This chapter reviews a process for finding and optimizing the small-to-medium scale customer experience problems within your digital properties. The first step of the optimization process is reviewing data sources about your current experience. Use the variety of data sources available to help you locate where there are problems within a given digital property. The second step is to conduct a user experience evaluation. After having used metrics to guide you to the problematic area in the first step, this evaluation will serve as the analysis that enables you to figure out what the actual cause of the issue is. Step three is to conduct a technical analysis, as it’s not uncommon for some of the sub-optimized aspects of a given digital experience to be rooted in technology platform limitations. 

The next step will be to develop hypothesis solutions and test them with users. In other words, use what you know about the key problems and their likely level of impact and technical effort to decide which problems should be addressed and how. The fifth step is to implement your fixes then continuously measure and optimize. Since this process has most likely revealed many problematic areas, you will want to maintain a backlog of optimizations that have already been identified so that, as resources and funding become available, you can keep chipping away at the improvements, studying the impact you are having, and repeating the cycle. Optimization should not be a one-time process but rather a continuous hygiene effort to ensure you get the maximum business benefit from your customer experiences.

Of course, you don’t want to get so focused on short-term optimization that you lose your longer-term vision. Ideally, maintain a balance.