Businesses in mature markets are aggressively pushing digital business strategies, and although South Africa is behind in the trend, it is catching up. Businesses are beginning to build new digital products and services, and financial services firms and others are investing heavily in digital channels, mobile technology, more open core systems, and other components of a digital business platform. Both locally and globally, this is not only to engage the new digital consumer, but also to optimise operating model costs for expansion into lower-income emerging markets. The underlying impact of which is a transformational change, through technology, in the interaction between organisations and customers.

Why is this such a challenge for organisations?

Companies know who their consumers are, but do not understand their needs, drivers and blockers as consumer behaviour and their environment is uncertain. The cosmopolitan nature of South African culture impacts how consumers use technology, and this is not easily understood by traditional demographic variables alone. The rest of Africa is similarly diverse, and technology solutions that target cross-country markets often ignore this diversity. Even more so than internal employee-facing systems, organisations cannot control user behaviour.

This inevitably leads to the need to understand consumer behaviour and their environment when designing technology solutions, and to build these solutions iteratively with continuous user feedback. Techniques and skills employed to understand consumer mental models found in the fields of Customer and User Experience Design (CXD / UXD), have become essential for understanding consumer behaviour, while agile project approaches are better suited to iteratively build solutions with uncertain requirements. These practices are growing in use, but are they being combined effectively?

How can these practices be integrated?

While most customer and user experience design can be done iteratively, there is one key dependence. Ideally, customer and user research should be done upfront and analysed holistically to understand patterns and underlying needs. This is not onerous and sufficient insights can be discovered in a matter of weeks.

The bigger challenge is the use of customer and user insights to drive prioritisation. This means a change in the way many agile teams work. In a typical agile setting, feature prioritisation is done by a business person, some of whom have a stronger customer perspective than others. An influential member of an agile team needs to challenge feature prioritisation by emphasising the customer perspective. In a startup environment, this is not usually a challenge but in a large organisation it means balancing customer and business needs, which can conflict with one another. Practically, this can be supported by making customer personas and other customer experience design inputs visible to the team and major stakeholders in the project.

By focusing on these two challenges, customer and user experience design practices can be integrated with agile practices. As with any change, starting small is usually a wise approach, so the first step is to identify a low risk project to test out the change.