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. 2

Usability testing is almost always tactical and short-‐ term focused. Even when done across releases…the results are almost always used tactically. 3

Usability testing and evaluation can ﬁnd problems with your site or product. But the method is not well suited for:   Crafting a uniﬁed user experience   Planning for tomorrow’s user experience   Creating delight, loyalty, stickiness 4

Delight Loyalty Stickiness How do you attain these? 5

By designing the user experience: For now. For next year. And the years after that. 6

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. 7

Strategy vs. tactics 8

“[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.” Wikipedia.org 9

Strategic plan: Go from airport to hotel Tactics: Make some turns 11

“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? 12

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. 14

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? 15

…and how many customers do you think were lost because of this one short-‐sighted decision? 16

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. 17

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. 18

Usability and user experience 19

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. 20

From Peter Morville: http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php 21

…but only a part. 22

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. 24

From sign-‐up to initial use…free to pay conversion…calling and emailing help, tech support, and billing…even closing the account. 25

If you don’t know about this concept, talk to your product managers. They do. A typical product manager-‐y image…  26

Check your IVR! Most are horrible! (IT typically designs the prompts and call ﬂows.) 27

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 28

She’s my wife. She’s also the best VUI usability expert around. 29

How do you “do” strategic user experience? It sometimes means big changes. It often drives process and organizational structure changes. 30

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. 31

Oﬄine: Nordstrom’s. Virgin Air. Online: Zappos. Amazon. Land’s End. (Oﬄine too.) Who else? 32

The sad truth: most organizations don’t align on the user experience. 33

Everybody’s. And nobody’s. That’s the problem. 34

How do you take a strategic approach to creating a great user experience? Four very hard easy steps… 35

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. 36

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! 37

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. 38

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. 39

Yeah, but… how do I get my organization to do this? “Initiative” 40

Give yourself a new job: “Change agent” UX “Initiative” Easy to say… harder to put into practice. 41

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” 42

“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” 43

Successful strategic user experience is not just about delivering a design or testing the UI. 44

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. 45

If you’re doing your job right, you’re changing your organization. “Initiative” 46

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. 47

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. 48

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. ) 49

Paul Sherman http://www.shermanux.com paul@shermanux.com Twitter: @pjsherman 50

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Usability...Or Strategic User Experience?

by Paul Sherman on May 03, 2009

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