Despite recent changes by Apple and Google, we still sleep in an interconnected, interwoven world. Digital experiences are increasingly integral, and COVID-19 has only accelerated a shift to true online / offline living. Brands who can provide this experience stand to realize – those that can’t will lose.
But within the background, satisfying the insatiable demand for a very seamless experience is sort of the technical quandary.
Enter Multi-Experience Digital Platforms, or MXDP.
MXDP’s are how brands like Domino’s are launching experiences that connect with their customers wherever .
Today, we’re getting to probe the way to manage an MXDP, some common challenges, and a couple of solutions we’ve seen prove effective.
What’s the purpose in an MXDP?
The purpose of an MXDP is to deliver cohesive experiences across a good range of platforms.
Of course, we didn’t all awaken yesterday and find out, lo and behold, that folks interact with our businesses and organizations across multiple dimensions.
Historically, the answer has been to, at a little scale, run parallel but disconnected solutions, and as you grow, to start out to create our dedicated teams.
For example, a product may need a fanatical team for managing their mobile app alongside their main product.
This solution inherently causes two problems:
- It’s really hard to make a genuinely seamless experience. You’re working across teams, handling data and organizational silos, not to mention internal politics, the planning standards of every format – it’s a multitude.
- It’s inherently unscalable. the amount of experiences a brand is now liable for being present on has exploded. maintaining the unique design, technology, and even ways of engaging (e.g. social norms) on each platform to make a top quality experience may be a truly massive amount of labor. This problem will worsen as our love for devices goes on.
A MXPD addresses these problems by allowing you to make one application that engages the platform-specific functionality of all the devices and modalities your users are consuming it in.
For example, rather than building an internet application, an iOS application, and an Alexa application of an ecommerce store, you’d build one application that has the capabilities to serve all those unique modalities of engagement (click, swipe, and talk, respectively).
This finishes up streamlining both app development but also app and user experience management by funneling data streams, security requirements, and more during one application.
How to manage an MXDP
There are a couple of key things to believe when you’re managing development with an MXDP.
First off, you would like to ask: what percentage platforms are your customers on?
If you’re selling shoes directly to consumers, for instance, then an MXDP makes sense, since consumers are present on plenty of different platforms.
However, if you’re selling deep sea drilling equipment, then your deep sea executives might only really be engaging together with your business across a couple of platforms, so you would possibly not need a full MXDP suite.
By first evaluating your needs, you’ll get a far better sense of how best to deal with your MXDP.
Assuming an MXDP is the best choice for you, you would like to believe your organizational structure. Especially, you would like to believe how different teams work together if you want to develop on your own and now have to develop as a more cohesive unit.
Naturally, your MXDP will look out for tons of technical challenges (e.g. enforcing cross-platform standards) but there’s a broader social change that must happen. It’s often worthwhile creating more collaborative cells, especially early , to interrupt the trend of siloed development.
Finally, evaluate your own capabilities and requirements. An MXDP may be a huge asset in driving cross-platform development. But the rationale for that’s that there’s structure built into the rear end, deliberately restricting development. So when you’re managing your MXDP confirm you’re controlling expectations of what’s possible (and selecting a partner who can deliver thereon goal).
Wrap Up
Rising expectations and increasingly complex development requirements have created a world where organizations are struggling to satisfy the requirements of their customers. While some are leaning into that fact by reducing the amount of platforms they’re on with “do one thing really, really well”-type logic, others are determined to unravel this challenge at its core.
Enter the MXDP — a set of tools to assist teams deliver their solution anywhere and everywhere.
However, before you hop on board, there are a couple of things to believe from a management perspective. First, you would like to work out if it’s the proper approach for you. Are you developing across multiple platforms that are sufficiently unique to form it well worth the trouble?
Second, you would like to think through your organizational structure. Is your organization ready for the shift to more centralized development?
And finally, you would like to speak the parameters that a MXDP naturally enforces – if not, then you’ll invariably find yourself disappointing your stakeholders.
An MXDP is often a strong tool and is vital to really delivering the omnichannel experience that customers expect. If that’s your objective, then it’s likely the answer for you.
