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UX Consultancy Guide for Clients

How to leverage trends and foster a company innovation culture

Customer Experience
Category
Published:
August 2, 2020
Updated:
August 5, 2020
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Mario Stipetic

Product design lead

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UX Consultancy Guide for Clients

With this guide, you will get an introduction to understanding how your company can leverage trends to release an innovative product or service.

Your marketing, sales, business or operations team will be able to be more:

  • be more competitive
  • have more engaging staff
  • efficient time management
  • better growth potential

Here is the list of the following chapters:

  1. Foster innovation culture
  2.  Trends are double-edged sword
  3.  Basic guidelines to identify a successful trend
    a) Does it solve the existing need in a more efficient way?
    b) Does the trend lean on one or a few new technologies?
    c) Focus on trends that improve the customer experience

To get a sense of the trends in the fashion industry please see our 2020 eCommerce trends article.

1. Foster innovation culture

Amazon is the champion of innovation, either on a tactical or strategic level.

For example, Amazon Jeff Bezos, installed the "two pizza rule" for the tactical level - every team should be large enough to be fed with two pizzas. Having more agile and leaner teams produced innovation faster.

Amazon cloud was a result of internal team innovation; the development team built a scalable, fast, secure, and agile could platform for internal use. They managed to convince Jeff Bezos that this will be an excellent product for the public.

Now AWS accounts for 41.5% of the public cloud market , and almost half of the Amazon operating income

Dominos pizza is now the leader in the pizza franchise business. And that was all the result of their innovative culture.

Their main strategic differentiator innovation is the business case orientation on the delivery for free - that was not very popular back in the 60's and 70's.

With delivery as their primary offer, Dominos could reach out to a specific audience like college students and young adults. 

Later they innovated with on the tactical level with 30 minutes free pizza guarantee and square cardboard boxes with holes to keep pizza warm and crust crisp. 

Those innovations came out of necessity, the founder David Hoffman grew up in a  low-income family, leading him to deliver newspapers for a living. He envisioned the benefits and convenience of delivery and improved the customer experience of the whole generation.


Trends are double-edged sword

By identifying intelligently what trends will continue and what trends fill fail, you and your team will avoid working in the wrong direction.

Samsung's Virtual Reality MWC 2016 Press Conference

For example, back in 2017, a big trend of VR promised VR headset future, and all the big companies followed it like Facebook and Magic leap. VR still did not reach the mainstream market because of poor user experience, lack of real-world oversight, and lousy display quality - all the ingredients for a perfect trend fail.

Back then,  it was not so clear to know will this trend succeed or not.

Be careful when following a trend, and be sure to try the experience yourself and discuss it with the team in detail before proceeding.

The example of a successful trend that nobody ever imagined was, of course, Steve Jobs's iPhone. 

I had the first iPhone in my hands back in 2008, and right from the first minute and experience, I could know that this is the future -- so try to identify similar patterns by observing other people customer experience.

Basic guidelines to identify a successful trends

Does it solve the existing need in a more efficient way?

For example, Uber tackled the existing need for taxi transportation with the better customer experience that included

  • being able to order the taxi in 2-3 clicks
  • being able to rate the taxi drivers performance
  • being able to track the taxi live on a map
  • able to define your existing and end destination within minutes
  • being able to rate the driver
  • and, as the final win in customer experience - leave the car without paying --> all being handled automatically through credit card
Uber interface screenshot

Does the trend have a substantial market potential?

For example, if your company innovates in a space where it will not meet enough satisfied clients, then the innovation cost outruns the benefits.

The box that closes itself

having a innovative and cool box that closes itself is of course more related to art or a joke than innovation as it lacks  market potential.

Does the trend lean on new technology?

New technologies are always a catalyst for innovation. Companies that have been able to use the latest technology to lead the change in perfect moment strived to become the market leader in every sector.

For example, Facebook grew when computer technology was already widespread (web 2.0) to tackle the complex social network requirement.

The main tactical level innovation was the aggressive use of connecting to an existing email contact book API that was released by major email providers. Facebook grew virally because of the better customer experience of having majority of your friends there.

Facebook also innovated with a simple interface compared to MySpace, which has been entirely customisable, leading to pour customer experience.

To get a sense of the trends in the fashion industry please see our 2020 eCommerce trends article.

Does the trend  improve the customer experience?

As Steve Jobs pointed out in the early days of Apple -  "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You cant start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it. And I have made this mistake more than everybody else in this room, and I've got this scar tissue to prove it. And I know that this is the case. And as we have tried to come up with the strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with what incredible benefits you can give to the customer. Not starting with, let's sit down with the engineer and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how we can market that. And I think thats the right path to take". 

Find and focus on trends that improve customer experience and solve the existing problem better. 

For example, a recent delivery trend enhances customer convenience by ordering anything to deliver at your doorstep. Widespread door delivery was not possible decades ago without the mobile internet and smart mobile phones. The new set of technologies made a foundation for a better customer experience that was superior in the competitive market. Companies that did not adapt to the changing situation lost their market share.

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What will be the most important 2020 fashion eCommerce trend based on your professional experience?

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What will be the most important 2020 fashion eCommerce trend based on your professional experience?

Note: we will publish selected answers and get back to you by email
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Authors

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Mario Stipetic

Product design lead

Mario has worked for New York and San Francisco-based startups and large corporate companies such as ZTE. He specialize in product design solutions.

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