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    "title" : "Customer experience and human-centered design |Digital.gov",
    "description": "Customer experience and human-centered design",
    "home_page_url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/","feed_url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/2024/01/18/customer-experience-and-human-centered-design/index.json","item" : [
    {"title" :"Customer experience and human-centered design","deck" : "The mission and the how-to","summary" : "Customer experience is the application of design within a business context to craft the human experience.","date" : "2024-01-18T14:46:00-05:00","date_modified" : "2025-01-27T19:42:55-05:00","authors" : {"ana-monroe" : "Ana Monroe"},"topics" : {
        
            "customer-experience" : "Customer experience",
            "design" : "Design"
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  "Four circles indicate the four phases of Human Centered Design: discovery, design, delivery, and measurement. Arrows connect these circles to indicate that the process is also cyclical, and steps need to be repeated at different phases.", "width" :
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      "filename" :"2024-01-18-customer-experience-and-human-centered-design.md",
      
      "filepath" :"news/2024/01/2024-01-18-customer-experience-and-human-centered-design.md",
      "filepathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/blob/bc-archive-content-3/content/news/2024/01/2024-01-18-customer-experience-and-human-centered-design.md",
      "editpathURL" :"https://github.com/GSA/digitalgov.gov/edit/bc-archive-content-3/content/news/2024/01/2024-01-18-customer-experience-and-human-centered-design.md","slug" : "customer-experience-and-human-centered-design","url" : "/preview/gsa/digitalgov.gov/bc-archive-content-3/2024/01/18/customer-experience-and-human-centered-design/","weight" : "1","content" :"\u003cp\u003eAs a designer working in a customer experience shop, I’m frequently asked how \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/topics/customer-experience\"\u003ecustomer experience\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/topics/design\"\u003edesign\u003c/a\u003e work together. After all, the two seem similar, but they’re not quite the same. Both center on humans and the human experience, but their core applications seem to vary. How do they relate? Where do they interact? Does one encompass the other?\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is how I respond to those questions:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBusinesses rely on customers for their existence.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe experiences of those customers determines the longevity and/or impact of the business.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDesign can be framed as “the scientific method for business”\u003csup\u003e\u003ca aria-describedby=\"footnote-label\" href=\"#fn1\" id=\"footnotes-ref1\"\u003e[1]\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e as it allows businesses to explore, test, and tinker to create and improve offerings and customer interactions.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTaking these three things together, it’s clear that \u003cstrong\u003ecreating and supporting excellent customer experience is necessary for any business, and design is the how-to that helps organizations achieve success\u003c/strong\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"happy-and-unhappy-paths\"\u003eHappy and unhappy paths\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn user experience design, there is a concept called the “happy path,” which refers to user flows that “were conceived and architected with best-case scenario[s] in mind.”\u003csup\u003e\u003ca aria-describedby=\"footnote-label\" href=\"#fn2\" id=\"footnotes-ref2\"\u003e[2]\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Although conceived in the \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/topics/user-experience/\"\u003euser experience\u003c/a\u003e world, this concept can also apply more broadly to customer experience. Providing excellent customer experience along a happy path is easy: a customer comes to an organization knowing what they need, and finds engagement with the organization clear and navigable. The customer and the organization are both able to fulfill their needs, and everyone goes home satisfied — that’s a great customer experience!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnfortunately, that’s not always how situations unfold, especially in complex business spaces. In the public sector, for example, customer experience excellence requires that organizations anticipate and design for unhappy paths, and help customers who find themselves on them. There are many situations in which customers and organizations might find themselves on unhappy paths, including:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA customer comes to the organization unwillingly.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eA customer is unclear about what they need.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe customer’s requirement can only be partially fulfilled by the organization.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe organization’s business process(es) are very new, very old, or only partially built, and they can’t yet fulfill the need.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese situations carry substantial risk\u003csup\u003e\u003ca aria-describedby=\"footnote-label\" href=\"#fn3\" id=\"footnotes-ref3\"\u003e[3]\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e for the organization. If the interaction is a struggle—even if the customer gets the outcome they desire—the customer will perceive the interaction as a poor customer experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the government context, unhappy paths can sometimes even seem inevitable. Government agencies must often engage with customers during their most challenging moments, such as receiving a diagnosis of a chronic illness, or being notified of a high tax bill. Clearly, engaging with a government agency during such an experience will be challenging, but through intentionally designing for these unhappy paths, agencies can make these situations less painful than they might otherwise be.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-to-do-design-for-everything-you-can\"\u003eWhat to do: Design for everything you can\u003c/h2\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"image\"\u003e\n  \u003cimg\n        src=\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/digitalgov/hcd-guide-intro-1.png\"alt=\"A flow chart showing the design process in four steps; discover, design, deliver, measure. Repeat each step as needed.\"/\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is where design, the how-to of customer experience, comes in. Throughout the government, agencies use \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/guides/hcd/\"\u003ehuman-centered design\u003c/a\u003e to help customers and agencies progress along both happy and unhappy paths. The human-centered design process centers on human perspectives and contexts. It is cyclical and produces replicable results. Perhaps most useful in a business context, it can simultaneously show concrete, determinate outcomes, as well as generate new directions for the organization, while de-risking to produce innovative results. This is why design can be characterized as “the scientific method for business.” It allows organizations to frame experiments, run them, measure their effectiveness, and find new opportunities in the process. Given this structure, human-centered design is an efficient, meaningful tool to use in traversing both happy and unhappy paths. It helps an organization evolve their offerings to anticipate future customer needs and inclinations, and mitigate the risk of unhappy customer paths occurring.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"loose-engineering\"\u003eLoose engineering\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCustomer experience teams use human-centered design to address current customer paths, as well as to loosely engineer future ones\u0026hellip; but the term “loosely engineered” is an oxymoron. There’s no such thing as “loose engineering”—engineering is strictly practical and always firmly fixed in the possible, controlling all variables. When something breaks, engineers isolate variables and experiment until they address the issue. But you can’t engineer the future, because you can’t control all the variables.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo, why should teams go through the work of design if it won’t result in a perfectly controlled, positive customer experience? Unfortunately, because an experience will be different for each person, it’s impossible to deliver a perfectly controlled customer experience in all situations. But that is one of the most compelling reasons to work on customer experience in the public sector. It’s a challenge, but it is one to embrace, not to run from.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003carticle class=\"dg-ring\" aria-labelledby=\"7db463d45e37b541f210896e6a28c5a4\"\u003e\n  \u003ch2 id=\"7db463d45e37b541f210896e6a28c5a4\" class=\"dg-ring__title\"\u003eCase study\u003c/h2\u003e\n  \u003cp\u003eThe U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) worked with the Farm Service Agency (FSA) and GSA’s \u003ca href=\"https://coe.gsa.gov/\"\u003eCenters of Excellence\u003c/a\u003e to better understand and improve the direct farm loan experience.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo learn more about how customers navigated through the loan process, they employed customer journey maps to show a typical farm loan experience from the viewpoints of both a loan applicant (a producer like a new farmer or rancher) and an FSA loan officer:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://coe.gsa.gov/2019/04/17/cx-update-9.html\"\u003eWhat is a customer journey map?\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://coe.gsa.gov/2019/04/24/cx-update-10.html\"\u003eHow do you read a journey map?\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https://coe.gsa.gov/2019/05/01/cx-update-11.html\"\u003eHow do you use a journey map?\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNote that processes, tools, and methods may look different at your agency, depending on many factors, but research to better understand how real people use your products and services is always worthwhile.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003c/article\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCrafting customer experience through the design process means embracing the feedback loops built into the process, and understanding that uncertainty—and both happy and unhappy paths—are part of an evolving public sector and ever-shifting public needs. More use of customer journeys and more conversations with customers provide intelligence on not just what’s going right or wrong in current paths, but will also inform organizations about what customers will be looking for in the future, and what to offer in anticipation. Even in unhappy paths, there are opportunities to learn from customers and to build relationships of \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/topics/trust/\"\u003etrust\u003c/a\u003e with them, as well as to establish and grow organizational resilience when faced with unknown unknowns.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe goal is not to create cookie-cutter experiences for every diverse customer in every possible future state; it’s to anticipate enough paths to encompass a wide range of customer experiences, make them as positive as they can be, and use all of those experiences to build trust.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"what-can-i-do-next\"\u003eWhat can I do next?\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCheck out the \u003ca href=\"https://digital.gov/guides/hcd/\"\u003eHuman-centered Design Guide Series\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"https://methods.18f.gov/\"\u003e18F Methods\u003c/a\u003e for a collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlso, explore \u003ca href=\"https://www.usda.gov/digital-strategy/research\"\u003eUSDA\u0026rsquo;s research plays\u003c/a\u003e. Modify them to uncover customers’ pain points, goals, and behaviors. Then, use this knowledge to create better experiences for your customers.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDisclaimer\u003c/strong\u003e: All references to specific brands, products, and/or companies are used only for illustrative purposes and do not imply endorsement by the U.S. federal government or any federal government agency.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"dg-footnote\"\u003e\n   \u003ch3 class=\"dg-footnote__heading\" id=\"footnote-label\"\u003eFootnotes\u003c/h3\u003e\n   \u003col class=\"dg-footnote__list\"\u003e\n      \u003cli class=\"dg-footnote__list-item\" id=\"fn1\"\u003eHigh Resolution. 2017. Review of Episode #7: GV Design Partner, Daniel Burka, on Prototyping Your Way to Massive InfluencePodcast. Hosted by Bobby Ghoshal and Jared Erondu. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeE6Tx_nO94. \u003ca href=\"#footnotes-ref1\" aria-label=\"Back to content\"\u003e↩\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n      \u003cli class=\"dg-footnote__list-item\" id=\"fn2\"\u003eWeaver, Jesse. 2022. “Resilience Is the Design Imperative of the 21st Century.” UX Magazine. August 17, 2022. https://uxmag.com/articles/resilience-is-the-design-imperative-of-the-21st-century. \u003ca href=\"#footnotes-ref2\" aria-label=\"Back to content\"\u003e↩\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n      \u003cli class=\"dg-footnote__list-item\" id=\"fn3\"\u003eIn addition to risk, anticipating and designing for unhappy paths presents an opportunity for resilience as well. If an organization does not anticipate negative possibilities, it “...has little to no resilience in the face of behaviors that diverge from that \u0026#91;happy path] scenario.” This means that “...if and when the system breaks down and\u0026#91;/or] people use it with ill intentions, \u0026#91;the organization]...will be slow to respond or possibly incapable of recovering, as \u0026#91;it tries] to react to a circumstance they’ve hardly considered.” https://uxmag.com/articles/resilience-is-the-design-imperative-of-the-21st-century. \u003ca href=\"#footnotes-ref3\" aria-label=\"Back to content\"\u003e↩\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n   \u003c/ol\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n"}
  ]
}