As little as 10 years ago, users were interacting with brands solely in person, by mail or on the phone and rarely interacted across more than one device or channel to complete one single task. But as technology has involved users now interact with organisations on various devices and engage across many channels in order to complete one single activity. That means we now need to think about how we design experiences that allow users to complete tasks whenever, wherever on many different types of devices. To do this we use omnichannel user experiences that allow users to connect to brands across multiple channels, it also enables them to act on their product or service triggers and makes each interaction more intuitive and effortless.

Omnichannel experiences use:

• Consistency

  It ensures that all content is consistent throughout all the devices a user may use. For example Amazon uses a consistent look and feel across all their platforms whether you are using it as the website on your laptop or the app on your phone. making it easy for users to pick up where they were and finish their shopping or browsing.

• Availability

  Users expect the product or service to be available to them on the channel of their choice. Different channels are right for different users so the right platform will depend on how you are catering for and asking yourself questions like what devices do your users prefer? How do they shop? How do they spend their free time? Where are they more likely to go when browsing for things? For example for most companies or brands the bare necessity is to have a website as they are as crucial and important as their physical stores.

• Context Optimisation

  This is about not only creating an experiences to users where you are always available and that you treat each channel as equally important as the other but also creating an overall experience that is adapted to suit certain platforms and its strengths. For example by recreating a website experience as an app, simply copying it and just making it smaller will not work as mobiles are a lot smaller and interactive so it requires a more pragmatic approach.

• Seamlessness

  This is making sure that the user can pause an activity at any point and return back to it at any time or on any channel and be able to continue. This could be things such as saving user activity on an online shopping cart on an ecommerce platform or when a user starts an activity on their phone when they are on the bus but can finish it on their laptop when they get home

Successful Multichannel Experiences

Paul challenged us to name the most successful multichannel experiences we have used from the following categories:

• retail
• technology
• entertainment
• commerce
• travel

A lot of the examples we came up with are very common and popular multichannel platforms which makes sense why we think they are the most successful as so many people use them and require them to be not only accessible across different devices and platform but also easy to use no matter where or when they use it.

<aside> 💭 This introduction of multichannel and omnichannel experiences was really interesting and has allowed me to think about how crucial it is for a brand to maintain engagement and a high level of satisfaction with their customers. It has really helped highlight the importance of seamlessness and consistency when designing for my product or service to be used across multiple channels as this is something that I may need to think about on placement and leading into my final year project.

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