Making dubizzle UX mature
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A case about how I, in my role as a design manager, how I got the team to look outside the building to uncover needs we were not filling in appropriately, not at all or too much of.
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Making dubizzle UX mature
- 1. Goodmorning Joost Wolzak 4 November 2019 @ Uber
- 2. How would you prevent an autistic person from plucking all the filling out of this sofa?
- 3. How Katie uncovered Pete’s hidden needs Katie (designer) Pete (customer)
- 4. 🤍 People 🤍 Collaboration 🤍 Break mould UX Researcher UX Designer Team Designer Making teams UX mature
- 5. Making A teensy bit more UX Mature
- 7. EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY TEAM CUSTOMER @ THE HEART I helped achieve customer-centric habits
- 10. The challenge DELIVERY CULTURE LEARNING CULTURE
- 11. EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY TEAM CUSTOMER @ THE HEART LEARNING CULTURE
- 12. Customer S Customer Effort Score = % ‘easy’ - % ‘difficult’
- 13. May 2017: New verticalized property UX THE OLD Property search is part of the monolith - left filter navigation THE NEW 100% verticalized experience - top filter navigation
- 14. BIG learning moment for the desktop CUSTOMER EFFORT SCORE OBSERVATIONSUSABILITY TESTING ➔ 45% did not apply a single filter ➔ -14 CES points ➔ Filters not noticed by 6 of 12 usability test participants ➔ Many CS requests to go back to old UI Δ-14
- 15. EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY REFLECTIONS CUSTOMER @ THE HEART LEARNING CULTURE
- 16. Improve collaboration NEW WAY OF WORKING UX FOUNDATION COURSE
- 17. Rapid Prototype Testing became a habit
- 18. Rapid Prototype Testing became a habit
- 19. EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY TEAM CUSTOMER @ THE HEART LEARNING CULTURE
- 20. The company realized VoC was important Quick Wins (70%) Big Bets (15%) Thankless Tasks (0%) UX Debt (15%) High Value High EffortLow Effort Low Value SET CES TARGETS FINDING MWEB FINDING DESKTOP POST AD USED CARS 80 80 76 PROP 4 RENT 80 70 N/A ROOMS 4 RENT 80 70 N/A GOODS 80 80 90 BUY CHAT 85 SELL CHAT 95
- 21. Result: ResearchOps Customer feedback SIGNAL Filters Speed TAGS TAGGING ROOT CAUSE Reach * Impact * Confidence Effort R.I.C.E. PRIO 🙋 Customer 🤍 VoC Researcher 🤍👱 VoC Researcher Product Designer 🤍🤍⛹👱🤍 VoC Researcher Product Designer Analyst Developer Product Manager
- 22. EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY TEAM CUSTOMER @ THE HEART LEARNING CULTURE
- 23. +2 User Researchers +2 Designers +4 VoC researchers = 14 people
- 24. PECHA KUCHA Time to get to know each other PERSONALITY NORMS
- 25. Functional OKRs and weekly reflections on progress OKR ACHIEVEMENTS Every Thur 5PM OKR PROBLEMS & PLANS Every Sun 10AM PERSONAL OKR 1:1s Every Tue/Wed
- 26. Result: Living Design System All Devs & Designers embrace the design system Key Result Adoption = 100% Reduce FE dev time by 30% ✔ UX OBJECTIVES Beware the downside of design systems :)
- 27. EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY TEAM CUSTOMER @ THE HEART LEARNING CULTURE
- 28. A potential dubizzler What we sell dubizzle.com + = Awesome dubizzle user who can do rad shit What users buy
- 29. Mental space: group of related towers. Eg ‘Understand how to finance a house’ Result: A holistic view on the customer’s journey Tower: group of tasks, thoughts, feelings. Eg ‘Understand all payments’ Pink = All / Blue = Investor Task, thought, feeling E.g. ‘Create overview of all payments The map is not chronological
- 31. Property picked up key customer struggle Company Objectives are customer-centric Property seekers can find all locations in top 30 communities Key Result Property Objective is based on validated customer struggle Key Result 95% coverage KEY STRUGGLE Too time consuming to discover & compare areas in Dubai OKR coach
- 32. UX maturity RESULTS ➔ Record high CES ➔ Huge drop in complaints about locations ➔ New listing growth in previously unavailable areas A NEW VISIONRECORD HIGH CES
- 33. LEARNING CULTURE EXPOSURE TO USERS BETTER COLLABORATION A CLEAN KITCHEN HEALTHY TEAM CUSTOMER @ THE HEART
- 35. I’d love to help Uber! How might I?
- 36. Appendix
- 39. Balance risk with research Amount of Effort
- 40. Avoid Waste This is the point that effort goes up by 10X
- 41. High confidence? Build! Medium Confidence? Test! Delivery track Discovery track
- 42. EXPOSURE Team does not know their impact GUARDRAILS Designers are literate, but not yet fluent AUTONOMY Embedded designers are UX fluent UX INFUSED Every project team member is UX fluent UX DARK AGES UX MATURE My approach
- 43. Functional UX OKRs to maximize autonomy All Devs & Designers embrace the design system All company Objectives are customer- centric Key Result Adoption = 100% Reduce FE dev time by 30% Key Result Property Objective is based on validated customer struggle UX OBJECTIVES & KEY RESULTS
Editor's Notes
- Goodmorning, Thank for you spending your first hour of the week with me. Let’s start
- I’d like to start with a question for you.
- This is the case of Kingwood Trust, a UK charity helping adults with autism and Asperger’s. Katie, a designer at Kingwood trust, got to know Pete Pete had a knack for damaging behaviour, such as picking the stuffing out of sofas. Her objective: prevent this destructiveness, assuming that Pete was in it to destroy stuff. Should she buy a wooden couch? Buy him a really old shitty couch? Second thought she asked herself: ‘What if Pete’s actions were motivated by something other than a destructive impulse?’ She mirrored his behavior and discovered how satisfying his activities actually felt. She decided to pick the filling out herself: She started to perceive Pete’s sofa as an object wrapped in fabric that is fun to pick. Her immersion into Pete’s world not only produced deeper understanding of his challenges, it also revealed a bias about Pete. Pete had been seen up to that point as a disability sufferer that needed to be kept safe. Her experience caused her to ask herself a new question: Instead of only designing for safety, how might she design for Pete’s pleasures? This led to the creation of living spaces, gardens and tactile experiences such as this pillow in the picture. I love this example, because it highlights the most important part of our job as designers: To deeply understand the hidden needs by living the customer’s experience. https://www.hirstwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Exploring-Sensory-Preferences-Living-Environments-for-Adults-with-Autism-.pdf https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works?utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=opencourse.opCIcU3SEeWeiwqPB940Pw.announcements~opencourse.opCIcU3SEeWeiwqPB940Pw.3Uj0raIcEei3CxKHHMN8aA
- Before we dive into my case, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Joost. I am an experienced creative problem solver with 20 years of experience in the field. Lost Boys Usability testing Learnt the ropes Helped deliver KLM’s first booking tool and online check in Then moved to Jungle Minds Small agency, big clients Being the first employee I learnt everything about being entrepreneurial: From cold calling to PR. 2007 Marktplaats UX designer / product manager Redesigned the whole site and delivered the first apps en an improved mobile site, moving mobile traffic up from 35% 50%. Also created the vision for how marktplaats could facilitate the whole deal making journey. 2011: OLX - had the opportunity to help build a classifieds business in emerging markets. Worked in the trenches of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India and Europe. 2017: moved to dubai, where I concluded I was now a designer of teams, instead of pixels.
- This morning I’d like to tell you about my journey at dubizzle and how I matured UX @ dubizzle. I have 1 case, but in it you will find multiple cases. I hope it will give you a good idea about what I believe in and how I work. Please feel free to interrupt me for questions at any time.
- Short introduction. Dubizzle is a well loved site by everyone in dubizzle. She’s your one stop shop to set up live in Dubai. You can find a job, home, stuff and car to . Dubizzle is the lifehack to living the life in the UAE. Dubizzle was founded in 2005 in Dubai. One of the few successful local startups. Acquired by the OLX group in 2013. 2016 > They reigned supreme: They owned the UAE Full fledged monetisation mode: Doubled revenue to to $40 million in the previous 2 years. In 2016 I helped out with a design sprint. I fell in love with her culture and her people The love was reciprocal and they hired me as the Head of UX. We move there from Cape Town in Jan 2017.
- In short, I introduced with the team a whole bunch of healthy habits @ dubizzle with the goal to make the team more UX mature. I will tell you a story about I exposed dubizzle to its customers. This opened the door to figuring out how we might collaborate better and stop building stuff that users did not need. Instill a sense of Ubuntu: ‘I am because we are’ These things led me to drive the teams to clean our kitchen. They realised they could not cook a fantastic dinner for our customers without it. As the UX team grew I secured their health by creating a safe space to reflect on our UX objectives. Finally me and the UX team achieved the leadership team to embrace customer-centric objectives, which put the customer back into the heart of the matter. Let me start at the beginning
- A few days into my tenure the team released a new search engine: Algolia instant search The promise: Never click a search button again! Every time you clicked something, fresh new items, property or cars would instantly appear. Result from a hackathon. Result: instantly grinded to a halt. Loading ads would take forever, far from instant. Customer complaints started to roll in. 2 days later roll back. Something was off in our way of working. What was it? The failed Algolia experiment showed me that dubizzle had some bad habits in place > Ideas came from above or by navelgazing > Ideas were simply built, not validated with users before they went into production. > Designers would simply mock up and go, no questions asked. > No user research at all. Waste developer’s time by building stuff that no user needed. They key is to avoid waste!
- Essentially we were fumbling in the dark looking for the light switch.
- Clearly building stuff was enough. Delivery culture a fact! I concluded this should be my mission. How might I move dubizzle to a learning culture? stop navelgazing and start getting out of the building to check our ideas stop ‘building stuff as fast as we could’ and start ‘caring about quality and customer impact’ Stop wasting developer’s time and start using them for the important stuff. By growing a learning culture we would know where the lightswitch was instead of fumbling in the dark
- First I made sure I exposed everyone to users. This, in my mind, would open the door to understanding and accepting that there was room for improvement
- Straight after the perfect storm that was Algolia I set up an incredibly simple survey that would enable to track how much effort a user felt he had to invest to achieve today’s goal. It launched at an appropriate time. The score is calculated by subtracting the % of people that say ‘difficult’ from the % of people that say ‘easy’. I started to track all our main finding and posting experiences to expose my fellow dubizzler’s to the voice of the customer. So that they could feel the impact of their work. As you will see later this simple thing became a game changer for us.
- May 2017 - after the Algolia instant search failure - I had been there for 4 months - the company had decided to verticalize the property experience to Give the property business full reign over their experience Make a custom made property experience Set us up to compete better with PropertyFinder The project was split in two parts so that two separate teams could work on it in tandem: A mobile experience and a desktop experience. In the UAE desktop was still important (about 50% of visits). New infrastructure A new search engine Algolia New filters Moved the filters from the left to the top
- After a short AB testing period where the product manager kept track of basic KPIs such as visits, replies and number of pages per visit, the team felt it was safe to launch the new experience. Once again it tanked. The Customer Effort Score dropped by 14 points. 45% of users did not apply any filters on visiting the site. And usability testing at a property conference showed that a 6 out of 12 participants failed to spot the filter menu. Most customers complained about wanting the old UI back.
- In short, I introduced with the team a whole bunch of healthy habits @ dubizzle with the goal to make the team more UX mature. First I made sure I exposed everyone to users. This, in my mind, would open the door to understanding and accepting that we may not be as effective as the team though they were
- This learning moment opened the door for the next phase in making the team more UX mature: Better collaboration. I initiated design sprints with several team to identify ways in which we could improve our way of working. Some of the key questions we asked ourselves were: HMW explore solutions together as a cross functional team? HMW create testable prototypes as fast as possible? HMW make usability testing an recurring activity? This all led to the creation of a new signed off design process. Moreover, the experience led the design team to understand their own seniority level. They saw they needed training. We selected a certified UX training by David Travis on Udemy and had bi-weekly hour long training sessions before taking a final test. 5 out of 7 succeeded, including Majida who later joined our team from the creative team. The Usability testing and the Customer Effort surveys had done their work. They had opened up the team’s eyes and made them willing to accept the protection of the guardrails whilst forming new healthy habits that would help improve ----- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HU7RuqhYlyu715NBuz0hWpovV_tuhoW5/view?usp=sharing
- The team clearly was wanting to spend more time to validate their ideas and designers. So I organized and facilitated rapid prototype testing sessions. They became a weekly habit. As this new habit slow but surely settled in, the wider team started to join the sessions. We even got Danny to join us in our weekly usability testing sessions. Danny was the type of developer who believed that users should not be lazy. “They can learn our experience!”. Now that he was seeing it, he let go off this belief. The tip is to always focus your attention first on exposing the biggest cynics to users, especially when they hold influential positions. Snacks and food always help! The prototypes became better and better. This is an example of the current property experience. Prototypes: https://share.proto.io/KVOMQS/ https://share.proto.io/BFKAIP/ https://share.proto.io/SVWYWK/
- The team clearly was wanting to spend more time to validate their ideas and designers. So I organized and facilitated rapid prototype testing sessions. They became a weekly habit. As this new habit slow but surely settled in, the wider team started to join the sessions. We even got Danny to join us in our weekly usability testing sessions. Danny was the type of developer who believed that users should not be lazy. “They can learn our experience!”. Now that he was seeing it, he let go off this belief. The tip is to always focus your attention first on exposing the biggest cynics to users, especially when they hold influential positions. Snacks and food always help! The prototypes became better and better. This is an example of the current property experience. Prototypes: https://share.proto.io/KVOMQS/ https://share.proto.io/BFKAIP/ https://share.proto.io/SVWYWK/
- Now that we understood that we should understand our customer struggles and had a better way to identify problems and co-create solutions for our customers, I was able to start cleaning our kitchen.
- A big step in becoming more UX mature was that the company realized the Voice of the Customer was important to its success. As W Edwards Deming said: ‘A dissatisfied customer doesn’t complain; he just switches.’ So we better intercept them before they do. We had now accepted we needed to infuse every decision with the Voice of the Customer. As a result the product and tech team agreed to allocate 15% of their capacity to fixing the bad UX in our sites and apps. They also agreed to take on Customer Effort Score targets for all the key flows.
- To ensure teams could achieve their CES targets we created a workflow intercepting as many customer complaints as we possibly could and capturing these in a one stop shop for user insights (EnjoyHQ). Our VoC researcher would tag each and every single one of the comments. Once a pattern had been uncovered the VoC researcher and the product designer would sit down to understand the root cause behind the complaint. What was the reason behind wanting a nationality filter in our rooms for rent section?? They would come up with a fix and have it prioritized using a method I introduced called RICE. RICE = ( Reach * Impact * Confidence ) / Effort. Where normally customer complaints were ignored by the business, now they were considered and fixed! Big win!
- The case had now been made for customer-centric thinking. The next challenge was to ensure we got a healthy team doing all the right things! Reflections are key!
- With all the new attention on design, we got the luxury of expanding the team. We found 2 new user research, 2 additional product designers, one internal transfer and we inherited 4 CS people so that we could turn them into Voice of the Customer researchers.
- June 2018 all of the sudden we were a sizable team, yet people did not know each other that well. So it was time for a bit of bonding and figuring out how we might collaborate. We organized a pecha kucha, which allowed us to share some of our teenage traumas (no, that’s not my sister, that’s me) that we had experienced in the diverse countries we grew up in, such Algeria, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordania, Syria, Philippines and good old Holland. We each shared highlights from our personality report (I talk too much) and listed the things that we do not like when others to it to us, such us ‘do not interrupt me’, ‘do not take away my lunch’ or ‘treat me equally’. Very useful! These discussions also led us to create our norms. Each of us wrote down what we could expect of each other in our mission to infuse every design and decision with the voice the customer. We grouped them, discussed them and wrote them as ‘adages’ rather than instructions. Eg instead of saying ‘Be open’ it says ‘great teams bring their whole true self’. This way it doesn’t feel like an instruction. Much better! These efforts created a strong sense of belonging and safety. The thing to say was ‘I got you, Son. Friendships grew: Some of them even took pole dancing lessons together. I felt very proud of achieving this sense of belonging. --- The best way out is always through Magic is art + science Unicorns can only be uncovered together Our word is our bond Great teams bring their whole true self We grow on the cross roads of passion, ability & need
- Bonded Healthy habits in place I decided it would be a good time to embed into the cross functional packs to ensure they spread the news. Challenge: How might I still get us to improve our craft and mature ux more within dubizzle without becoming a burden to the packs? How might I keep track of progress efficiently? Adopted the OKR framework, the first team to do in the company. Before start quarter > OKR sprint of the packs’ autonomy. How might I keep track of progress efficiently? Up to then: the team Sunday meeting. Yet, some people in the team felt they never had a clear idea about what we had achieved by the end of the week. Also, they listed things they did, instead of achieved. As a result they would go to their home or the bar on a Thursday with a fuzzy feeling about what they had accomplished that week. That’s not a good way to go into any weekend! The goal was to create a healthy habit of recognition and reflection every week. To achieve our goal we hired an OKR tool called Koan that enabled us to reflect individually on our achievements for 20 minutes before our achievements session every Thursday at 17:00. Now we could go onto our weekend in and feel like you deserved it. This was easily one of the best things I have done for us. On Sunday we would come together first thing and discuss everyone’s confidence level in achieving our OKRs. We would discuss what made us feel less or more confident. All the more interesting if the confidence level were different. Then we knew we needed to spend some time on the subject to see how we might help each other out that week. I would onboard these discussion to discuss more in depth during weekly 1:1s. This way we build a healthy weekly personal reflection cycle that was a massive milestone in building our learning culture.
- The design system movie made the difference and got our devs on board
- Finally, now that things were rolling and our way of working become more frictionless we had some willpower left to tackle the question : hmw remain relevant as a business in say 3 years time?
- After all, it wasn’t enough to just polish the power-up. We also needed to know how to remain relevant in the UAE in, say, 3 years time. We needed to know how to turn our users into supercharged versions of themselves. With the economic headwind, our legacy product, strong vertical competition and an imminent entry of Facebook Marketplaces into UAE, it was high time to take a holistic look at our customer journey.
- The goal was to understand all customer struggles for buying or renting a home in Dubai. We needed to know our customer’s hidden needs. The ones that could enable us to get a sustainable advantage over our competitors. We set out to create mental models for our key customer journeys in Property.
- Reasons for customer struggle that it takes too much time to figure out where you want to live: Locations are incomplete (60%) New people to Dubai have trouble understanding where what is And what an area is like People that have been in Dubai do not know about new areas To ensure our research got a foothold into our quarterly objectives, I persuaded the MD to let me coach the leadership team. After all, I had the most experience with OKRs. Offered to coach to ensure Customer-centric objective Top down, bottom up, top down Prevent mission statements, mention end state Not fluffy: like get back to swinging Transparency & reflection APPROACH Worksession with LT: Retrospective, Themes, Objective input bottom up, Grouping & prioritising, Objective definition KRs were negotiated with teams individually Koan trial for property - transparency
- In short, I introduced with the team a whole bunch of healthy habits @ dubizzle. First I made sure I exposed everyone to users. This opened the door to figuring our how we might collaborate better and stop wasting time and effort on things that users did not need. With all the competition and strong economic headwind we needed to become a team fast! We realised we needed to give ourselves a proper helping of ubuntu, an old African belief that says ‘I am because we are’. We started to clean our kitchen so that we could cook dinners our customers would live. When we got a little cleaner, we gave ourselves more willpower to reflect on our achievements, moving us away from a delivery culture. Even better, we figured out what they wanted and coached the management to place customer struggles at the heart of their Objectives. This all got dubizzle a few steps closer to a learning culture. Thank you
- My most fun design project was to do the first big redesign Marktplaats and its mobile experiences from the ground up! Mobile experiences increased mobile visits from 35% of total to 50%! Talk to me about that later if you want.
- Just so you know, I am super excited about the possibility of working for Uber! Bold > Ambition level Disruptive > one operating system Diverse > All different kinds of things I hope it shone through in my presentation. Thank you.
- What was the situation like at dubizzle when I arrived? In short, it was a delivery culture. Navelgazing was the norm > Ideas were simply built, not validated before they went into production. > Designers would simply mock up and go, uno questions asked. > No user research, the only customer input came from a disconnected CS team Also, the company had decided to silo each different business unit thinking it would make squeezing the lemon easier. And it had been quite effective at doing just that. Dubizzle had nearly doubled revenue to $40 million in the previous 2 years. At the same time, the economy had been facing headwinds due to the low oil price. It had become harder and harder to squeeze the lemon. When targets became harder to make, panic followed and started to spiral out of control. As a result: > Ideas came from above, including the targets, deadlines, etc. > infighting between the business units over the availability of our 50 odd developers > People were constantly re-assigned to battle on fronts they did not fully understand > Nobody knew the context of why they were building stuff > Morale sank > Customer struggles were never considered. Building stuff was enough. Delivery culture a fact.
- It all felt like the company was playing a game of soccer like these 200 kids - all running after the ball, not taking position, no tactics and loosing.
- We know that building a product is risky. The only we can we certain that it will work or fail is after we launch. However, we can respect the truth curve that will allow us to reduce the risk of failure by validating our ideas. A great product process will help to eliminate many bad ideas before they reach development.
- The key was to avoid building waste by reducing the risk that the developers would build the wrong thing. We all know hypothesizing ideas is cheap, as soon as people get involved the cost goes up 10x. The cost goes up 100* when it gets into people’s hands. If you don’t avoid waste, you will surely build a house of cards that will collapse on you somewhere down the road. The Algolia instant search project being a perfect example.
- https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/the-hypothesis-prioritization-canvas/
- My approach to solving this challenge was to: Expose the team to their customers: Imagine you and your team’s job is to make delicious apple pies. Now imagine you know what it tastes like, but you’ve never seen any of your customers eat them. Once you’ve experienced the impact of your work, you can leave all your old assertions behind. Just like Katie did with Pete. It’s the first step towards a learning culture. Guardrails: Now you and your team may have learnt your apple pie may not not be the best apple pie, maybe the Mcdonalds apple pie is better. Shame on you! You and the team realize that you need to learn. Anytime you’re trying to change people’s behavior, you need to start them off with a lot of structure, so they don’t have to think. A lot of what we do is habit, and it’s hard to change those habits, but having very clear guardrails can help us. You and the team need to be given a great recipe and all the ingredients to make a good quality basic apple pie. Autonomy: Imagine you and your team are now fluent at making great basic apple pies. Now you have won autonomy so that you and your team can help making pies even more efficiently. Now you’d be embedded into a cross functional team to expose all members of your team to your super special apple pie making skills. UX Infused: Imagine, you have infused your incredible apple pie designing skills into the team. Your team is now producing good results without thinking about it. They now have the time and space to take the apple pie to the next level, because they have time and space to help each other grow. You might even make a molecular apple pie! I have a applied this approach to dubizzle to evolve it from the UX dark ages to UX maturity.
- Bonded Healthy habits in place I decided it would be a good time to embed into the cross functional packs. Challenge: How might I still get us to improve our craft and mature dubizzle more? Embraced the OKR framework, the first team to do in the company. Before start quarter > OKR sprint 2 examples: Our design system And later on, once the company had embraced OKRs as well: Infuse company goals with validated customer struggles observed in the market