Designing for Customer Intentions: Part 2

Published on UX Booth. November 10, 2020.

Now that you’ve been introduced to the Designing for Customer Intentions concept, let’s dive into the method illustrated by a real-world example (generalized for client benefit) of putting it to use in an e-commerce website redesign project.

Before we jump into the details, it’s important to highlight that this method is system agnostic. Whether you’re designing websites, complex digital products, or services, you can use the customer intentions method to make those systems more human.

Defining Customer Intentions

The first step involved is all about defining the customer’s intentions for the digital property you are designing, in our example case, it’s an e-commerce website.

Talk to loyal customers

We kickoff this step by talking to the business’s most loyal customers. The key pieces of information we unearth from these conversations include an understanding of when and how customers interact with the business (i.e. their touchpoints), and, more importantly, why they choose these interactions.

Gather the Whens, Hows, and Whys

After talking to customers, the second step involves gathering and listing out all of the Whens, Hows and Whys statements customers made about their experiences.

For example, When & How statements could be: “When I want to learn more about Acme’s products (when), I use the website (how).” A Why statement might be: “I do this because I know the website will give me a high-level view of all the different items I should consider purchasing”. And so on.

Turn insights into intentions

Once we list all these insights, we summarize the list into clear, mutually exclusive, bullet points. Each of these bullet points finishes the sentence “When a customer goes to the website (or application or system) they intend to…”.

Read the entire article on UX Booth

For more on the subject, check out these ideas:

Diana Sonis:
What is Website Navigation

Diana Sonis:
How to Talk With Customers Through Your Website

Diana Sonis:
Designing Website Navigation for Customer Intentions