Making a Great User Experience Sandwich

You like sandwiches, right? Who doesn’t? 

I’m going to attempt to illustrate the value of user experience (UX) design with a sandwich analogy—bear with me.  

Imagine yourself at a deli and ordering a sandwich. The person making the sandwich asks no questions and gets to work. Three minutes later, you’re handed a ham and pickle sandwich. But wait, you’re a vegetarian and you despise pickles. You’re left unsatisfied, not to mention hungry.   

What went wrong? 

Well, a few things, but let’s ignore the part about you completely forgetting to ask for anything specific. The bigger issue? The sandwich designer assumed they knew best and didn’t ask any questions to better understand your wants and needs.  

See what I’m saying? 

To put it plainly, UX design is an important and essential part of the design process (whether it’s a sandwich, a website, or a physical space) as it aims to deliver an experience that fulfills the user’s needs.  

At DCG ONE, we don’t design sandwiches. However, we do create a lot of experiences that connect organizations and their customers. 

When it comes to understanding what will resonate with customers, our UX design team takes a thoughtful approach to ultimately design a meaningful experience. Here’s how we do it: 

Get smart 

As an agency, we work with a wide range of companies across many different industries including travel, healthcare, technology, retail, and fintech. We work hard to research your space and ultimately, speak your language. We look at the market, study your competitors, and read up on your business.  

Seek customer insights 

In collaboration with our Strategy practice, we gather data to ensure we aren’t leading with assumptions. We partner with our clients to understand the target audience and what they are trying to accomplish. We advocate for learning from your customers directly through interviews, focus groups, and testing to ensure we’re designing experiences that meet their needs, while delivering on the business objectives.  

Dig for data  

If we’re refreshing a digital experience, we look at analytics to understand current state engagement and traffic. We partner with our analytics team to find answers to our questions and build a measurement plan to learn from our design strategies and recommendations once delivered. 

Ask thoughtful questions  

We don’t presume to know your business better than you. Once we’re smart (or smart enough) in your space, we meet with stakeholders to get clear on your vision, objectives, and pain points. Our discovery process often includes experts in content strategy and visual design to ensure we are all working together to build an experience rooted in the same strategy. 

Delivering value 

It can be hard to resist the desire to start building the experience. However, we know that by first getting clear on the problem we are solving for will result in an experience that delivers value for your business and meaning to the customer.  

So back to sandwiches. If the sandwich designer simply asked a few more questions and worked to understand the problem, the result would have been a positive, fulfilling sandwich-eating experience. 

At DCG ONE, we strive to create experiences that are purposeful and relevant for the people that use them and deliver value for the organizations that sponsor them. Our Experience Design practice brings together our experts across strategy and UX design to build a meaningful foundation for which creativity can flourish.