With customers worldwide coping with the pandemic, companies need to recalibrate customer experience (CX) efforts, and with most people cooped up at home, it’s suddenly more important than ever to get digital experiences right.

That means urgently redirecting funds toward the people, processes, and technologies required for digital user experience (UX) to deliver:

  • Excellent interaction design. This is how you enable people at home to get things done using your website or app. Are your workflows, forms, controls, and responses well designed?
  • Compelling value. Does the value that customers get out of your websites and apps match up with the amount of effort, data, and money they’ve got to invest in the experience?
  • Intuitive presentation. Is the user interface as easy, effective, and emotionally resonant as possible for customers to use — including layouts, grid systems, graphical elements, typography, and more?

So here’s what to prioritize as your organization doubles down on digital UX:

  • Scale up your design team. You’ll probably need more capacity and efficiency to up-level the UX of your website or app — in terms of skills, processes, standards, structure, and mix of people. For advice about how to do this well, see “How To Scale Your Design Organization.”
  • Hire outside help where needed. It may be a challenge to scale up quickly with internal resources, only because onboarding takes time and specialized skills are hard to find. For comprehensive guidance on how to choose a services firm to contract with, see “At A Glance: How To Select An Experience Design Provider.”
  • Rigorously review your UX so you can make it better. To assess the quality of your digital properties’ interaction design, value, and presentation, use the methodology we explain in “The Forrester Digital UX Review.” To ensure your review is objective, it also helps to contract with a third party (like Forrester) to perform these evaluations. Make sure the firm you hire staffs the project with UX experts, not generalists.
  • Update and sharpen your UX expertise. Make sure you’re aware of and able to apply best practices in key UX areas like search, navigation, accessibility, content clarity, etc.

If you’re interested, you can contact a Forrester account manager about our UX-related services, including:

  • Full digital UX reviews of your entire site or app or your competitors’, with screenshots, scoring, and recommendations.
  • Light reviews of specific parts of your site or app — this can be your prototypes, wireframes, and other work in progress.
  • Custom webinars on UX best practices in specific areas like search and the others I mentioned above.

How is your organization coping with the challenge of ensuring high-quality UX at this historic time? Would you be willing for me or one of the analysts on my team to interview you about this? We’d love to hear from you — reach out anytime. (And just to be clear: Our analysts do not sell anything; the purpose of the interviews is purely for research.)