EXPERIENCE

The PROJECT Framework is a workshop format, crafted to convert your ideas into thriving projects, either as an entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial journey.

The most successful and inspiring people from my network will present the power terms behind each letter of the acronym P.R.O.J.E.C.T. Today, with Dante I??l ?zkan, we decipher EXPERIENCE, being the E in PROJE.CT, a.k.a UX, CX and you name it.

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Raya: Hello, Dante, please introduce yourself.

Dante: Hello from Istanbul! I am the digital architect at Oktomax and Oktopeople. Oktopeople is a pure design product company. Optimax is a marketing automation tool for e-commerce which makes personalized offers for end consumers.

Raya: How is user experience (UX) different from customer experience (CX)? What do these terms mean?

Dante: I found this question difficult too. First, let me talk about what user experience design is. User experience design is the overall feeling customers have about the brand when they interact with it. It could be about the design, usability or software development. What kind of feeling you're getting when you interact with the brand or the product?

Let's say that you go to your favourite sushi restaurant. The way they present the sushi is essential. The ambience. The plates, the service, and the chopsticks that you're using. Do these enrich and enhance your experience? What about the colour of the food? Is it triggering? Is the smell of the Jasmine tea evoking your senses? So, all of these good experiences, little stories if you want, add to each other and create your overall experience.

When it comes to customer experience, I believe that we have to look at it from an omnichannel perspective. What is the experience of your customers when they call your customer support? For example, if they're dealing with a bank, what is the experience when they go to an ATM and the credit card gets stuck.

So, we have to imagine all possible touchpoints and make the experience seamless.

How can we find solutions that millions of people are dying to use? What is the secret recipe of that? There is no such. We should simply follow step by step the user experience design principles in the design thinking process. If you think that if there is any problem, we need to emphasize.

There is an ideation stage after which we can do design sprint workshop together with our team whether we have developers, designers, marketing - all relevant stakeholders.

Raya: What is the typical design thinking process? From idea to starting a business, how can future founders validate it, thinking about the user experience in the first place?

Dante: I would suggest them to use design thinking methodologies to understand and emphasize with their customers: clearly define the problem and start early ideating and then make it tangible with a prototype, then test and implement. Don't work on the software yet, unless you are sure about the product.

So, before you invest your money on software development, you can just validate your idea with simple design prototypes. There are many open and free tools available. Future founders can use those prototype tools to make qualitative user research to validate their ideas. Whom are the customers interacting with the prototype? Is it corresponding to their needs?

My suggested steps would be:

1) Run up a design studio (even if it's just a founder and one employee). Answer all the questions starting with W: Why, What, Whom, Who, When, How.

2) Create the most straightforward landing page to onboard the customers. Remember, you only have got five seconds to let them know what this product or service is about; otherwise, they will just bounce from the website.

3) Define your one-liner (preferably in less than 140 characters, Twitter-style)

4) Do a SWOT analysis so that you can magnify those strengths on the design.

5) Check on the competition

6) Prepare a deck

7) Define Persona types and map the user journey (one per persona)

8) Prepare the strategy documentation (for example, for customer X to go from point A to B, we need these features (write down the futures!). It would be a big pile of features. Choose wisely which will be included in your MVP. If you would like to launch this product in a month or two, what would be the minimum viable product? Slush these minimal level product terminology right now that means. Are you sure?

9) OK, you choose those futures for the MVP, now get help from designer friends and ask them to visualize this design prototype

10) Once we have the design prototype, we can have a usability test. Start with interviewing six people minimum. You will learn a lot about their pain point.

We need to make sure that the features work, and we have the demand on the market.

When you start prototyping, start with mobile-first because Millennials are most likely using their mobile phones right now.

Raya: You're also a startup mentor. What are the typical challenges that founders are experiencing?

Dante: Early-stage founders are not confident which their core target market is. They tend to oversee thorough research. What are the numbers there? What is their addressable market? And unfortunately, those are the questions which the investors ask first.

Also, founders may often have focus problems. We have a lot of great ideas. We think that all of them are brilliant, but we have minimal resources to develop them all.

Raya: I'm genuinely curious about the startup scene in Istanbul. What should we learn about it?

Dante: I believe that we have a young population and very bright millennials, who are well-educated. They have a global perspective. They grew up with Twitter, Facebook, Spotify and Netflix, and they're very advanced in technology. And as we, Turkish people, are very close to both Europe and Asia, we have no cultural issues with anyone in the world. This is a great advantage.

I trust the young people, the young generation of New Wave Millennials of Turkey! However, I see also improvement areas. We are not good at presenting our ideas, so we need to get better in terms of marketing and communication. The other thing is, we need to reflect this global mindset on our business. I know that young entrepreneurs can do it, and they are ready for growth in an international arena. I would diversify teams more.

Some of the well-known Turkish startups I can think of are: 

• Insider E-commerce conversion optimization growth platform
• Prysnc E-commerce price comparison widget 
• Segmentify Boosts Ecommerce Revenue by Using Omnichannel Personalisation
• Rimuute A Virtual Company to Start Your Freelance Business, automated invoicing solution 

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If you have any questions for Dante, please leave your comment below.

If you want to sharpen your idea with The PROJECT Framework, contact me.

If you want to watch our conversation, follow @smartset.group on YouTube.