What Does Product Experience Mean?

As a business owner in today’s digital age, the success of your product is no longer solely dependent on its features or functionality. It’s about something more intangible yet crucial: the product experience. Like it or not, as a manufacturer, your viewpoint on your product is constrained and often does not contribute much to its market success. Rather, your potential customers’ ideas, feelings, and experiences as they navigate your product take precedence. This is because these emotions act as a prelude and determinant of whether they will eventually make a purchase or move on to a competitor.

If you’re wondering what product experience means, we’ve got you covered! Read on as we explore its intricacies and what it means for your brand.

Product Experience Meaning

Product experience, or simply PX, refers to the totality of a customer’s experience with a product. This usually involves both the tangible product and any digital interactions associated with it that offer information about the product. It encompasses the holistic journey a user undergoes while interacting with a product or service — from the initial awareness stage through long-term usage of the product, including the emotional and psychological aspects of that interaction.

Every touch point contributes to the overall product experience. When you employ excellent product experience management and practices in your brand, you can avoid hiccups and inconsistencies in product information, brand language, values, and so on, ensuring that your visitors have the best experience from start to finish.

What Is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Product Experience?

To grasp the significance of product experience, let’s consider a closely related concept: customer experience.

Customer experience is the emotion a customer experiences while interacting with a company. It encompasses their perception of the brand, their sentiment toward the service or product, and their overall feelings about the business.

While product experience focuses on how customers perceive a specific product and its features, customer experience extends more broadly to encompass how customers view the company as a whole. This goes beyond understanding the product and its onboarding support to include other channels the customer may encounter and interact with. Customer experience examples include interactions before purchase with sales/marketing, social media, landing pages, free trials, the purchasing process, CRM, transportation, loyalty programs, and more. Note that these do not take place within the product. On the other hand, product experience examples include the use of in-app micro surveys, in-app video tutorials, onboarding checklists, and free trials, which occur within the product.

What Does a Product Experience Manager Do?

Every system needs a controller to ensure it runs smoothly. The same applies to product experience. A product experience manager is the mastermind who controls and organizes the overall product experience for one or more products. This means they’re the individual in the organization responsible for overseeing the product experience, even though the actual product experience strategy and implementation is cross-functional and requires collaboration. Some companies may have a full-time individual dedicated to this role, or it may form part of a product manager’s responsibilities. Whatever the case may be, this position is generally recognized as an expert role and requires good knowledge of product experience and customer expectations.

How Do You Create a Product Experience?

Developing an exceptional product experience begins with observing how users currently interact with your products rather than envisioning how you wish they would. This approach allows you to identify and eliminate obstacles, incorporate users’ most sought-after features, simplify design elements, and enhance product intuitiveness. The following are vital practices you should adopt to create a compelling and efficient product experience that resonates with your potential customers:

1. User Journey Mapping

Before a product launch, you must map out your products’ entire user journey and flows. This exercise provides valuable insights into user interactions, helping you identify and address specific friction points to improve the overall product experience.

2. Improving Onboarding Experience

Design an onboarding experience that swiftly captures users’ attention, guides them through getting started, and maintains engagement until they can grasp how your product serves their needs. Whether through articles, videos, or pop-ups, onboarding should be both comprehensive and concise.

3. User Feedback and Testing

Actively seek user feedback and prioritize it in your product roadmap. Maintain a public development backlog where users can request features, vote on them, and track improvements as you implement changes. Quickly addressing user needs enhances the overall product experience.

4. Customer Education and Support Content

Establish educational resources, such as a help desk, knowledge bases, FAQ pages, articles, guides, and on-demand videos. This proactive approach allows users to find answers independently, reducing the need for support inquiries and fostering a self-sufficient user community.

5. Maintaining Consistency in Design and Communication

Strive for uniformity in your product design, user experience, and messaging to ensure a cohesive brand experience across landing pages, marketing emails, logins, product pages, design elements, and so on. Consistent design patterns reinforce the trust established with customers and facilitate effective product marketing and adoption.

6. Establishing Clear Goals and Objectives for Product Experience

Define explicit product experience goals to assess customer satisfaction with both existing and new features. Metrics such as NPS, customer queries over a specific period, average handle times, churn rate, and time to value for customers can be utilized to measure and gauge the success of these goals.

7. Utilize a No-Code Product Experience Management Software

By employing a no-code product experience management (PXM) solution, you can dramatically enhance your product experience. The software solution encompasses the procedures, tools, and actions you need to automate, standardize, enhance, and disseminate your brand’s digital portfolio. Good PXM software empowers product teams and marketers to scale up product adoption, address customer queries at scale, create in-app guided content, and ultimately drive widespread product adoption.

Choose Lumavate as Your PXM Solution

The first step to getting the most out of any product experience solution is to put all of your product data in a PIM software and store all of your digital assets in a DAM. A solution like Lumavate offers you functionality for both right out of the box! Lumavate is also equipped with vital functionalities and program integrations, such as design elements that allow you to seamlessly create digital product experiences for every touch point in your customer journey. With Lumavate, you can tailor your product experience to suit your customers, partners, dealers, distributors, and employees. Ready to build your product experiences with Lumavate? Book a demo today.