Transforming B2B with UX consultancy
29th August 2024 •
29th August 2024 •
You know something isn’t working properly when your website isn’t doing what you hoped or expected it to do. Perhaps people aren’t leaving their contact details. Maybe they’re contacting you about something they should be able to self-serve. Could they be putting things in their basket but never completing a purchase? You know what the symptoms are but you’re struggling to pin down the cause.
Maybe your business strategy includes the creation of a brand-new product or service to help you take a larger slice of your market. You have a sense of what might be compelling and valuable to your customers, but want to test out the concept before allocating budget and committing to a specific course of action.
Sound familiar? UX consultancy can help.
Whilst we’ve had plenty of requests for “UX consultancy”, we’ve also had a fair share of clients who are completely unaware of the service or the benefits it can offer in improving the experience for their customers. If you don’t know much about UX consultancy and how we’ve helped transform customer experiences using a few tried and tested techniques, this article is for you.
User Experience (UX) consultancy is all about improving the usability, accessibility, and overall user satisfaction of digital products or services. UX consultants typically provide expertise in understanding how users interact with technology and aim to optimise those interactions to create positive experiences.
B2B companies often serve diverse user groups with varying needs and preferences. UX consultancy helps B2B companies better understand their customers’ pain points and preferences, allowing them to tailor their products or services more effectively to meet customer needs.
As consultants specialising in B2B, we’ve encountered many businesses, across multiple industries, all with similar and different challenges to solve, including:
As B2B companies grow and evolve, products and services need to adapt to changing user requirements. UX consultancy can help you build scalable and flexible solutions that can accommodate future growth and innovation.
A well-designed user interface helps prevent user errors and reduce the need for customer support. By investing in UX consultancy, you can minimise support costs associated with user confusion or frustration, ultimately saving time and resources.
In today’s competitive marketplace, user experience can be a key differentiator. By providing a superior user experience, you’ll stand out from competitors and attract and retain more customers.
Here’s how we can work with you across the life of your project to help guide and inform from a user-centric perspective.
Getting to know you and your goals.
You know your business and customers best. As UX consultants we need to get up to speed quickly. It’s critical to spend time with key stakeholders understand their needs, expectations, pain points and any ideas that have already been formed to address the issues. In most cases B2B companies are well organised with coherent and compelling business goals and strategy. UX consultants like to question and challenge, getting to the root of the ‘why’ through group workshops and one-to-one interviews. You’ll get a playback of what’s been discovered so you can be sure that everybody is on the same page.
Understanding user needs.
To improve user experience, we need to put the customer right at the centre of the process. We always start with some research to better understand the unique needs, preferences, and behaviours of the intended audience. Using your valuable customer knowledge, we dive into the insights within your business, talking to as many stakeholders as possible. We quickly become knowledgeable about your B2B proposition and the strategic goals you need to achieve. From here we’ll start talking to your customers via user interviews, surveys, usability testing, and data analysis. We gather insights into user expectations, pain points and opportunities for making a real difference.
UX consultancy can help streamline workflows and processes within B2B environments, leading to greater efficiency and productivity. By optimising interfaces and reducing cognitive load, UX improvements will help employees accomplish tasks more quickly and accurately. UX consultancy can help put appropriate measures in place to capture data to demonstrate productivity gains.
Profiling the customer journey.
We distil all our findings into a set of personas, or customer profiles. We create as many as are necessary to illustrate the broad reach of the product or service we are analysing. These personas play a critical role in quality-assuring and informing recommendations and decisions throughout the consultancy. They help us get into character, empathise, and live out the experience of target users. Each persona is accompanied by a set of indicative scenarios and tasks. We’ll assess the current state of play by walking through a scenario as a given user persona, mapping out their experience in the journey. We like to create customer journey maps as visual aids when discussing the problem and identifying the opportunity for improvement.
UX audit and competitor review.
The UX audit is a core UX consultancy service. Sometimes referred to as an expert review, sometimes a heuristic evaluation. These terms are relatively interchangeable until you look under the hood. The methods are slightly different and in the case of the heuristic review, many reviewers are involved. Usually where budget is tight, a single UX consultant is often enough to review your site, product or service against a set of specific criteria. Recommendations will align to UX best practice, guidelines, standards, trends and experience. We role-play as representative users, following typical scenarios, completing key tasks and identifying issues as we go.
It’s important to benchmark against key competitors within the B2B industry to get an understanding of how well your offering stacks up, and what can be learned from what they’re doing, as well as any established conventions that you may either want to align to or deviate from. We’ll also review your competitor offering using the same criteria that we used to evaluate your website. You’ll see how you stack up and we’ll highlight the opportunities for improvement.
Validating the vision, forming a strategy.
UX is the sweet spot between business goals and user needs. Having absorbed stakeholder goals and representative user needs we’ll be in a position to fully identify the opportunity.
Through more collaborative workshops, we use interactive activities to collect ideas and opinions about guiding principles and success criteria and potential solutions. There are often many great ideas stored within the heads of people in your business. We use techniques to bring them to the surface and interrogate their validity. We’ll also bring our own fresh ideas, from an outsider perspective. Plus our expertise and experience from working with numerous businesses across the same (and different) sectors. Everything will be collectively reviewed, and we’ll seek consensus on what to take forward for further exploration. Once we have a clear vision with SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound) objectives, we can then form a strategy with associated tasks to make it happen. The project vision could be a fully optimised, brand-new website or a targeted campaign landing page or continuous improvement dashboard. The key aspect is that we will have data compelling enough to support the case for change, and measures in place to be agile enough to adapt to curve-balls thrown at B2B during these volatile economic times.
Testing concepts, mitigating risk.
Having set the vision, we recommend spending time devising and testing concepts to make sure that what’s being proposed will resonate with customers. Here UX consultants collaborate with designers and developers to create prototypes and design solutions that address user needs and align with the project goals. This may involve wireframing, prototyping, and iterating on designs based on user feedback.
We conduct usability testing to evaluate the effectiveness of design solutions and identify areas for improvement. This iterative process helps refine the user experience and ensure that the final product meets user expectations.
As your project progresses and things come into being, it’s important to take stock and make sure they align to the user needs and expectations captured at the start. We didn’t create those personas, scenarios, and user journeys so they’d be filed as ‘delivered’ and archived away!
We run mid-project reviews to sense-check outputs against the agreed criteria. We also conduct usability testing with your customers or potential customers to capture their initial emotional response, as well as insight into how well the work in progress does what we hope it would, and make prioritised recommendations for change. We recruit people for testing based on the original customer profiles and create test scripts based on the scenarios and tasks we set right at the start of the project. Inevitably, new questions arise that you’d benefit from finding answers to, so we adapt and weave this in accordingly.
As the project progresses to a conclusion, we turn our attention to ensuring that metrics are in place to measure success.
Just like in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts, B2B users also appreciate intuitive and user-friendly interfaces. By investing in UX consultancy, B2B companies will enhance the usability of their products or services, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Along with metrics already in place within the business, UX consultancy can recommend additional methods to capture and evaluate customer sentiment and satisfaction.
UX consultancy involves user research and data analysis to inform design decisions. By leveraging insights from user testing and analytics, B2B companies make more informed decisions about product development and optimisation, leading to better outcomes.
Analysing website analytics helps you understand how users are interacting with your site, which pages are most popular, where users are dropping off and if they are doing what you hoped and expected. We like to track key performance indicators (KPIs) over time and identify any trends or anomalies that may require attention. We compare your website’s performance against industry standards or competitors, to identify areas for improvement.
Having reviewed analytic data and qualified understanding with usability testing we form hypotheses for improvements. A/B testing allows us to compare two or more versions of a webpage to determine which one performs better in terms of user engagement, conversions, or other key metrics. It provides empirical data on user behaviour, preferences, and responses to different design elements or content variations. By continuously testing and optimising different aspects of the website, we gradually improve its performance and effectiveness over time. It’s these small changes, rather than large-scale redevelopments, that often provide the most value.
As well as providing direct consulting services, UX consultants also offer training and workshops to help companies build internal UX capabilities. This can involve teaching design principles, research methodologies, and usability best practices to employees of all levels.
The ideal company will include a UX seat at the executive table, who can ensure that user-centred practice is at heart of decision making across the business. Torpedo Group is fortunate to have a CEO with a background in UX who can easily spot opportunities for user-led improvements across the business.
If you’ve read your way all through this article, you’ll agree there’s a lot to think about. With UX consultancy being applicable to most aspects of B2B, it can be overwhelming knowing where to start.
However, an initial conversation with one of our consultants needn’t take up too much of your time – and it will help you to faster identify what will work best for you.
