Three rules to build your digital experience strategy

Regardless of any uncertainty about which mobile application development platform to use, application development professionals must not hesitate to design and develop mobile apps to deliver experiences whenever and wherever customers want them.

Rule 3. Stay fresh.

Human brains can be fickle and easily bored so don't count on being able to trigger the same dopamine response from the same experience indefinitely. What customers find exciting one day becomes the new standard tomorrow. If your competitors get there before you do, you may lose your customers to them. Therefore, not only must you design dopamine digital experiences, but you also have to keep refreshing those experiences on a regular basis. But how?

Being first means constant innovation. Continuous creativity is essential. Focus on designing dopamine experiences for customers, by adding features or changing the design of existing apps or even creating new apps. App innovation stems from having deep knowledge of both technology and customers.

Development teams should run parallel streams of design, development and testing to speed delivery. Parallel work streams can reduce uncertainty and the number of costly iterations.

Software development is not pure coding, engineering, architecture, management or design. It is cross-disciplinary, creative and heuristic. Teams that succeed at this kind of software innovation operate more like a software design studio built around talent. Great software talent means renaissance developers who have passion, creativity, discipline, domain knowledge and user empathy.

Unlike software development processes that assume all human resources have equal skills, the studio places talent and tools first and adapts the process to serve the studio, like a professional sports team optimizes the way it deploys players to leverage their talent to the max. There are many strategies to win a game. Conventional processes assume one strategy will yield results regardless of the team, tools or business problem.

Remember that great applications have to deliver an experience that users love, but your app can't deliver a great experience without also meeting nonfunctional requirements such as availability, performance, scalability, adaptability, security and economy to support a dopamine experience. If you are to get faster, your architecture cannot stand in the way. You must assess your architecture to ensure that it meets all of those nonfunctional qualities now and will be able to meet them in the future. Adaptability is important, because the wrong architecture can limit how fast you can change the app.

A wait-and-see or copycat strategy is no longer sufficient if you want to deliver dopamine customer experiences whenever and wherever customers want them. Innovation can no longer just be something you aspire to—you actually have to do it, with continuous creativity. Get faster to be first.

Forrester data over the past five years has shown that organizations have been continuously investing in technologies supporting digital customer touchpoints. The evolving nature of digital touchpoints—particularly in reaction to the proliferation of mobile devices over the past several years—has forced organizations to view their digital experience technology plans within short-, medium- and long-term roadmaps rather than as self-contained projects.

Get your digital strategy right—and turn your company into a digital disruptor.