The LEAD approach was raised by John Maeda, CXO of Publicis Sapient, to define excellent CX. Since then, it had been constantly optimised and practised by all the designers in PS.
As a UX designer, I love to see a sophisticated design concept being brought onto the table again, getting iterated and refined by great minds in the industry, and for all the designers to think and contribute. Along the process of understanding LEAD framework, my thoughts and knowledge regarding experience design has also been re-constructed and strengthened.
In this blog, I would like to discuss my understanding of this method, its composition elements —— Light, Ethical, Accessible and Dataful and how I would like to apply it into practice.
Experience is the best teacher
"With the LEAD framework, we can do an assessment tool and help clients see how Light, Ethical, Accessible and Dataful they are with their Experience."—— Wendy Johanson | Group VP, Experience Transformation Lead
According to John Maeda’s blog “What is CX?”, the LEAD is addressed as following four elements:
Light: When an experience is fast, quick, and its presence is made immediate without feeling overbearing — it feels simple.
Value: It’s immediately adoptable.
Accessible: When an experience “fits me” and is intentionally inclusive of all possible people that might want to use it — it feels relevant.
Value: It’s immediately valuable.
Ethical: When an experience is built upon the right choices that match to my personal values — it feels trustworthy.
Value: It’s retained over the long term
Dataful: When an experience is instrumented for quantitative telemetry or it’s been developed with qualitative research — it feels adaptive.
Value: It’s evolving over the long term.
To me, “light” experience means no obstacle or confusion along customer journeys for target audience to fit their expectations and swiftly, precisely and seamlessly leading them to the next step after one action. In other word, just simply fulfil the promise and give customers what they want, although it might be easier said than done sometimes, that’s where needs the wisdom of leveraging simplicity.
“Accessible” means caring and empathizing for not only physically or mentally disabled target customers, but also the seniors. As we live in such a rapidly growing digital world, my own grandmother even started to use mobile payment since last year, they definitely deserve to be included and educated properly.
Additionally, paying adequate attention to A11y checklist, running tests on the specific groups are other good methods to achieve accessibility. I would say we definitely have a long way to go from now to a sophisticated accessible digital world, but as long as we realized how important it is, we are going to do better.
“Ethical” can be interpreted into focus on environment sustainability, respect for personal privacy, respect and empathy for different cultures, willingness to share experience both culturally and personally.
One positive and stable relationship with customers is impossible to be established without sufficient moral awareness of the company. Therefore, if a company wants to improve the experience and build healthy relationships, it must put more emphasis on showing ethics. Customer service can be very important in this part.
“Dataful” can be achieved by using data driven initiatives, I would like to call it put the fact to the test. Through qualitative methods (e.g. domain research, competitive analysis, individual interviews, A/B testing, focus group) and quantitative methods (e.g. survey, questionnaire), designers discover the goals, frustrations, motivation, pain points of customers and define the problem statements to make sure things are on the right track.
Put into practice
Right now, the LEAD framework is almost like a heuristic evaluation, according to Wendy Johanson, which will tell the state of UX. Through a proposal or a concept or a prototype, we can let clients know what can be improved to create the most inclusive experience for customers.
I would like to combine the framework with the Double Diamond design process:
img from internet
Research – Dataful
Gathering data during research stage by whatever method fit the project. Using data driven initiatives to speak is the most powerful way to speak. Because designers are not always the users themselves. If we are, that’s fantastic, we know exactly what users want; if we are not, then through various researches is the best way to empathize with target users.
Insights/ Needs/ Touch Point – Dataful & Accessible
Hopefully, in this stage we have already gathered the data we need, next step is to utilize and analyse it and let it leads us to users’ true needs and touch point. The key of this step is to look through the surface and discover the real problem. Think as deep as we can but also bear in mind that the foundation of all brilliant ideas are that they are accessible, otherwise meaningless.
Ideation/ Brainstorm – Accessible, Ethical & Light
It could be hard sometimes to resist the temptation of adding more and more features because we can when ideating and brainstorming, even though they are not so relevant to the product. That’s a trap made of ambitions. Therefore, we designers should keep in mind of our true mission and goal when designing customer journeys, while also keeping in mind the accessible and ethical elements that have been decided in the preliminary stages.
Prototypes – Light & Accessible
Taking colour contrast, icons, font sizes and other elements into consideration when designing the wireframes so they are accessible for all groups. Also, try do deliver steps or actions one at a time in a clear flow so that they are light and self-explanatory to users.
Thanks for reading the article. I will keep refining and reflecting my thoughts on LEAD as I keep pursuing the career.
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