Brian Winters, Improve Your User's Experience; Improve Your Bottom Line

Improve Your User Experience Improve Your Bottom Line Brian Winters Director of Usability Text Careerbuilder.com www.thisisbroken.com 1

Brian Winters  Over 15 years exp. in marketing programs  Ten years expr. in user insights & usability  Symantec, Intel, Proxicom Consulting, United.com  Director of Usability, Careerbuilder.com 2

Experiences “Business success is always defined by the quality of the overall customer experience.” — Forrester Research, 2001 3 Examples of good and bad experiences offline/online with products/services.

Bad User Experience Images from www.thisisbroken.com 4

Experience as Competitive Advantage 5

Why UX is Important?  Perceived Credibility  Proﬁtability  Intent to Return  Intent to Purchase  User Satisfaction  Word of Mouth 6 Perceived Credibility - sites that are easy to use are more credible.  Profitability - happy customers buy more. Help users achieve their goals easily and you will be make more $.  Intent to Return - people will come back to good shopping/browsing experiences and avoid bad ones  Intent to Purchase - many users will abandon a process or shopping cart flow if it is hard to understand and use.  User Satisfaction - if users can accomplish their goals easily, they leave feeling empowered.  Word of Mouth - this is probably the most important aspect of the experiences good or bad. This usually holds the most influence for future customers.

UX http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryce/106972762/ Web Content 2007 – Improve your User Experience, Improve Your Bottom Line 7 This chart was developed by the consultants at Experience Dynamics. It shows in a nice and simple way the chain of elements that go into either a good or bad experience.

Why focus on UX?  Experiences are designed  Experience is a differentiator  The market is changing  Improving experience has a real ROI 8 When you design an experience, you are much more in tune with the users’ needs matched against your business objectives. If you design something just to meet your business objectives, the end result can wind up being not very efficient. Today companies can all buy the best software to run their companies, they have many of the same tools and means to reduce costs, so the next horizon for differentiation is design and customer experiences with their brand. The market is moving towards customized experiences. Web 2.0 is building the foundation of a different conversation with users. As you improve the site experience for your users, you will see repeat business, higher conversion rates and overall increases in satisfaction.

Steps to Improve UX  Hire usability/design experts  Site analytics  Usability testing  Surveys  Focus groups 9 •Hire good usability folks. Duo Consulting has great talent when it comes to user experience and interaction design. •Site Analytics gives you instant feedback on what users are actually doing on your site. Conversion rates are the easiest metric to look for. •Usability tests add “context to web site analytics •Remote testing is very cost effective, simple and easy to do. •Surveys •Focus Groups provide more general attitudes towards your site/brand/web site. Users will never give you specific answers in a focus group to solve their problems. You need to really listen.

Steps to Improve UX  Understand user goals  Focus on design early  Use AJAX where possible  Measure everything  Test, test, test \"In our first year we didn't spend a single dollar on advertising... the best dollars spent are those we use to improve the customer experience.\"- Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com 10 If you can’t understand the goals of the user, then you can’t really provide them with the best experience possible. Otherwise, design is just based on business goals and ignore the user. It is far more cost effective to design the user experience early in the development process. This means doing research early to get inputs before development begins. AJAX is a great way to improve the experience for users. It allows you to do things that used to take page load after page load to accomplish, often times removing the user from the task at hand. Measuring and testing are important. If you don’t know if your design decisions are helping users achieve their goals, then your shooting in the dark.

Improving User Experience at Careerbuilder.com  Core metric is job applications  Test, test, test  User research  Alignment of business and user goals  Agile development environment 11 One of the main measures for our web site is # of job applications and the ratio at which unique visitors apply. Our goal is to have a UV apply ratio of one-to-one. We test often. This keeps us on our toes and we learn new things all the time. Just when you think you got it right, even after user research and heavy design work, you have to test it to know. User research takes all forms at Careerbuilder. Usability testing, surveys, focus groups, A/B testing Careerbuilder tries to align our business goals and user goals as much as possible. Having an agile development environment lends itself to multiple quick iterations of a page/process. This is really advantageous when you are trying to improve the user experience across your entire site. It also allows you flexibility to try different things without straying too far from your business goals. As you iterate and gather feedback, each iteration becomes stronger and your intuition improves.

Scream to their eyes 12

Apply Button Project “It’s just a button...”  Goal = more job applications  Project started as a simple test  Yielded astonishing results  “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” —Hans Hofmann 13

Before After 14

Before After  “I don’t have a resume.”  “What is a posted resume?”  “I have not posted yet.”  “Do I have to post a resume to apply to this job?”  “I don’t want to post, just apply.” 14

Before After  Simple – Apply Now!!!  “I don’t have a resume.”  New user trafﬁc improved 40%  “What is a posted resume?”  New resumes increased  “I have not posted yet.”  Applications increased 15%  “Do I have to post a resume to apply to this job?”  “I don’t want to post, just apply.” 14

Apply Via Email Project Conversion rates were 50%  Process wasn’t “broken” so why ﬁx it  Highest volume of applications  Special tracking was difﬁcult to change  \"Improving user experience can increase both revenue and customer satisfaction while lowering costs.\" - Get ROI from Design\", Forrester Research, June 2001 15

Apply Via Email - user test 16

Apply Process Now 17

Results Page Refresh Project  Goal = improve search experience  10% of users clicked on search filters  Filters were almost eliminated  Most users liked the filters after first use “The average UI has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%.\" - Landauer, 1995 18 We knew the results page was due for an overhaul, but this highly trafficked page made any changes risky to our business metrics. We also knew that only 10% of users actually used the search filters. The running assuming, or inference on that data was that people didn’t like them, or understand them If they were only be used by 10% of users, there was the possibility to eliminate them and use that real estate for something else. However – it was discovered that when people used the filters they found them very helpful. How can this be? Users like the filters, but only 10% of user actually click on them??? We needed some user testing to provide context for the things we already knew.

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Saved Search Project  Saving Search disoriented users  Used AJAX to improve UX  Keep users on-task in process ﬂow  AJAX allows for Rich Interaction Design 21

Saved Search - AJAX 22

Improve your UX, impact your business  Understand user goals  Test your assumptions  Use technology like AJAX  Design the customer experience  Start early in development cycle “The product is the brand. You build brand in our industry through the product and the experience - Jim Wicks, Motorola, 2006 23

Questions? 24

Brian Winters, Improve Your User's Experience; Improve Your Bottom Line

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