You have to take your user on this incredible journey without making it obvious.
Abhii Dabas is the CEO of Webpuppies, one of the leading web development and digital solutions companies and consultancy services in Singapore and South Asia. Dabas is also CEO and founder of Joblu.io, an innovative job portal for matching overseas job seekers and employers worldwide.
Dabas is passionate about UX and UI and teaches his theory of the five-star UX strategy to graduate students. He also enjoys exploring how companies can successfully focus on customer messaging.
In this episode of Velocitize Talks, Abhii Dabas, who’s inspired by the joy of what he does, shares his thoughts on the customer experience, web development, WooCommerce and the new job search.
Untapped Emotions
The first step is about evoking an emotion.
To describe the distinct stages of the customer journey, Dabas created a 5-star UX strategy. First he starts with how to evoke an emotion from the audience. For example, if a brand is struggling with transparency, it may want to gain trust from its audience and evoke that emotion to connect with them. According to renowned Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 90 to 95% of our purchasing decisions take place in the unconscious mind and are shaped by our emotions.
Second, you should use numbers to highlight your strength as a brand. “Numbers really paint a picture,” Dabas says. The third star in the UX strategy is to show, not tell. The fourth is to make sure your website or app is as user-centric as possible. The fifth star? Conversion.
“If you look at Coca-Cola, when we talk about evoking emotions, they do a beautiful job,” Dabas said. “They don’t talk about what’s in the bottle; they talk about the impact.”
From Products to Partners
The user journey started from a point of view of why you should be a partner.
Webpuppies recently partnered with a government organization which works with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The group co-developed vaccines, which became extremely relevant over the past couple of years. They were looking to overhaul their website featuring Covid product sales but hadn’t developed a cohesive user experience. In the end, what they were selling weren’t tests and vaccines; they were selling partnerships.
“There was no need for those products to be on the website,” Dabas says. “All they needed was for companies to come partner with them. The user journey started from a point of view of why should you be building that partnership, that trust.”
After developing these key partnerships, the individual companies took on the product sales. In turn, the government agency helped facilitate the growth of their partners.
Help Wanted
If you speak with any employer, they will always say we can’t find the right candidates. If you speak with the candidates and job seekers, they say we can’t find the right job.
As Dabas said, organizations are no longer just targeting customers. They’re also targeting potential employees. Dabas founded Joblu.io, a platform for matching overseas job seekers and employers worldwide. Launched during the pandemic, Joblu helped facilitate the job search process, becoming a solid replacement for traditional recruiting.
“We find our life partners through dating apps these days but we are still sending resumes,” says Dabas. “They are trying really hard to come across as companies that are interesting, fun places to work at. That’s becoming quite integral.”
Unfortunately, as with dating apps, there are plenty of examples of both job seekers and employers being “ghosted.” But according to Dabas, modeling the job search platform after social networks like TikTok and Instagram has allowed Joblu to gain a different and more personal perspective on what the user is looking for.
“What we’ve seen is how people lead their lives,” Dabas says.
Choose Your Platform
A few years back clients were talking only about one thing—scalability. They were going for licensed products and lots of e-commerce platforms and all kinds of complex integrations.
Aside from scalability and notable page speed, Davas points out that e-commerce clients also need to be nimble, a capability which WooCommerce provides. That’s especially important in the face of teams and employees moving on from the company and taking that platform knowledge with them. In recent years, Webpuppies has transitioned more of their clients to the customizable WordPress plugin.
“Even if the reputation initially for WooCommerce was that it was very easy to do so maybe it’s not as scalable,” Davas says. “But I think that’s so far from the truth. For the last few clients we worked with, we encouraged them to use WooCommerce.”
To learn more about Webpuppies, visit their website and follow them on LinkedIn and Facebook. To keep up with Abhii Dabas, follow him on LinkedIn.