UX as a core competence - TYPO3 conference Asia 2012

Editor's Notes

• #2 I’m here to convince you, a room full of very smart technology folk, that you need to do more than just technology.In fact, you guys are the best positioned to do more than just technology because you understand it.Let’s start with an easy question – who wants to change the world?I’m sure there are many ways thru tech to change the world, heck I’ve got one project in edu that I am doing.I’M HERE TO SHOW YOU ANOTHER. ANOTHER WAY THAT TECH PEOPLE DON’T OFTEN CHOOSE, BUT IS IN HIGH DEMAND.Let’s start with something very important. Dilbert. Any Dilbert fans?
• #3 Here’s what I’d like to talk about.Help you experience user experience.Most of you here because you prob believe in UX as good to do, but not something you think needs to be core to what you do.Give you proof that you need to change this belief. UX needs to be CORE to what you do. My job is to convince you of this so the next conference you go to is a UX one!Hopefully near the end, I’ve convinced you and will give you some practical things to take away to get started.When I mention UX, I am really talking about design. Not design where you make things pretty but obsessive user centred design.First some background. Who am I to be up here telling you this? You can prob guess that I am a bit biased of course.
• #8 Let’s start by defining what I mean when I talk about user experience.I think a lot of you will probably have different ideas about this.It’s better to show than to tell.
• #11 Here’s another one that you might be more familiar with. Ever seen one of these?
• #13 Lots of technical definitions but I won’t bore you with that. It’s pretty simple. At this stage I might lose a few of you cos I sound like some marketing guy. Like it or not, human beings are emotional beings. Our operating system if you like is fundamentally an emotional one. It just so happens our cognitive brain takes over to explain our behaviour. There’s a lot of research to support this. Emotions, and understanding emotions is ultimately what matters. Here I’ll prove it to you.Hands up, how many people own one of these?
• #14 Technically, iphones are not that much better than other phones. It’s how Apple devices make us feel when we use it that has made them the most valuable compnay in the world.Of course no presentation on UX is compelte with out reference to Apple, so there, I’ve done it.We will come back to them later.
• #15 Their view is that “advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” I’m here to convince you that you can help your clients build remakrable products and services through UX.Quote from http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/2009/05/28/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-kindle-advertising-and-being-green/Photo from ???
• #17 I think that customers would be less frustrated if you spent all your money on the customer experience. I love this cartoon – The Oatmeal. They have a range of cartoons such as ‘Why I believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable’ and ‘Six Reasons To Ride a Polar Beer to Work’. “It’ll impress your fellow commuters.”======http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service
• #18 So let’s get personal. It’s easy to mock what other people have done, but what about you?Is there room for improvement?Are you an iPhone or does your product spawn a cartoon parody?
• #19 Maybe you’re still not sure about all this UX stuff.Let me give you a more recent piece of evidence to consider.
• #20 One month ago, Marissa Meyer somewhat unexpectedly was hired as CEO of Yahoo.Here’s one of the main reasons they picked here.She is “focused on the user experience”. Marrisa was well known in UX circles well before she was famous and was one of its most passionate advocates. UX is no longer a nice thing to have. It’s in the board rooms of some of biggest and most innovative businesses in the world.
• #21 What Yahoo is doing is far from new.Businesses everywhere have started to get this in the last 5 years.We are in a tough economic climate and it makes it even harder for people to stand out. Technology, by and large, is easy to replicate.Experiences for customers on the other hand are tough to copy consistently. Why this matters is because your clients are either thinking about this, or they should be.Most of us want to move up the food chain. After you make the 20th website, there’s only so much more you can tolerate. Most of you want to do more interesting work and work at more senior levels. One way you can do this, is by focusing on the user experience. I will now give you some examples of how businesses did this, then talk about how you can begin helping businesses – your clients – begin this journey.
• #22 So why should you care about usability?For a start, there is ample research that suggests that a dollar spent on usability related activity results in savings of between $10 and $100. The savings are in: Increased user productivity Decreased user errors Decreased training costs Decreased user support costs
• #23 But here is the main reason why I think you should care: Reduced development costs.Pressman showed back in 1991 that for every dollar spent to resolve an issue during product design, $10 would be spent on solving the same problem during coding, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release (IBM, 2001).A robust user-centred design process helps ensure that what you build not only matches a technical specification but is useful, easy to use, and satisfying once it goes live. Usability helps ensure that you identify the $1 fixes very early on, and helps avoid the $100 fixes you have to make once the system is in the wild.======================Reduced development costsIn a 1991 study (Boset, 1991) usability techniques helped cut development time by 33% - 50%.Decreased user support costsOne study we know of said that 60 – 80% of support calls were usability related.
• #24 Here is the reason why usability activities need to start early.Going back to our graph from before – we know that it costs more to make a change the further through the project we get.Perhaps less obvious is that the number of design alternatives that you can explore also reduces as time goes on. It costs too much to try out new ideas the further you go, so your design gets more and more locked in.For this reason, it’s important to explore a larger number of design alternatives very early in the process (before we cut any code).
• #25 Your clients. Many say they want to be world-class. Can they be? Can you help them be world class? What is world class? Let’s see two three examples, each that represents each of these three circles.If you want to move up the food chain, work with clients that are progressive. Show them leadership in business and in technology.Companies tend to focus on these three things. Let’s start with service.
• #27 If people feel bad or have a bad UX, often it’s because businesses have ugly systems.That doesn’t jjust mean bad UI. It means bad processes and often bad software that propogate bad processe.
• #29 365-day return policy24-hour/day call centreFree shipping on all purchases - both waysAnd they regularly surprise upgrade customers to next-day shippingThey also offer new employees a $2,000 bonus to quit after a four-week paid training program. 97% turn it down. “It's best to know early on if an employee doesn't buy into the vision or the culture, it just makes economic sense” - Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
• #30 They build systems but it exists to support the experience.“If something gets returned four years later -- and it happens -- we can scan it in and know who bought it and if it was returned three times before. The whole history of the item is kept in the system. For employees, it automatically sends daily email reminders to call a customer back, coordinates the warehouse robot system, and produces reports that can specifically assess the impact on margins of putting a particular item on sale”
• #31 77% revenue is from repeat customers.
• #32 Photo by orangeacid http://flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/459207903/
• #34 Needs no intro.
• #35 http://www.cultofmac.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/scary_steve_jobs_mask.jpg
• #36 Can you imagine doing that to your code?Apple throws away 90% of what they do. Apple have a fanatical focus on elegant, emotional designBlah blah blah blah.. They throw 90% of it away.They boil it down to the core - there is nothing left to take away. It is beautiful.They build desirable products.
• #37 The reason they do this is because they are obsessed with the user experience.It makes people do this to their products.When was the last time your website made someone applaud and cheer like these guys? It can you know.http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/03/03/apple-tops- fortunes- most-admired- companies/http://blog.yellowmedia.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/applemania.jpg
• #38 Results speak for themselves really.I still remember Apple being a bit of an outsider.
• #39 At this point I want to change gears and look into how we can be great at designing UX.First some bad news.Easy to use is actually NOT VERY EASY TO DO.If you think dealing with code is hard, you should try dealing with people. We’re all consumers and we all know how hard we are to please. It’s funny how when we’re producers we’re not nearly as fussy as we are when we’re consumers.The bad news is that consumer behaviour is changing very rapidly, and it’s getting harder and more complicated to satisfy people.
• #40 Part of the reason is that there’s just so much competing for our attention. And we have so much expectation, and so many choices.We’re hit with loads of information daily. There’s more information in one week of NY Times than lifetime in 1800s.We have information and attention overload. But our appetite for data is ever growing.We have all these new possibilities to collect data, share it, bring it from one place to another, to remix it, label it and find itWe have to cut through all that noise.
• #41 The truth is that we live in a multichannel world. That makes it harder – more channels means more complexity.But in some ways this is GREAT news for you guys. You design and build half of these channels. Web, mobile, social media. These are on the rise and they need leaders that understand UX.============Amcal guy: http://www.stardeals.co.nz/images/starstores/img-2647.JPG
• #42 The good news is that there is an answer.Design is the key.Making it elegant and easy is half the answer.
• #43 And by design, I don’t mean that creating a great looking website or impressive signage or an award-winning ad. Design goes far deeper than a surface layer. As Steve Jobs says, design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Quote from http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/customer-experience-lessons-from-steve-jobs/
• #44 Or put another way…[READ QUOTE]Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management, and wrote a great book called the Design of Business.
• #45 So here’s my not so humble advice to you all. You guys work with big clients and you mostly satisfy their technology needs. Don’t stop there.So, the way to deal with the bad news – the complexity of this new world - is to explicitly designthe entireexperience: across interactions and across channels. Techn people who really undestand UX are rare.UX people who really understand tech are rare.
• #48 Here’s the Optimal Usability process.
• #49 You take the business needs from the Define phase
• #50 Combine that with everything that we understand about the user needs from the Discovery phase (their goals, characteristics, context – that kind of thing).
• #51 The next step is to generate a lots of different design alternatives, that meet the business goals and user needs we identified in the first 2 activities.
• #52 How do you get these alternatives?Something called co-design. Everyone of these “designers” is a client. I don’t have time to get into the co-design process, but in a single day we can get dozens of really good concepts, all of which have been critiqued.
• #53 The best ideas then go forward to user testing. You get in real users, set them realistic tasks to do using the sketches, and we find out what they found confusing, annoying and frustrating.
• #54 Here are some of the methods that usability practitioners most often use. I thought it would be useful to go through these quickly.Pick the ones that are relevant to you.
• #55 Start with a fake method.Who has been part of a focus group? Run a focus group?As a side note, focus groupsaren’t very useful in the discovery phase.Great for thinking you’ve done something useful.
• #56 That’s because what people say and do are often vastly different things. For example, in one study 60%...
• #57 In other words, in a focus group people will tell you that they don’t like all the sex and violence on TV. And yet, what do we watch? Sex and violence.========================There is very little scientific evidence supports the use of focus groups.That’s why its so important to go beyond what people say and watch what they do.Photo from http://errornotfound.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/true-blood-true-blood-7167238-1280-1024.jpg
• #58 This is about observing how people interact in the context of the real world. For example, we did some work for a bank a couple of years ago that involved several days of hanging out at their branches and their competitors, looking at how people moved, what they were carrying were they coming in in groups, where did they go when they came in?This technique is great for understanding the context of use of the technology, especially the physical environment. Is it a loud office? Are they using a small monitor? What are sources of information do they use – are there manuals that they refer to? Do they have post it notes stuck to their monitor?
• #59 The process of learning about ordinary users by observing them in action. I’m going to talk about this in a little more depth in a second, because it is such a great way of checking that your forms are easy to use.
• #68 Classifying and structuring information so that it is easy to find stuff. This can be useful to understand what questions people think belong together.
• #69 Classifying and structuring information so that it is easy to find stuff. This can be useful to understand what questions people think belong together.
• #70 Classifying and structuring information so that it is easy to find stuff. This can be useful to understand what questions people think belong together.
• #71 Classifying and structuring information so that it is easy to find stuff. This can be useful to understand what questions people think belong together.
• #72 Of course, these days mobile is a big thing. Again, start with low fidelity.
• #73 You do this multiple times and you gradually get to higher and higher fidelity designs.
• #74 You just ask people to pretend that their finger was the mouse.
• #75 Actually designing the interactive experiences.
• #76 Usability professionals independently analyse an interface looking for violations of best practice usability guidelines.Evaluation method without usersFast and easyBest practice usability “rules of thumb”Lots of different checklists
• #77 OK, so to finish up - what if you flipped your spend on it's head? =============TODO: person lying down imagining…
• #78 OK, so to finish up - what if you flipped your spend on it's head?
• #79 So that if you took their attitude and spent all your money on the customer experience? I think a number of things would happen. I think that retail stores would be places that people would want to hang out at. Apple became a billion dollar retailer faster than anyone else in history, and their sales per square foot of $4,406 is higher than Tiffany's (about $3K). This is the line outside NYC Apple store.How did they do it? To start with, they rented a warehouse near the Apple campus and built a prototype of a store. Apple spent a year testing its concept, and masterminding a store layout that staged its products in a way that highlighted how they could be used, rather than the conventional retail method of stacking products by category. Buying a computer was less about the machine, and more about what you could do with it.When that first store finally opened, only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: photos, videos, kids.In other words, they kick arse in retail because they followed that same ‘discover, define, develop and deliver’ process.From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Line_at_Apple_Store_in_NYC.jpg
• #80 So, in conclusion
• #81 World-class companies don’t compete on service, products, technology or features. They certainly don’t compete on marketing.They compete on experience.
• #82 World-class companies don’t compete on service, products, technology or features. They certainly don’t compete on marketing.They compete on experience.
• #84 If this presentation has resonated with you, get in touch.I can point you in the right direction, or help you myself.