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By Rahul Khosla, Partner, eDynamic
B2B portals such as Customer portals, Partner/Agent/Broker portals and Financial
portals are complex, and most B2B portal initiatives typically are not
successful from a perspective of Customer Experience. Customer Experience
includes an experience that meets users needs, is easy to use, and keeps the
user informed and engaged. B2B portals have a mix of several moving parts
including strategy, design, technology development and product marketing, which
make it difficult to manage the whole initiative as an effective program. In
this blog, I’d like to introduce you to our UX Program, which when applied,
ensures that key elements of the initiative are not overlooked.
B2B portals are difficult to manage, largely due to the following reasons..
1. Quite often there is a lack of understanding of user needs. Needs are
gathered using the same techniques with which websites are created, but there
is a fundamental difference between websites and portals, and requirement
gathering needs to be approached differently.
2. Capabilities and functionality can be quite complex. Information Management
and Business Intelligence are difficult to get right, given their complexity.
Back-end systems, which have a large bearing on the user experience, are
typically complex.
3. Lack of communication between marketing/product development and technology
teams: This is one of the key reasons of failure. Marketing/Product development
define requirements and user experience, and then approach technology for
implementation. Many of the capabilities are either not feasible based on the
technology solution, or are difficult to implement within budget. At that time,
the UX is typically just bandaged and stitched up, which ruins the experience.
4. Portals are designed like websites: Portals and websites are fundamentally
different. Portals are very process driven and process design and information
architecture takes precedence over design. Quite often portals are approached
with the same methodology of designing a website, and the resulting user
experience is typically broken
5. Lack of measurement: Most B2B portals do not measure experiences effectively.
Even when they claim to, often all they are really doing is just installing
someanalytics software, but then don’t even know what to do with the data to
gather real insight. This is a key challenge. If you’re not able to
continuously iterate and improve the experience with an effective methology,
your portal experience will break down.
6. Ineffective workflows: Portal experiences typically have a large number of
intelocked steps to reach a point of completion. If any step doesnt work
effectively, the experience breaks.
Through our experience in creating portals since 1999, we have come up with a UX
Program for B2B portals which covers all aspects of managing a program to
enhance customer experience. The following illustration captures our program
simplistically:
Now let’s look at some of the core elements that go into creating a successful
online B2B experience.
1. Web Portal Strategy. Apply an end to end Strategy which
provides a Point of Arrival for the customer experience you want to achieve
with your program. Quite often, B2B portals go through radical changes of
direction because the strategy is not complete or specific enough.
2. Measure user needs. Continuously identify and validate user
needs. Portals can be quite complex; utilizing a visualization based approach
with the help of prototypes is very helpful in capturing complex needs.
3. Workflows: Portals are workflow driven; Information
Architecture and workflows matter more than design. Ensure that you create an
efficient experience. Business Analysts and Information Architects in project
teams need to have the skill set to do effective process design to be able to
create efficient workflows. Typically, business analysts are adept at capturing
requirements and use cases, but find it difficult to design efficient
workflows.
4. Impactful design: Design that not only is in line with
corporate branding, but enables ease of use
5. Site Structure and Content. The structure and content of
the site need to be managed well. Your navigation structure and content
architecture will impact user experience significantly
6. Technically feasible experiences. This is the banana skin
of portal design projects. Design and UX is quite often not technically
feasible. Your program needs techniques in place to ensure technical
feasibility of experiences. At eDynamic, we typically involve our technical
resources early pn in the engagement, to assess feasibility of process flows
and information architecture, and provide technology boundaries to work within.
These boundaries can be a double edged sword: while they allow you to deliver
feasible experiences, they can short change the experience as boundaries are
not pushed
7. Customer Satisfaction measurement. All portal capabilities
that are rolled out need to be measured for customer satisfaction. These are
done against customer needs and the tasks users they perform on the portal. By
leveraging Web Analytics software intelligently, you can track user behaviour
and get metrics for capability and portal usage, critical path analysis and
user profile. Other techniques like surveys, interviews and customer focus
groups help to measure customer satisfaction. This process needs to be
continuous.
8. Program management. B2B portal projects can be quite
difficult to manage. They involve complex technology where user experience
needs to be merged. There are typically a lot of moving parts. Managing the
program holistically, and not in design and technology silos brings success.
9. Product marketing. Marketing the portal and its
capabilities for successful adoption and usage is important. Providing demos of
capabilities, quick how-to videos that help users use capabilities, and
communication plans for product launches are all methods which will help you
ensure that your product is adopted effectively by the user community.
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