And what next? A case study in how to get the most out of your user research

Editor's Notes

• #3 UX lead at TUI UK & Ireland Part of TUI – Europe’s largest tour operator And one of the world's leading leisure travel companies operating in over 180 countries with more than 30 million customers Have a lot of different brands within the UK
• #4 Primarily work on the Thomson & First Choice website – two of the biggest travel sites in the UK
• #5 You’ve done the detective work to find out more about your customers e.g. Interviewed customers Carried out surveys Conducted diary study Looked at analytics and usage stats Looked at general market research data Spoken to customer facing parts of the organisation
• #6 And now you’re no doubt drowning in data
• #8 Write a big fat research report – or let the user researchers write one
• #9 As anyone that’s had to write one will know, research reports are typically painful to write, and even more painful to read
• #10 If you can persuade people to actually read it, it’s only likely to get lost in translation anyway People will take out of a report what they want to take out of it I apologise for the lack of thought that’s gone in to this slide – I promise it gets better from now on!
• #11 Somewhat ironic slide! – Death by PowerPoint not ideal as Quickly gets forgotten Doesn’t really support the on-going UX design Requires colleagues to attend a presentation Can be difficult with when an organisation is based all over the place
• #12 There must be a better way!
• #13 Take a step back and consider what you’re trying to do here…
• #14 Within all organisations if you ask who your users and your target audience is, you’ll invariably get lots of different answers What you want is to bring this out in to the open and to ultimately get everyone signing from the same hymn sheet You want to build a shared understanding of who your users are and of your target audience
• #15 Of course more importantly you want to design great experiences for your users The question is, given what you’ve found out, how can you best achieve this?
• #16 This is where I rip open my shirt to reveal…
• #18 Hands up who remembers Challenge Anneka? For those that don’t remember the early 90s Anneka Rice used to ride around in a big lorry and dune buggy and be given a challenge, such as renovating a building with a ridiculously small time frame to do it – hard to wonder why the show isn’t still around! I remember one episode when she had to repaint Happisburgh lighthouse in Norfolk – near where I grew up, only for it to be repainted a few years later because they’d done such a bad job!
• #19 Its important that the user research lays the foundations for a solid UX design because we all know what happens when you build on shoddy foundations It does make for some great photo opportunities though…
• #20 We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words
• #21 So utilise the power of Infographics This is something that we’re starting to use at TUI This shows some information about different TUI customer market segments Really good for creating information that people can easily digest and use Could stick infographics up around the office
• #22 If a picture is worth a thousand words a good story is surely worth a million
• #23 You see nothing tells a story like a good story It’s the oldest way of passing down information We’re hard wired to respond to stories – it’s a very natural way to communicate and take in information By the way – I love the fact that this kid seems to have had his Maths homework shaved into his hair!
• #24 I’ll show you how powerful a little story can be with an example from Google
• #25 As we all know, every story needs characters
• #26 For your characters you should be using your personas Hopefullly everyone here knows what personas are – they’re basically fictional characters based on fact So please don’t go basing your personas on soap opera characters I’m not going to talk too much about personas as it’s a massive topic in its own right but I will talk a little bit about how we use personas at TUI
• #27 At TUI we’ve been undertaking a substantial redesign of both the Thomson and First Choice websites Even though both websites are used by millions of people from all over the UK, we’ve primarily used two personas Helen – a price conscious Mum of 2, and Deborah – a more adventurous and experience driven traveller We’ve used only 2 personas because this means that everyone only has two personas to remember, to buy into and to consider To some extent Helen and Deborah are different ends of the spectrum, and this is consciously so
• #28 The key when it comes to your users and subsequently your personas is behavioural differences You might have two users that are quite different demographically, but if their behaviours are very similar it doesn’t make sense to have separate personas We decided that when it came to the behaviours that we had identified of our customers, we could cover these with two primary personas – Helen & Deborah Of course we have some secondary personas but to be honest these are little used
• #29 Having identified the key behavioural differences we’ve found it useful to define where we expect our users to fall on a behavioural scale – so that we can better define who we’re designing for For example, how much assistance will that user require? We’ve made a conscious decision to push users that require a lot of hand holding to the retail shops or call centre
• #30 Can be useful to have personas towards the ends of the spectrum when it comes to your user behaviours E.g. Helen isn’t much of an explorer – likely to stay at the hotel whilst Deborah will be out and about Helen is a real deal finder, whilst Deborah is more concerned with her holiday experience Deborah is an advice seeker, whilst Helen likes to do all the research herself If you can accommodate users like Helen & Deborah that are towards the ends of your user behaviours, you should be able to accommodate all those inbetween
• #31 We’ll also keep personas to a minimum by reusing them wherever possible Of course only reuse a persona if they fit the sort of user profile you need to consider, but you don’t want to create a whole new bunch of personas for each new design
• #32 So you’ve got your characters, now of course you need your storyline
• #33 At TUI we use personas for our characters and user journey maps, sometimes call experience maps as our storylines These outline an end to end experience from a customer’s perspective This is an example from Adaptive Path for Rail Europe Rail Europe sell passes and tickets for European rail travel and this map shows the current customer experience for planning, booking, travelling and then post travel for European rail travel
• #34 There is no set format for a customer experience map – it’s up to you really You basically take one of your personas and a goal of theirs, such as taking the train in Europe Then for each stage of the customer’s journey you ask some questions, such as: What does she do? How does she do it? What is her experience like? What challenges does she face? How can we improve things for her? We like to work through the experience map as a team, but you might equally create a customer experience map as a starting point, to then go through with the team You’ll often be initially looking at the current process, and then might create new customer experience maps for how the customer journey might be designed
• #35 The best thing about customer experience maps is that they show the customer’s perspective So often organisations only look at things from a channel, or operations perspective – this is something handled by the website, this is something handled by the call centre Customer experience maps show the different channels used by customers and outline how customers might switch between different touchpoints
• #36 Customer experience maps are also great for highlighting problems and issues that customers currently experience
• #37 But most importantly they can help identify opportunities to make things better… both from a service delivery and UX perspective
• #38 Customer experience maps are often quite high level – looking at an end to end customer journey This is great for bigger picture stuff but sometimes it’s useful to drill into some of the detail so that people in the organisation can see how customers are attempting to undertake a specific task, such as actually booking a Europe rail ticket This is where scenarios come in… Again hopefully scenarios are familiar with most people – they outline how a user goes about a specific task There are a number of ways to communicating stories in the form of scenarios:
• #39 A scenario map is a bit like task analysis – we have used them on a few projects within TUI A map will show the steps that a customer will take to complete a task, with different colours used for steps, comments and details, questions (to be investigated) and ideas You could ask customers to map out how they undertake a particular scenario, or create a map based on the user research If you google ‘Scenario maps’ you should find some articles about the method
• #40 You could also use storyboards – something we’ve used a little bit on TUI These graphically show the steps that a customer goes through, either at the present, or how we’d like them to They are great for communicating the customers story but can obviously be a little time consuming to create
• #41 Finally you can let the words do the talking and outline a scenario in the form of a narrative This can be a mini-story, although I find it easier to use a table format with the steps, comments, outstanding questions and ideas or required functionality outlined Narrative scenarios are relatively easy to create but perhaps require a bit more effort (not to mention imagination) from the reader Ultimately the way that you choose to communicate your customer’s stories will depend on all sorts of things, such as the time, resources and audience You might even use different ways to communicate depending on the audience – but more of that later
• #42 So you’ve carried out your user research, got some great insights and material to share, but how do you get the word out?
• #43 The first thing to realise is that people won’t generally come to you seeking this stuff out (some might, but most won’t) So you have to get up from behind your desk and make people aware of who your target audience and your users are To build up that shared understanding There are a number of ways that we’ve found effective at TUI for doing this
• #44 A very basic thing is to stuck stuff up in the office At TUI we have a white board wall which is always full of sketches, personas and other UXy stuff For example, you might stick some persona posters or user infographics up in the canteen, or other high footfall areas
• #45 Something else that we’ve found works well is to hold showcases every quarter or so Get a room, stick a load of stuff up and then invite people to take a look It’s a great way of getting people from around the organisation more involved
• #46 It’s also good to be creative For example, you could create persona playing cards that people can take into meetings and use
• #47 You could create a fictional blog from one or more of your personas Not something we’ve tried out in TUI yet Here’s the queen’s very own blog
• #48 You could ask people to role play a situation or scenario as one of the personas Good for getting people to step in to their shoes
• #49 Something that we’ve certainly discovered is that its good to provide differing levels of details Detail for those that want it and key points for those that don’t This is a persona that I created at a previous job – one is very high level, the other shows a lot more detail, including detailed background and a day in the life
• #50 It’s also important to make it easy for people within the organisation to find information about users and the target audience Usually this sort of information is scattered all over the place – certainly it is at TUI
• #51 So it’s a good idea to put all this stuff in one place Could be on the Intranet or even a Wiki site is a good idea – this is something that we’re looking into at TUI Important to have one person (or persons) to be responsible for the knowledgebase – for organising and managing the knowledgebase
• #52 This should all an on going thing – it’s most certainly not a one off Must continually research your users, translate into actionable and usable findings and utilise these for your design You can then validate your design against your users and continue…
• #53 Because your users change and their behaviour certainly changes You only have to look at the changing way in which people access websites and online services, such mobiles, tablets and computers
• #54 Of course it’s also important to continue to evangelise and drive home the message about this stuff It’s also a good idea to have a process in place for getting new people up to speed, something we’re looking to put into place in the TUI UX team
• #55 If you want to find out more about this stuff there is of course loads of stuff available online You should also checkout these two excellent books