Usability...Or Strategic User Experience?
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Paul Sherman ShermanUX
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Presentation at Usability Marathon 2, 14 October 2009, http://marathon.uidesign.ru/ Originally presented to the Online Marketing Association's 2009 Conference in San Diego CA, February 2009. Also presented in shorter form at Big (D)esign 09 in Dallas TX, May 2009.
Transcript of Usability...Or Strategic User Experience?
Paul Sherman ShermanUX
Usability testing ≠ a good user experience!
Strategic user experience planning can yield a unified and consistent user experience.
And strategic design leads to great user experiences.
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Usability testing is almost always tactical and short-‐term focused.
Even when done across releases…the results are almost always used tactically.
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But the method is not well suited for: Crafting a unified user experience Planning for tomorrow’s user experience Creating delight, loyalty, stickiness
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Usability testing and evaluation can find problems with your site or product.
Delight Loyalty
Stickiness
How do you attain these?
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By designing the user experience:
For now. For next year.
And the years after that.
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And designing the entire experience…
Not just your product or web site’s user interface. Or your email campaign’s HTML formatting. Or
the user assistance content.
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Strategy vs. tactics
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“[Strategy is] A long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.”
“Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions by its orientation on affecting future, not immediate conditions.”
9 Wikipedia.org
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Strategic plan: Go from airport to hotel
Tactics: Make some turns
“Find and fix” usability is like making a turn.
It’s a good thing to do… If you know where you’re going.
Do you?
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At many companies, various groups and departments are not aligned around creating the best user experience possible.
In fact, some groups are incented to create a bad user experience.
How can that be? Easy…unintended consequences of incentive structures.
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Example: Imagine a fictional company where a marketing department is responsible for shipping and fulfillment.
Imagine they charged $15.95 USD to ship a box of software. And this made the department 500K yearly.
How many people do you think abandoned their shopping carts when they saw that price?
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…and how many customers do you think were lost because of this one short-‐sighted decision?
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Usability testing and user-‐centered design can only do so much.
To create great user experiences, you have to take a holistic -‐ and strategic – approach.
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I’m not the only person saying this:
Steve Baty – “Being An Experience-‐Led Organization” http://bit.ly/40xrLP
Jared Spool – UPA 2009 keynote (I’ll find a link somewhere…)
And many others.
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Usability and user experience
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What is usability? Your intended users can accomplish what they’re trying to do on your site or with your product.
What is user experience? The positive AND negative attitudes and affect generated from interacting with your offering, on several dimensions.
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21 From Peter Morville: http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php
…but only a part.
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Measure it There are many ways to do this. NPS (net promoter score) is one of them, but it doesn’t capture all the dimensions of user experience.
There is no one best way My advice: multiple methods, multiple measures.
Both quantitative and qualitative. 23
The first step is to become aware of the problems!
How?
Walk through the entire customer experience.
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From sign-‐up to initial use…free to pay conversion…calling and emailing help, tech support, and billing…even closing the account.
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If you don’t know about this concept, talk to your product managers. They do.
26 A typical product manager-‐y image…
Check your IVR! Most are horrible! (IT typically designs the prompts and call flows.)
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Just because you do GUI doesn’t mean you can do VUI…
VUI expert Susan Hura “Is Your Goal To Get Rid Of Money?”
http://bit.ly/2yehF “Are You Working Hard To Suck Less?”
http://bit.ly/18vVP1
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She’s my wife.
She’s also the best VUI usability expert around.
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How do you “do” strategic user experience?
It sometimes means big changes.
It often drives process and organizational structure changes.
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Remember, in many organizations, departments and teams are incented to create bad user experiences.
Changing organization structures and incentives to refocus on the customer is hard work.
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Offline: Nordstrom’s. Virgin Air.
Online: Zappos. Amazon. Land’s End. (Offline too.)
Who else?
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The sad truth: most organizations don’t align on the
user experience.
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Everybody’s. And nobody’s.
That’s the problem.
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How do you take a strategic approach to creating a great
user experience?
Four very hard easy steps…
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1. Alignment Find the disincentives to delivering a good user experience, then surface them to your leadership. Eliminate them.
Advocate for tweaking the business model if you need to.
Don’t take “bad profits”. Bad profits are unsustainable profits.
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2. Values Be open to learning about and improving the user experience.
Those aphorisms about the customer always being right? They’re all true.
Remember the guy who complained about the food on Virgin Air? He’s now a taster. Stunt? Yes. But effective and revealing!
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3. Assess the user experience holistically Traverse the customer corridor. Assess the total experience – not just the UI.
Find the sticky points, the little trapdoors.
Remember, one bad touchpoint affects the whole brand.
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4. Leverage user experience design Don’t just fix the little user experience trapdoors and holes.
Assess and redesign the customer touchpoints… all of them. Even the IVR.
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Yeah, but… how do I get my organization to do this?
“Initiative”
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Give yourself a new job: “Change agent”
Easy to say… harder to put into practice. “Initiative”
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UX
A person who leads a business initiative by: Defining and researching the problem Planning the intervention Building business support for the intervention Enlisting others to help drive change
Isixsigma.com UXmatters.com – “The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent”
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“Change agents must have the conviction to state the facts based on data, even if the
consequences are associated with unpleasantness.”
Isixsigma.com Uxmatters.com – “The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent”
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Successful strategic user experience is not just about delivering a design or testing
the UI.
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It’s about aligning the organization to measure and improve the user experience…
Using the tools and techniques of user research, interaction design, and usability assessment.
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If you’re doing your job right, you’re changing your
organization.
“Initiative”
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Get out of your silo, comfort zone, etc. Be nosy. Really understand your business’s revenue and profitability goals. And who’s responsible for delivering what part of it.
Plan and influence Advocate for planning the user experience of the product(s) you support. Socialize the plan, sell the plan.
Measure and improve Measure the user experience to know how to improve it.
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You might not get to focus on strategic issues yet. But start thinking about it now.
Start talking with your colleagues about the long-‐term direction of the products and services you support.
Find the problems with usability testing and evaluation. Fix the ugly parts now, but plan to overhaul the whole experience.
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Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent. Paul Sherman. http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000162.php
Customer Support on the Web: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You. Dan Szuc. http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2007/11/customer-‐support-‐on-‐the-‐web-‐dont-‐call-‐us-‐well-‐call-‐you.php
The Bizarre Myth of Customer Service: An Interview With David Jaffe http://www.infodesign.com.au/uxpod (Look for #42… see, it IS the answer to everything. )
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