The aptly dubbed practice of “user experience,” or UX, encapsulates the series of interactions that an end user has with an online interface, and it has become one of the paramount goals for companies looking to further engage customers or increase the efficiency of employees online. Rightfully so—it has been found that 52% of users said that a bad digital experience with a brand would make them less likely to engage with a company.

Whether it’s the revamp of an entire customer-facing website or streamlining back-end operations to help your team members provide excellent service to your clients, UX should be at the forefront of your mind as a business owner. And Salesforce Community Cloud is the easiest and most effective way to develop an immersive online experience for your customers. Here are just a few steps that we here at Simplus consider when building out exceptional UX design for Community Cloud.

Pain points and goals

Today’s users demand sleek, simple, and stunning experiences in personal and business interactions online. Cross-device and cross-channel capability is also imperative—you need to provide these experiences for laptop, tablet, and mobile as well as across all platforms of engagement. And you, as the business owner, have the responsibility to differentiate and create your brand loyalty through these offerings.

The underlying purpose of creating a better user experience is simple: you want to create a solution that addresses a user’s pain points. That is, what are users lacking that might bring them a heightened outcome? It can be tricky to exact pain points, however. While some pain points are obvious and can be inferred, others might take some deep digging into customer analytics to unearth a need that customers might not know they had.

Your goals should be an amalgam of these two things: unmet needs and pain points. If you fail to satisfy these two conditions, you will find yourself in the dust of your competition.

Building a journey map

Your UX journey map is the entire overview of a customer’s interaction with your company or brand. It is the conceptual and ideal path that a user of your products or services will take throughout the lifecycle of their exposure to your business. The construction of a journey map is a thoughtful, data-driven model of the customer’s perspective of the brand. And, as such, no two journey maps are alike. Some of the key components of a journey map include:

Personas: Personas are the rough grouping of similar-minded users or customers that interact with your business or brand. These different groups of people are characterized by needs, timelines, and experiences in a given scenario.

Touchpoints: Touchpoints are the channels in which a user might interact with your business. A few examples include shopping or search portals, emails, ratings, reviews, or social media.

Emotions: Businesses create a subconscious experience and feeling for their users on a daily basis. You want to understand what those emotions are. These could be positive emotions, such as loyalty to the brand or happiness with the product, or negative, such as distrust and being undervalued by the brand.

To build a journey map is to comprehend how all of these factors interplay with each other. Once you have a solidified, high-level concept of how all of these components comprise your journey maps, then you can begin building out the nitty-gritty, low-fidelity user interface (UI) elements and screens of your UX.

The Simplus approach

The process of constructing an effective user experience for your user can be a painstaking process that involves weeks and months of analyzation and research to understand your customer’s needs. But, with the ease of Community Cloud and with the right guidance, you can make the going easy.

Community Cloud provides you with customizable themes that are seamlessly created using your existing experience in HTML, CSS, and some easy to learn skills in Salesforce Lightning. This gives developers full control over the visual presentation and UI without having to learn a new development language. It’s a beautiful, easy-to-navigate environment created with clicks and not code, allowing you to create a unique brand identity seamlessly.

A common pitfall for companies is hiring an agency to create the user interface and then bringing in a system integrator to implement. With Simplus, you get both in one. We staff a project with both technical and UX resources to ensure the UX can be effectively built on the community and the community conforms to the desired UX. Our team can empower your business to make value-driven decisions through internal, technical analysis of your current system and setting up best practices to ensure optimal engagement and adoption.

Simplus can lead you out of legacy portals to a design-rich customer experience that allows you to achieve success beyond your anticipated goals—and far beyond your competition. Are you ready to see what a seamless and streamlined user experience can do for your business? Contact Simplus today and realize the true potential of UX.