Essentials of a digital experience platform

In the current market scenario, one can witness organisations gearing towards a paradigm shift in Digital Transformation. The core of Digital transformation is wholly focused on Digital Experience platform. This platform can either be a single product or a suite of products that work together. The previous era saw companies moving towards an omnichannel strategy and maintaining them in silos. This involved huge cost, time and a lot of effort. The new platform enables the host to blend in content and commerce features to the same platform and thereby offer a connected user experience across all their digital channels to their customer. With its capability to integrate new modules and products, the platform inflates the customer engagement with their brand and vice-versa.

Further, the powerful, scalable and innovative platform enables them to easily scale up and integrate new generation technologies like NLP based bots, ML-based personalization with their platform at ease.

Architecture

With business demands changing rapidly, one needs to match the growing user demands with reliable system carrying zero downtime. The Digital Experience Platform should be highly scalable to handle more users, sessions, and their digital interactions without affecting the end user performance at any point in time.

A scalable platform needs a robust, sustainable and innovation-friendly architecture that can help you to solve this challenge. You can enhance your capabilities without changing the code, thereby resulting in zero downtime.

Key Building blocks for Site Architecture:

• Site Information Architecture
• Multisite Architecture
• Taxonomy Architecture
  • Taxonomy definition helps to classify website content and it is an important part of the site information architecture.
• Code and Module Structure
• Panel Based Architecture
  • Panel Based Architecture to create reusable pages and build landing pages in less than few minutes.
  • Localization Architecture to support platform localization

Reusability

Reusability is a key factor to have a highly scalable platform architecture with no downtime. The codes, modules and other features built with the Digital Experience platform initially, can be reused at a later stage when the organisation decides to change or add a new function. This functionality brings down the development time by 80%.

This also provides the luxury to try different ideas at the dev stage before choosing a fixed option since the development time is less.

Time to Market

Your information architecture, platform architecture should be robust enough to clone, rebuild and customizable for the local markets. A shorter time to market means less development time and implementation cycle for the main and subsites. With technology, the forerunners in the market who carry the new factor manage to gather maximum benefits. The span should not only be noted for the initial launch but also for any future enhancements and integrations.

Cost of Ownership

The best way to find out the cost benefits is by sticking to the basic approach of cost comparison. The Digital Experience platform carries the Purchase cost (Software Licensing, first time build etc.), the deployment cost (Localization, training, Technical resource and project management cost etc.) and maintenance cost (server upgrades, 24*7 maintenance etc.). For a company operating the integrated functions of DXP in silos, the new DXP platform will bring down the cost. It is advisable to lay down a long-term budget plan with respect to the DXP implementation strategy.

User Experience

The site’s user accessibility, ergonomics, design, performance all contribute towards the better user experience of the site. A good user experience intrigues the user to interact with the elements (content, forms, CTA) in your website delivering better engagement and conversions. Considering the benefits, the new Digital Experience platform should offer high-end customizations in the UX front in both design and deployment front.

Performance

Another key factor is the Performance of the platform. The parameters deciding the performance of the site are Time to the first byte to time to last byte, DNS lookup time, digital assets and the same is being reflected in the page’s error time, bounce rate and conversions.

To check the same, identify and Baseline the site performance before migration or upgrade. Check the competitive site's performance and Conduct systematic performance test under various user loads

Moving into the world of Big data and predictive analytics, the performance should not lag with rising user loads.

Open Web

Open web means the openness of the platform to embrace new leading technologies. These new technologies are Chatbots, ML personalization, blockchain, AMP, PWA etc. The platform should offer the luxury to the user to integrate such technologies with ease.

Resource Availability

Calculate the available amount of resources for each stage of the deployment cycle. From development to maintenance phase draw out the number of people to be involved and the expertise required based on the technology you work with. This can be either in-house or outsourced.

Team

Your expert Engineering team are your troops to march with. Working on Digital Transformation is a long-term process and it happens in an agile structure. Your engineering team can either be in-house or outsourced and the team should understand the business goal and the Digital strategy to help you align in long-term for a successful implementation.

Security

This should probably be on the top of the checklist. Nevertheless, platform security accounts for the organizations and its stakeholders. Periodical security patches timely security updates will help you stay on the shore. The core CMS platform should be validated in this aspect.

Localization

APAC, LATUM, European businesses are everywhere, and you don’t want any stone unturned. If you are enterprise set up, you might be there already. Launching your core Digital experience platform, the technology should be capable of catering to the localized markets. It should be capable of customization in terms of language, currency, taxation, shipping etc. The platform should also offer a centralized control structure for all localized markets.

Flexibility

The platform should be extendible to collate with new features and technologies. The module integrations should be made easier and at reduced or zero complexity. The code architecture should also be flexible to plugin those new features and operate efficiently.