User Experience (UX) is all about creating well designed products and services that make life easier for users – and help businesses flourish. For July’s First Wednesday we were joined by Wojtek Kutyla (Lead User Experience Designer) and Jason Kennedy (Digital Art Director) of Storm ID, looking at how arts organisations can provide a great user experience both on and offline to ensure that they effectively engage, retain and grow audiences.

We’ve summarised our key learnings from the afternoon:

Start with needs. Marrying the needs of customers with the desires of businesses lies at the heart of UX design. To do this effectively you first need to gather insights on users’ behaviour. The Storm ID team begin with organisations’ needs and then move to thinking about personas. Personas are archetypes of key consumers that provide a foundation for any design and are a good way of visualising who your audiences are as individuals. In this way, UX design focuses not just on products or services but on the people using them.

Test, and then test again. Prototyping is crucial. When developing any product or service you should re-evaluate and improve your work continuously. What’s more, responsible design should never discriminate against users with different needs and the session highlighted the importance of building for inclusion. With this in mind, testing should be done with as many different users with as many different needs as possible.

Focus on the whole customer journey. Organisations should aim to create experiences, not just websites. Thinking about customer journeys from beginning to end is important because if any one part of a transaction is difficult for your users it will impact negatively on how they perceive your brand. Wojtek and Jason advocated embedding digital at the core of everything you do as the best way of solving service design problems. Integrating technology into the customer experience from the start can streamline the process, making life easier for users. It’s about developing a model that embraces the digital, not one that treats it as an add-on to existing business structures.

Asked to contribute to our blog post, Wojtek said:

“True design should be open, sustainable and, above all, influenced by both decision makers and users of the end product. Whatever your organisation does, keep exploring user experience. Remember that the convenience of technology comes with a price: bad products can impact the happiness of your users, whereas good products can make your organisation work better! If in doubt about any design decision – always refer to your end-users. They will quickly tell you if your ideas make sense. Hopefully you’ll hear that they do, but if not, fasten your seatbelt and… enjoy the ride! Make mistakes and improve, be transparent about the process and evolve as a product maker.”

Exclusively available for Culture Republic Partners, First Wednesdays are a great opportunity to learn and network around key issues affecting our sector. Next month we’ll be exploring the question: is print dead? Alastair Jeffrey of J. Thomson Colour Printers will lead the session looking at how to use print in the digital age. Contact us to find out more about this event, or about Culture Republic partnerships.