After a brief intermission, we now complete the CX 101 Series with Bryan Fitch, Creative Director of Tahzoo Studios. With decades of experience working in marketing, design, and technology, Bryan offers his unique insight into how the three collide to produce experiences that delight, drive, and deliver for companies and their customers.
Tell us what makes the Tahzoo Studios crew so special when it comes to helping clients think about their digital experiences.
Bryan: Well, the design team kind of casts a wide net here. We help with marketing, designing assets, making prototypes, and developing the basic code to build architectures. We meet with clients to make sure we’re still on track, then sync up with our developers and product managers to produce a unique customer journey.
At this point, we have spoken with folks on the design side, the strategy side, and the developer side. These are the three pillars of Tahzoo and how we orchestrate building great customer experiences for clients.
Bryan: Correct - for a CX project to be successful, you need all three. At Tahzoo, we start with using business and implementation strategy to align company objectives with the problem we’re trying to solve. Then, we move into completing the user interface and user experience, incorporating a good wireframing process that maps out the project and blueprints it. Once we put a visual aesthetic on top of that, we’ll transition it to the development team where it goes into two tracks of front-end and back-end development. Sprinkle in some quality assurance, maintenance work, and deployment support, and boom – we’re closing out the project.
As the Creative Director, you provide the vision for the experience, meaning you’ve got strategic consulting and development consulting on either side of you. How does that impact the work your team does?
Bryan: Experience design requires us to have our hands in all of it. We think about the strategy behind the solutions posited by the business analysts and the project managers before immersing ourselves in the brand to understand the space we’re working within. I like to compare this portion of our analysis like a game of chess, like what are people going to do if we build out A, B, or C? How are people going to use it to achieve their goals? Sometimes, we go in and interview the users and show them what we’ve come up with to gather feedback. Other times, we go to market with what we’ve observed from data analysis and market research. We do all of this by weaving strategy into our designs so that by the time the developers get involved, the experience is developed properly and achieves the desired outcome.
For those who don’t know about the process of architecting digital experiences, can you talk us through what it takes to take on a project? Where does one even start?
Bryan: This depends on if I’m dealing with a design-focused project or a systems integration one, but generally, I would start by storyboarding. The very first question I would start with is, what are we going to do? If the client likes a certain image or promotion, I can then conceptualize the beginnings of a content campaign. I’ll cast actors and direct a shoot around the idea. Once I build a catalog out, I will gather all assets, map it out, and begin crafting a layout to visualize how everything would look on a page. Is there a font or color palette that we need to adhere to or is the client seeking to evolve that? Are we updating the logo? Does everything make sense when arranged together? At this point though, we’re covering visual design; it's not really functional, and we don’t have enough information to know if it’s practical. So next, we start to break it down in the context of the client problem: Does it fit your need? Does it solve your problem and any gaps we identified in the heuristic analysis? What is your information architecture? Now simultaneously, I’m working in blueprints and wireframing the whole experience to see if the visual design is compatible with the architecture.
Why is it so valuable for our customers to bring on a CX consulting firm like Tahzoo?
Bryan: Unless our clients have CX specialists on hand, it can be hard for them to visualize the complexity of their problem which often leads to wrongly identifying an issue. A client may think their situation is the result of a particular page or software, but really it is a much larger problem that stems from multiple moving parts that boil down to one main issue – weak system architecture. It's how people access your information. What is your bounce rate? Are people finding the data they need? Are they interacting with a webpage in the way you intended? Are they buying items from your product page? If not, why? This is where a consulting firm like Tahzoo comes into play. We are experts at conducting and reporting on this type of analysis for our clients. We use it to break down their site or portal in a super granular way so that we can clearly identify all of the things contributing to the larger problem. Getting everyone on the same page before executing a solution is critical to project success. And it gives our clients a sense of relief knowing we’ve inspected their problem from every angle to ensure every detail is accounted for.
And like that, our CX 101 Series comes to a close! Thank you for following along as we peeled back the complex layers of the process and value of building personalized customer experiences. If you are interested in learning how Tahzoo can help your business with a CX problem, reach out to one of our team members today at info@tahzoo.com. We cannot wait to do great things together!