The digital transformation glossary

An accessibility statement summarizes your efforts to produce the most accessible version of the site, interface, or course you’re delivering.

Within the accessibility statement you can note what measures you’ve taken (for example, ensuring adequate colour contrast for text legibility, adding transcripts for videos, and more), what interaction models have been tested (for example, responsive screen sizes, keyboard navigation, screen readers, zooming), what you know is working well, and any considerations or known issues (for example, testing with one kind of screen reader, but not others. ie, NVDA, but not JAWS).

In addition to these notes, offer a pathway to access support for any additional feedback or accommodations support.

Your accessibility statement should be prominently linked from your interface. For example, as a primary link in your website footer, from the main course landing page, and within any onboarding content.

Cohorts is a term often used in statistics and research to describe distinct groups of people that may have similar objectives, needs, or traits. Cohorts are similar to user groups, segments, and other ways of describing groups of people in design, research, and learning.

Continuous improvement is an approach that monitors the interactions and outcomes of a product or service after launch through validated learning and ongoing iteration. The objective of this approach is to find ways to consistently improve customer experience and optimize your organization’s efforts. This is driven by the unique opportunity in digital, where you can track and learn from every interaction, every person, every click or tap that occurs across digital channels.

Validated learning helps us pinpoint where we can focus efforts to improve customer experience and service delivery on an ongoing basis. This involves using user analytics, user testing, and other data gathering to inform these efforts.

The iterative process of continuous improvement means continually working to increase conversions, drive engagement, and make sure the team is working optimally towards meeting user needs and business goals.

Our approach to continuous improvement

Also known as: digital readiness

Digital Maturity is an organization’s ability to adopt emerging technologies and processes and adapt to changing markets and competition with capable decision-making and digital savvy teams.

When organizations achieve digital maturity, they are capable of identifying and implementing technology to match their business goals, improve their service delivery on a continuous basis, and continually grow their digital capabilities and upskill their staff.

We describe this achievement as “digital excellence.”

Our approach to achieving digital excellence

Digital transformation is the changing of organizational processes and capabilities by leveraging technology and new interaction models. Through digital transformation, organizations can provide a superior customer experience and optimize team efforts.

Digital transformation can extend product and service delivery to provide increasing value, hone existing digital channels and products, and define new initiatives that drive customer engagement and retention.

Digital transformation is not just about technology, as it impacts people and processes through core tenets such as human-centered design, continuous improvement, and upskilling to grow the digital maturity of the organizational and team members.

Our approach to digital transformation

Evaluative research is a type of user research that aims to determine or evaluate how well a product or service is meeting the needs of its users.

Evaluative research is key to identifying specific issues with a product or service that is in development or already in market. As such, evaluative research practices typically occur once a product or service is in development, rather than during early exploratory phases.

Research methods used as part of evaluative research include usability testing, A/B testing, and first-click testing, all aimed at gaining insights into participants’ behaviour while using a product or service and on an ongoing basis.

Generative research, also known as exploratory research, is a type of research typically used in the earlier stages of research, strategy, and design processes. Generative research can include activities like user interviews, ethnographic observation, or workshops with the aim of validate a market opportunity, concept, or to understand what users need in order to better conceptualize a product or service.

Through generative research, teams can find ways to innovate from the building blocks of a comprehensive understanding of user pain points, contexts, and potential use cases of a product or service.

An OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, is a framework and management structure that organizations use to define large, overarching goals. They are goals that are quantitatively (numerical or metric) measurable. They are ambitious organizational goals, not small objectives within a project.

One example of an OKR would be:

Objective: “Increase the engagement and inclusivity of our internal team structure”

Key result 1: “Employee turnover down 10% over the next two quarters”
Key result 2: “Implement a diversity team and at least 3 events or initiatives to boost inclusion”
Key result 3: “Raise employee engagement ratings by 30% over the next two quarters”

From these larger, big-picture OKRs, your organization can define smaller indicators of success within initiatives using KPIs (key performance indicators).

In a marketing OKR framework, a KPI for a website might be something like “maintain a bounce rate below 70%”, while the key result this would inform is “Hit 100% of each quarter’s goals for closing new business”. There would be a series of KPIs that would inform this key result so that you could both validate how the KPIs impact the key result in order to refine them and check on the KPIs on a more frequent interval to understand how you’re trending toward the larger quarterly goal.

Both OKRs and KPIs are key for setting measurable goals and growth plans in organizations in order to achieve impactful, transformative organizational objectives.

System strategy is the essential framework for driving customer experience and organizational effectiveness. This framework helps accelerate internal decision-making with an approach that uncovers key opportunities to drive customer engagement and retention while optimizing operations.

For organizations that are looking to improve product and service delivery, system strategy provides the roadmap to accomplish this. It aligns operations and channels with the customer journey in order to uncover new market opportunities, accelerate organizational objectives, and define new efficiencies in delivering product and service.

Our approach to system strategy

Web standards form the foundation of each and every website. These standards are set by W3C, enacted by web browser makers, and used by web developers so that the content and code of a website can be viewable and interactive across devices, operating systems, and web browsers.

Web standards are the underlying foundation for ensuring the access, performance, and security of your website, app, and online courses. Without adherence to web standards, accessibility and performance suffers, which reduces engagement with your content.

Learn more about web standards from the W3C.

Workshops in user research can include any format of interactive activities with users or stakeholders to aid in research, problem definition, or problem solving, including co-creation, brainstorming, and other activities.