For Digital Leaders

Taking a customer-centric approach means basing UI design decisions on the desires and needs the customer. Although have good intentions, business stakeholders tend to push requirements that suit their needs over the customers. This is a case for why it's imperative UI design teams prioritize customer needs over the business, why business stakeholders should have a limited role in your design process, and two real-world examples where customer-first thinking failed.

For digital teams to be successful, they must ‘get in the customer’s head’ and build deep insights into the intentions, motives and behavior that lead to the sale. This episode explains four ways to collect valuable data about your customers: how they interact with your store, what they’re thinking and why it’s crucial to build true customer empathy.

This episode is part of the #CommerceTech series why I review digital asset management platform Cloudinary which helps digital teams automate the entire image lifecycle — from upload, storage and catalog management, to on-the-fly asset manipulation (cropping, resizing, filters) and high-performance delivery through global Content Delivery Networks.

An effective mobile commerce optimization strategy is rooted in 'usability' and where design decisions are derived from research-backed usability research and data. Digital leaders need to ask themselves and their teams hard questions to know where attention should be placed going forward or risk losing out on the growing proportion of mobile traffic vs. desktop.