind, it’s time to start searching for inspiration. Avoid following your competitors’ footsteps. However, aiming for complete originality is a step too far. After all, no reference materials found online are going to be completely original. You want to strike an intentional balance between “new” and “familiar.” 

Look for design elements that compliment your brand (fit the brand narrative and brand guidelines) and vibe with what you know about the users.

“A splashy color isn’t going to make your product stand out — a cohesive, consistent and refreshing brand experience that exceeds your user’s expectations will.” 

To that end, be mindful in how you conduct your search. Remember, it’s important to avoid that “road map” mentality. If you plug in the same keywords as everyone else into Pinterest (or your inspiration site of choice), you’ll get the same results. 

Dig deeper. Break down what you’re looking for into smaller components and narrow the focus of your searches. It is also beneficial to look outside the typical reference points for your visual inspiration. 

For example, you could start brainstorming UI designs for a new financial app by casting your net widely, with a broad term like “cyber security.” Then you can reduce scope and refine your search with more targeted and/or peripheral queries, such as “data visualization” or “machine learning.” To ensure you’re not covering the same, old ground, shake things up by taking your search in a completely different and unexpected direction: travel imagery, the natural world below the ocean, space exploration, or anything fresh that can help you communicate your brand and product story.  

4. Establish your creative direction and provide options 

What should you do with the results that resonate with your brand, product and target audience? Here’s where Goodspeed’s villain, the moodboard, comes into play. 

It is important to point out that moodboarding is a terrific aid in the creative concepting stage. However, this resource, like your reference image search strategy, can be harnessed for good (authenticity) or for ill (running with the herd). The important thing is how you use the tools you are given.   

Moodboards remain a natural and effective method for piecing together a creative vision for your product’s UI design. They are the easiest way to experiment with your inspirational elements and set the creative parameters of your design process.  

Remember not to throw away those misfits, the references you like but don’t fit the theme or feel of your primary moodboard. Experienced product designers often create several moodboards to compare and contrast their different creative approaches and pull the best features out of each. 

5. Make it real: apply your design to the product UX

With your creative direction set, it is time to apply your creative vision to actual product features and user interfaces. Use what you’ve learned about your target audience (customers) to create and optimize a design to help users navigate the environment, accomplish their goals and establish a connection with your brand. A close, collaborative relationship with the UX team pays dividends at this stage, as design needs can place demands on development. 

An authentic brand experience, minus clichés 

Your digital products are a reflection of your brand. However, translating brand concepts into effective digital assets that convey and support your brand narrative is not simple. 

It’s easy to follow the herd and embrace catchy design trends, but this approach is no way to stand out. Creating an authentic brand and building extraordinary branded digital experiences requires that product teams ignore the outside noise and look inside first to find the defining elements that make your brand unique.

The post How to design unique, branded digital experiences that avoid clichés appeared first on Crush & Lovely.

Developing breakthrough digital products requires keen insight into your target audience and marketplace. Just gaining the attention of your prospects with an elevated user experience is not enough. User attention is fleeting in the hypercompetitive digital space. To keep your audience engaged over time, you must keep refining, optimizing and innovating user experiences. 

Which brings us back to data, the world’s new dominant resource. 

All digital solutions produce data that can be leveraged for user insight. However, not all organizations are empowered to make the best use of the data they collect (or could collect). Motivated product teams can realize the benefits of a more data-driven strategy by giving data collection and analysis the same design treatment as critical elements of UX.  

We’ve said before that it takes a comprehensive approach to product development in order to create solutions that truly resonate with digital native audiences. Data experience design is an increasingly important part of that holistic process. 

Why Pursue A More Purposeful Data Experience Design? 

Forward-looking brands are leveraging data to drive better user experiences and more effective decision-making. More impactful insights, achieved faster than ever before, lead to efficiencies and improvements, and bigger leaps in understanding, capability and user adoption. Brands that don’t move in the direction of data are looking to be left behind. 

More data is being generated today than ever. But not all of that data collection is done purposefully or in an organized fashion. In the rush to adopt analytics, many organizations failed to develop a sophisticated understanding of data management methods and practices. In some of these cases, the outcome has been a complicated network of disparate data streams unable to talk to each other or contribute meaningful insights. 

This is exactly where data experience design can help. 

What Is Data Experience Design? 

Data experience design is the process of transforming raw data into a robust and flexible data architecture capable of fully supporting the informational needs of users — external (customers) or internal (your product team). This more purposeful approach to data makes it more accessible, digestible and actionable. 

Data experience design occupies the middle ground between data visualization and user experience design. Whereas UX design is all about making things easier for the user, data experience design is all about making it easier to analyze large amounts of data and glean insights. 

How is this accomplished? 

In short, a data experience designer considers the full data experience — not just the chart or visual used, but the real-world questions the customer needs the data to answer. The designer must consider everything from how the data are collected and structured to the actions a customer needs to take once their questions are answered. From this holistic view, we can start to tackle challenges that plague data-centered products, like siloed data, meaningless dashboards (with charts that often don’t say anything at all), and interfaces that make essential comparisons or actions impossible. 

• Data Experience Design Changes Product Development at Nasdaq, Medium

Data experience designers develop custom-built data infrastructures and help product teams  create better tools for data analysis and advanced data visualization. Establishing that  infrastructure requires you to transform raw data into easily shareable formats. 

Data transformation is accomplished by gathering, warehousing, and preparing data for the purposes of insight, tracking and/or measurement. A critical aspect of data transformation is the ETL (Extract, Load, Transform) process, which includes decision-making around a number of key areas, including:  

• Data Harnessing 
• Data Warehousing 
• Data Integration 
• Data Management 

Data transformation and custom-built infrastructures allow you to develop sophisticated data visualization and analysis tools that help your product team to automate tasks, better track performance, provide custom reporting and share dashboards that support your team’s operational goals. Data experience design also helps to optimize your customers’ user experiences, maximizing the value they receive from your digital solutions. 

How to Harness Data to Power Your Digital Solutions 

A custom-built data infrastructure gives you the ability to utilize 100% of your data. At Crush & Lovely, we help our clients fully harness their data with a four-step data experience design process. We develop processes to power your applications, utilize analytics to inform smarter products, organize data for maximum efficiency at scale, and visualize data to help product leaders navigate further iterations with speed.  

1. Develop a purpose-led data strategy.

We begin by helping you identify the important questions, the queries which will be most impactful for your users and beneficial for the success of your digital product and business. From there, we design a tracking plan to effectively capture the data you need in order to answer those questions.

2. Create the data infrastructure to capture, store and format your data.

Our seasoned data and development team have considerable experience developing data warehousing strategies to satisfy the most stringent privacy and legal requirements. We review all the ways that data is coming into your organization and help you harness the most important data streams to extract valuable insights. When necessary, we develop additional ways to capture relevant user data to supplement existing data sources. 

3. Put your data to work immediately.

With the data infrastructure ready, it’s time to deploy that tracking plan and let the data flow. In the next step, a behavioral analytics pipeline and relevancy scoring system help to transform raw data and prepare it for presentation and analysis. 

4. Drive actionable insights with greater frequency. 

Data transformation enables powerful data visualization tools and techniques, driving the ability to personalize customer interactions and glean insights for future growth.  

Get the Most Through Data Experience Design 

The ability to leverage your data more fully can help you stay better connected with your users and ahead of your competition. To do so, you must take a purposeful approach in designing your data architecture. 
For product leaders hoping to engineer a more robust data analysis infrastructure, Crush & Lovely is here to help find the most efficient path to more effective data insights.

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