8 Ways a UX Consultant Can Move Your Business Forward
Ashutosh Chandra | 6th August 2020
People often wonder what exactly does a UX consultant does. It’s a fair question because there’s a lot of confusion around the role of UX consultant in a UX consulting company. So in this blog, we will understand what and how UX consultants work with clients. So, let’s begin.
8 Ways UX Consultants Assist Businesses to Succeed:
1. Assistance to Understand Customers Better
For a company to provide a better user experience, they need to understand their target audience. Where there are gaps, UX consultants assist in filling them using surveys, user interviews, and reviewing various forms of analytics. Most of the time the challenge isn’t gathering the data, but rather expressing it in a useful way. Typically most UX consultants do this through various visualization techniques including customer journey mapping and empathy mapping.
2. Auditing of Websites
User research is vital to improving the user experience. But there are some tasks that UX consultants have to do even before that. UX consultants can look at many websites and see improvements that will make the experience better for any audience. That’s why businesses often ask UX consultants to audit websites. The result of this is normally a report identifying areas of improvement that will increase satisfaction and conversion in the short term. These reports focus on addressing the smaller issues that obviously needs fixing before more nuanced improvements can begin.
3. Prototyping and Testing Better Experiences
Often when auditing a website, there are some issues that a UX consultant could address in a variety of ways. The best solution is not always immediately apparent and so different approaches need testing. To achieve this, a UX consultant will often build a prototype for their clients on which they can carry out usability testing. This cycle of prototyping, testing, and iteration is one of the favorite parts of UX consulting.
4. Establishing Businesses’s Strategy
Creating a great user experience does not happen overnight, and organizations will not achieve it just by improving the user interface. Often it requires organizational change and at least some degree of digital transformation. Organizations need a strategy to make this possible. A big part of UX consulting is for the UX consultant to assist organizations to draw up these strategies. That involves a lot of research, meeting with stakeholders, and understanding the business before they even begin. Once it is finished, a UX consultant will draw up a long-term vision for a companies user experience. Also, he will draw up a roadmap that outlines what he will need to accomplish to reach that goal. That set of recommendations becomes the organization’s strategy.
5. Implementation of The Changes
The problem with strategies is that they often lack granular detail, and as we all know, the devil is in the detail. That is the world of service design, where company processes, structures, and systems need to be adapted to meet consumer expectations. An area that demands a lot of time to address it.
To assist clients implement change, UX consultants work with them as an ongoing mentor. They work for the clients on a daily basis as challenges arise that need addressing. After all, UX consultants quickly learn, that no company has ever succeeded in implementing a strategy as it was written. There is always the need to adjust as they go along.
6. Educating and Inspiring The Colleagues
One of the most significant challenges in UX consulting are company employees. It is impossible to deliver a quality service to users without staff buy-in. People do not like to change and are often resistant to it. That is particularly true when introducing digital.
Most people don’t fully understand the impact of digital or why they need to change the way they work. That means for any strategy to succeed the organization must win the hearts and minds of their employees. It is not enough to tell them to change; they need to inspire them to want to change. Many UX consultants assist clients do this by creating training programs that range from workshops and inspiring presentations all the way through to self-learning video guides and internal comms campaigns.
7. Creating Design Systems
Enthusiastic staff is excellent, but if everybody doesn’t have the right tools and isn’t moving in the same direction, it can lead to chaos. Before long the user experience becomes fractured as too many people are managing too much online content without explicit coordination. To assist in addressing this problem, UX consultants work with clients to create design systems. These contain your classic pattern library, but also include content style guides, design principles, and service manuals. Together these things provide a framework within which everybody can work to ensure a consistent user experience.
8. Incremental Improvement of the Experience
Of course, UX consultants never finish designing digital services, such as the websites, as they are always evolving and improving. They are continually seeking to increase conversion and provide a better experience. That is why UX consultants work with many clients over the long-term to continually optimize and improve their user experience. They don’t redesign anybody’s website but they take their existing site and incrementally improve it.
Conclusion
That about covers everything UX consultants do. Get in touch with our expert UX consultants in our Oodles UX consulting agency for more assistance.
