This article was originally written by Avanade alum Dan Goldenbaum.

Consumers and business buyers expect consistent, personalized experiences. But the way they consume content continues to evolve at a rapid pace.

Building a digital experience foundation that allows you to deliver standout experiences that best support wherever and however your customers are consuming your content can seem daunting, time consuming, and costly.

But it is possible to future-proof your experience delivery. You just have to use the right building blocks and choose the right platform to piece everything together.

In his online book, Atomic Design, web designer Brad Frost breaks down digital experiences into their base elements, explaining the make-up of a webpage in biological terms. The very basics of digital experiences, or “atoms” as Brad calls them, are pieced together to form “molecules” (UI elements like a search bar). Molecules then go on to form “organisms” (for example, a navigation menu) and then, when organisms are pieced together, they eventually take on a life of their own, becoming full experiences.

This modular approach is an incredibly helpful concept for any business looking to deliver cohesive and rewarding digital experiences, regardless of the device or the context of how the content is consumed.

But following Atomic Design principles at enterprise scale can seem a bit granular. If we were to slightly adapt Frost’s concept, we would break down the three most important elements of the successful digital experience as “content”, “design” and “data”.

Content should always be relevant and concise – when it comes to earning brand loyalty, nothing is more important than your customer’s experience, so you should treat their time with tremendous respect. No two customers are the same, so not only does your content need to reflect and promote your brand, its vision and its values, but it also needs to do this in a way that is tailored to your customer.

For any online shopping experience, every individual element plays a vital role in creating a comfortable, enjoyable experience that continues to move customers along the buying journey. For example, the image of the item and the ‘add to cart’ button can be broken down into base design elements.

The third building block of digital experience is data. Data drives personalization and helps you develop new products and services that may better serve the needs, preferences, and desires of your customers. By adopting an approach that builds experiences off the back of unified data creates a virtuous circle that further improves your customer’s digital experience.

Once you’ve got all the building blocks in place, you’re on your way to delivering excellent, meaningful digital experiences that can constantly evolve. But the job is certainly not done there. Not only do you need to make it your mission to constantly question, evaluate and evolve the digital experiences you’re delivering, you need a platform that helps you transform your digital experience building blocks into more than the sum of their parts.

To take full advantage of this modular approach, you need a platform that allows you to dynamically construct experiences based on your bank of building blocks.

This system has to be agile enough to support the complex business and content requirements, with efficient operational workflows needed for today’s competitive market. After all, today’s brands grapple with delivering content for novel endpoints like voice assistants, chat bots, smart displays and more.

Adobe Experience Manager makes it easy to build, manage and deploy digital experiences, anywhere. The Fragments feature within Experience Manager enables your digital marketing team to create tailor-made content to deliver rich and rewarding digital experiences to your customers, wherever they find you.

The next stage for any business serious about digital experience is to future-proof their Experience Manager build. Avanade’s Digital Experience Foundation Accelerator (DXF) can help.

DXF helps you implement your digital foundation faster, and optimize your design and content without the hassle of creating complex, custom components. DXF stores content in an atomic data model, aligned with your atomic design system, so, as a content author, you can pull the content you need into place without having to reinvent the wheel for every new experience. Likewise, re-designing the interface or adding new UI elements is simply a matter of applying new CSS and an additional option for the new design skin. Put simply, it’s a smarter way to manage your building blocks, and put them to use.

So, whether you’re just starting your digital transformation journey or you’re ready to advance to the next level, see how Avanade can help you to build rich and rewarding digital experiences that will continue to delight your customers well into the future.

Ready to learn more? For more advice on building better digital experiences, watch our recent webinar co-presented with Adobe: Boost the ROI of your Digital Experience Platform.

More importantly, what do you think? Should we be thinking of digital experiences in terms of “atoms” and “building blocks”? Share your comments on our social channels or get in touch with us.

Are you ready to embrace the rising tide of CX? Avanade is the how and now of digital marketing effectiveness. Personalization at scale. CX that glides. Smarter data. Avanade knows how. And with Adobe, we can help you deliver instant impact and long-term value – fast.

Visit this page to learn more about building a better customer experience with Avanade and Adobe.