The coronavirus outbreak at the beginning of the year 2020 radically altered people's lives, including their businesses. Many brick and mortar operations learned to adapt to the e-commerce space. Likewise, what began as temporary fixes to the pandemic’s effects has now become the new standard to deliver value to clients. Digital transformation is creating and modifying the processes, culture, and experiences in your organization using technology to meet the ever-changing market demands.

At every point during the digital transformation cycle, you will need the input of the end-user, customer, employee, developer or process owner. User Experience (UX) Design is designing products give a meaningful experience to the users. UX Design brings in focus and eliminates the ambiguity in terms of the end goal of successful digital transformation.

Every business undertaking a digital transformation journey needs to invest in User Experience Design. User Experience Design makes sure that your digital transformation ideas are good and are going to work. User Experience covers these aspects of a product:

· Usefulness - the product benefits the user either practically or otherwise

· Usability – the product enables users to achieve the end goal without hassle

· Visibility – the product is easy to find

· Credibility – the product can be trusted by the users to work every time

· Desirability – the design of the product invokes user's desire

· Accessibility – the product is usable by all kinds of users, able and disabled

· Value – the product delivers long term value to both the users and creators 

The role of user experience design in any digital transformation is to make it easier to turn ideas into reality while making the experience pleasant for every stakeholder involved. You might build the world’s best system, but if users find trouble using it, then all your efforts go to waste. Getting to know your audience is key. Here are some methods to streamline your digital transformation with UX:

1. Customer Experience Strategy

The customer experience is every interaction a customer has with the business before and after a sale. The customer experience strategy informs the digital transformation journey of the customer’s pain points in the legacy system and tries to address them in the digital system. Insights for design will not just involve the customer-facing employees, but every department in the organization.

No two organizations are alike, but for most, it is easier to start by finding out which systems can be retired or those that are used by the least number of customers or employees but require tremendous effort to maintain. These can be sunset while other digital systems are put in their place.

2. Critical Execution

The best strategy in the world is nothing if the execution is not world-class. It takes the right ideas, in the right place, in the right teams at the right time. Execution will happen naturally only if everyone in the organization understands what the digital transformation strategy entails. Cleare communication will help them understand the process and grant them a sense of ownership of the project.

As you continue executing changes, monitor using the right tools and remediate any shortcomings quickly.

3. Measuring Success

One of the challenges of digital transformation is to measure the overall success rate. There is no single metric that will work for every company. Your organization must find the right yardstick.

You can compare the number of users already using the digitized platform against the number of licenses you bought to get your platform’s adoption rate. You can also check how many of your processes are running on the new platform. The result will show if the tool is relevant or if there is resistance to adopting new technology. You could find out the amount of revenue directly coming from the digitized system. This measures will show if the digital transformation brought about operational efficiency or improved business.

The adoption rate, the number of processes running on the new system and the revenue generated from the newly digitized system shows just how sticky a system is. Stickiness is the ability of a product to linger in people's minds long after they have used it.

We cannot emphasize enough that user experience is vital for any digital transformation strategy.

Every business undertaking a digital transformation journey needs to design user experiences through every step of their transformation journey. Without this, your product may end up being rejected by the your potential customers. Without knowing, some organizations ignore their customer’s needs because they assume that efficient ways will work in the digital space. The traditional method may not work online.

When you decide to change your processes, the way you interact with your consumers also changes. It is advisable to make the user the centerpiece of your digital transformation strategy, and this can only be done when you use UX design techniques.

The covid-19 response has been very disruptive, and there is no way of telling when we will return to normalcy. Many organizations have built tools that have changed the way we work and technology made this shift possible. Regardless of whether we will go back to our old lives, these tools will remain.

If you need a digital transformation partner to walk with you,