An introduction to Digital eXperience Platforms

This is a series of articles on DXP platforms, and how they are in essence a digital transformation for businesses online.

What is a DXP platform?

A Digital eXperience Platofrm is the next evolution of websites and web-based applications such as mobile apps and more generally the Internet of Things (IoT).

Gartner, the leading technology research and consulting firm, has been tracking the evolution of online technologies for businesses and maintain a yearly Magic Quadrant report that maps the evolving trend in DXP solutions. Gartner describes a DXP platform as:

A set of integrated technologies to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys.

That’s quite a mouth full, so what is this all about?

Hare are the salient keywords to understand:

• integrated technologies – decoupled web services that interact using APIs, exchanging and processing data into a coherent whole.
• composition of experiences – in addition to web-pages, composition can also include digital media, and these can be tailored for various target audiences.
• management of experiences – along with web-pages, the ability to manage a plethora of digital assets including media using taxonomies. This is also the ability to manage the life cycle of this content from ideation, to composition, to review and editing, and publication. This is done in a coherent and collaborative process involving multiple stakeholders from ideation to publication.
• delivery of experiences – the digital content can be consumed across a variety of devices, including IoT (Internet of Things) connected objects. In addition, a single end-user of this content interacting with the platform across multiple devices and locations is ensured a seamless and continuous experience.
• optimization of contextualized experiences – this is ensuring that the digital content consumed by a user is optimized (personalised) for that user based on data available for that user. This can include their access location, devices and possible other personal data shared by the user previously.
• multi-experience customer journeys – each user can have multiple digital experiences depending on their previous journeys on the platform as well as other contextualized data points.

Word-of-mouth transformation

The DXP Gartner report further notes,

This digital transformation is best served by customer-obsessed strategies which recognise the new business age of the  customer where customers look for seamless digital experience across multiple platforms and will not hesitate to discard a brand over another if unsatisfied with the overall experience, the product or service being only a part of that experience.  This transformation values inbound (word-of-mouth, referrals, reviews) marketing over outbound marketing.

In other words, users will automatically promote your product/service if they are satisfied with the digital experience your platform provides.

Optimising and Personalising Content

Optimising content and personalising to the audience is a key component of a DXP platform, and there are various strategies to achieve it.

Media optimisation becomes important when users access content across different devices. How many times have you accessed a web page whose images were simply too large or their cropped version irrelevant as the cropped part of the image no longer focuses on the object. This is especially true with cheap e-commerce sites that have been designed for a desktop experience, but are simply unusable on a mobile screen.

DXP platforms increasingly rely on AI image recognition to suggest the optimal image cropping for various devices. These services can even dynamically crop a video frame by frame to ensure the object of attention stays in-frame on a portrait mobile screen rendition, and ensuring an optimal experience for all users.

Personalisation is more tricky to achieve, as any given web-page cannot be dynamically personalised for every single users as this would create tremendous loads on a server. The majority of web pages are cached in order to speed up their delivery. Similarly a personalised web page con only realistically have a handful of versions which can cater to user segments. Here is an article I wrote which goes into more details on the strategies used for optimising performance on page variants.

So what makes up a DXP platform?

In the next post in this series, I explore what components actually make up a DXP platform.