Digital First

‘Viva La Digital: Digital First 2015 and beyond’ is a glimpse into the future of strategic user experience.

In this paper, Simon Norris explores the benefits of embedding a Digital First philosophy into an organisation and the commercial effect that superior user experience can have on an organisation when applying digitally ecological thinking.

Below is an excerpt of the first section, ‘Where people exist, digital exists’.

Where People exist, digital exists

Digital is omnipresent. The smartphone in your pocket (if you are one of the 1.91 billion people that currently have one) means you are never far away from digital interaction; whether it is browsing the web, posting a status update on LinkedIn or Facebook, or sending a tweet or text. The sheer pervasiveness of information as a result of our flourishing digital lifestyles means we have to look closely at the products and services we use, as well as the digital footprints they leave behind in order to make sense of our interactions.

Our emerging digital reality is so enticing that many organisations are exploring what benefits it may yield including access to new markets, ones that may never have existed, seemed possible, or were unthinkable. Welcome to the new world digital order of post-postmodernism or Alan Kirby’s digimodernism.

In a previous article ‘2014 and the shift to Digital First’ we outlined the shift in digital and how it has established itself as a primary method of interaction that supports a wide variety of behaviours, both digital and analogue. Thinking about the role and impact of digital is no longer a novelty, it is a necessity. Therefore, the value of Digital First thinking is that it provides a platform on which a user experience strategy can be approached, created and applied in the right way. Today, the reality is digital is everywhere.