User Insights: Diving Deep to Create Meaningful Design Experiences

Jan 26

Although customer insights are an essential part of designing brand experiences, many brands don’t realize how useful they are. Here, we’ll explain how companies can use customer insights intelligently in the design process and what organizations risk when they ignore this potent tool.

Building Meaningful Brand Experiences

When prospective customers become interested in a product or service, they experience a connection with it. It grabs and keeps their attention and sparks their emotions. This interest is immediate, emotional, and perhaps unconscious. These lightning moments provide the foundation of a meaningful brand experience.

When prospects have this experience, they engage in an unspoken narrative that connects them to the capabilities of a product or service in their life. That’s why storytelling is an important part of product design. It’s the glue that connects user experience, design, and brand stories.

Going Deep: What Makes These Experiences Valuable?

Successful brands are inspired and influenced by customer desires and worldviews. To join these ranks, teams must learn what customers are thinking, especially about their company, its products, and its services. Brands must describe themselves in ways that resonate with users so they feel that shared value connection.

User-centered design always starts with people-product interactions. This approach helps companies understand how users behave, what they need, where they get the product, and how much they’re willing to spend.

What’s most important, however, is how the product or service makes users feel. This is in contrast to simple descriptors such as age, sex, and geographical locations which correlate with different buyer behaviors. User insights lead designers to look for causes such as the emotions that prompt users to act.

Ignoring User Insights

If you don’t pay attention to and include user experiences in your design, you’ll face the dilemma that your product or service is unlikely to solve users’ problems or connect with prospects on any level — emotional or practical. When this happens, you dramatically shrink your user base and expose your brand to risks like:

Losing new customers to more innovative brands. There’s a direct, positive relationship between applying user insight methods to designs and making strong connections with customers. Those who listen, win.
Customer churn. There’s also a direct relationship between keeping consumers and connecting with them at the emotional level. Forging strong brand relationships with customers is essential for customer retention and therefore affects revenue.
Less agility. The ability to reposition your brand is always valuable, but in tough competitive environments, it’s especially important. Insight-based design enables companies of all sizes to adapt to changes in the business environment and act on new business opportunities.

So, by starting—and sticking with—user-centered insights and design processes, even smaller companies can compete effectively in the modern, customer-centered universe.

Practical Ways to Apply User Insights

There are two ways to engage talent and other resources in the quest for meaningful brand experiences. The first approach is to use the knowledge, skills, and experience you have onsite to map and apply user-insight-based methods. The second is to engage a partner who can offer insights based on their skills and experience. Here are some tips to get started.

Strategy 1: Use Onsite Resources

If you have the user research and analytical resources you need to gain customer insight in-house, your task is straightforward. Create a steady stream of brand experiences with what you already have.

Here are suggestions for starting small but smart:

Use basic tools. If your team is familiar with empathy or customer journey maps, use them to gather high-value information without a big budget. Use these maps to provide a basis for personas.
Keep things simple. Simplify data gathering by going to a cafe and asking people to use your product. All you need is robust Wi-Fi, a pen and paper, and fruitful conversation.
Extend user research capabilities. Do more formal research by using focus groups, in-depth interviews, and quantitative studies to observe your customers in their familiar physical environment.

There are no rules about how often you should repeat user surveys. Some services might require more frequent checks, especially when times are tough or when environmental or economic conditions change radically. However, gathering customer insight data should be constant. It’s also a good idea to pick your research tools wisely.

Make diversity embody your product development effort. That includes adding project managers, creatives, product designers and testers, key stakeholders, and anyone who is an expert in your product domain area to your team. Apply diversity to your target audience as well. Represent all groups of your core audience and use imagery and text that represent everyone accurately and respectfully.

Constantly refresh consumer attitude and response data. Updates provide proof that your brand pays attention to ever-changing user expectations. To be effective, however, your efforts must constantly gather new opinion data, surveys, interview information, and other metrics to track changes in the customer environment.

If your organization lacks the collective experience and other resources that design research requires, there is another path, one that provides a strong basis for ongoing research efforts.

Strategy 2: Put User Insights to Work with Daito Design

Daito Design specialists apply customer insight design principles to create memorable experiences for clients. We collaborate with your design team to provide them with fundamental how-to information and survey the competitive landscape to get a better understanding of your:

Potential business opportunities.
Core audience and what must happen for you to successfully reach out to them.
Business goals and how you will switch direction if changes in the business environment require it.

We can also use customer insight tools to:

Write the questions used in the interview and data collection processes.
Use journey mapping, empathy mapping, and other methods to gather customer insight information for strategic analysis.
Apply results of strategic analysis to client brand message and story.

Crafting an Insight-Centered Approach to Design

Whether you use in-house resources or the expertise of a user-centered design team, meaningful brand experiences can come from only one source—user insights. Using these experiences in your product design process can help you stay agile, create new business opportunities, and build stronger, more immediate responses to your products and services.