Leverage an experience vision to become a market leader

Envisioning your product of the future: how a UX vision can drive your company to success.

Developing a product or service that stands out from the competition is hard. What is worse, with any successful product launch the competition quickly emerges. Each company is trying to grow their piece of the market by offering a new feature or a better price. To be a market leader, it is more important to develop a strong vision for your user experience than to worry about competitor offerings.

In all likelihood, the product and marketing departments of each company have completed a competitive analysis to track exactly what others in the market are doing and offering. The goal is to make sure you can offer all the same features, and you do it for cheaper.

But competing on price is a race to the bottom. At some point, you can’t lower costs any more because the revenue coming in will not cover the cost of operating the business.

Quality, on the other hand, can always be increased.

Instead of trying to make your products cheaper, you can work to make them worth more. This is what the luxury brands do — they create a sense of higher value for the customer. Consider Apple products. They have a perceived quality, and high demand despite the much higher prices.

Quality is something the user experiences. When the user has a better experience with a product, they value it more.

Another example of this is name-brand vs generic sticky notes. Imagine the last time you were at the office supply store buying sticky notes. On the shelf you see Post-it notes with a generic brand (or a few) right next to them. Presumably, these products are the same. They have the same features: sticky line of adhesive on a small piece of paper. The paper could vary in size or shape, maybe it has lines. But essentially, they are no different. Which one do you buy? Most people will pay more for the brand name because they trust the name brand and could have had a poor experience with a different brand.

To increase quality and add more value to your offerings, you need to identify the things your customers are willing to pay more for. The people in your target market will tell you exactly what they don’t like about a certain experience or didn’t like about a competitor product. You just have to take that insight and translate it into a better experience.

This is where a user experience designer comes in. The job of a UX designer is to take the old, frustrating experience and make it pleasant.

Standing out and disrupting an industry requires a solid experience vision.

An experience vision is the result of understanding customer needs, frustrations and goals. It is the ideal future experience those customers will have when using the product. We write an experience vision to let everyone inside the company know what they are aiming for.

The UX vision can help set the product roadmap for the next 5 to 25 years. It is the north star guiding all decisions in order to make sure the future experience will come true. The whole team can keep their eyes on the prize rather than going crazy worrying about what everyone else is doing.

As I mentioned, the UX vision starts with a thorough understanding of the user and the current frustrations they have with a current experience. Knowing what is getting in the way of your customer’s goals and what they might like about using a product or service is impossible without having conversations. Beyond the interaction with your product, you also need to know the full journey, the context of use. Find out what prompts someone to use this in the first place and what they do afterwards.

User experience researchers are skilled at uncovering these insights. They can put the pieces together to reveal weak spots where your product can be improved. They can put together a map with all the various touchpoints and see how a product can better fit into the user’s habits across the entire journey. It’s these insights that allow a company to be innovative, instead of just directly competing in features and price.

What makes a market leader?

Most companies are closely watching their competitors to copy what they do, make sure they have all the same features, and guessing about what might be a good idea. Market leaders and innovators work to understand their users needs and challenges, so they can solve them. Smart companies are focused on the experience vision and don’t worry about what their competitors are doing — only what their customers are saying.

Related posts:

Ainda lembra como nos conhecemos? O nosso primeiro e último encontro. Dia a pós dias depois daquela noite em que te ouvi refletir, cantar, jogar ping pong e depois… dançar. Fui notando o quão ficava…

I got sober nine years ago. I made the decision a few weeks beforehand, so I could really go out with a bang and savour a few more sweet rounds of beautiful chaos before my retirement from the wild…

sullied in a story so familiar what are we still doing here how much more room is left to bitter this capacity will your flesh stretch further push the line back to excess we both went along with…