CHANGING MINDS AND REMOVING BARRIERS !!USER EXPERIENCE PRACTITIONER AS STRATEGIST AND CHANGE AGENT!Paul Sherman ShermanUX
let’s cut to the chase!
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.
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why isn’t testing enough?!
Usability testing is almost always tactical and short-‐term focused.
Even when done across releases…the results are almost always used tactically.
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so?!
But the method is not well suited for: § Crafting a unified user experience § Planning for tomorrow’s user experience § Creating delight, loyalty, stickiness
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Usability testing can find problems with your site or product.
Delight Loyalty
Stickiness
How do you attain these?
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By designing the user experience:
For now.
For next year. And the years after that.
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And designing the entire experience…
Not just your product’s user interface.
Or the email campaign’s HTML formatting. Or the user assistance content.
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STRATEGY VS. TACTICS!
yadda yadda definition…!
“[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.”
9 <Lazy>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy</>
here’s a good example: !
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here’s a good example:!
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Strategic plan: Go from airport to hotel
Tactics: Make some turns
“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?
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A STORY ABOUT ALIGNMENT!
it’s about the organization!
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.
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unintended consequences!
Example: Imagine an [ahem] “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 marketing department 600K yearly.
How many people do you think abandoned their shopping carts when they saw that price?
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unintended consequences!
…and how many customers do you think were lost because of this one short-‐sighted decision?
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my point is…!
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.
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i’m not the only one!
I’m not the only person saying this: Steve Baty – “Being An Experience-‐Led Organization” http://bit.ly/40xrLP
Jared Spool – UPA 2009 keynote
…and many others.
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USABILITY AND !USER EXPERIENCE!
some definitions…!
What is usability? A person can accomplish what they’re trying to do with your product or service.
What is user experience? A person’s positive and negative attitudes that results from interacting with a product or service.
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user experience honeycomb!
21 From Peter Morville: http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php
Usability is a part of it…
But only a part.
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how do you quantify ux?!
Measure it There are many ways to do this…but we don’t do a good enough job today.
My advice… Use multiple methods, multiple measures, and look at multiple customer touchpoints... not just the product experience.
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what can you do NOW?!
The first step is to become aware of the problems!
How?
Walk through the entire customer experience.
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walk the customer corridor!
From sign-‐up to initial use…free to pay conversion…calling and emailing help, tech support, and billing…even closing the account.
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the “customer corridor”!
If you don’t know about this concept, talk to your product managers. They do.
26 A typical product manager drawing…
and while you’re at it…!
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Check your customer service line UX! Most are horrible! (Because the IT group typically designs the prompts and menus.)
vui is a specialization!
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
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full disclosure…!
She’s my wife. She’s also the best VUI usability expert around.
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How do you “do” strategic user experience?
It sometimes means big changes.
It often drives process and organizational
structure changes.
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it takes big changes!
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.
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some do it instinctively!
Offline: Nordstrom’s. Virgin Air.
Online: Zappos. Amazon. Land’s End. (Offline too.)
Who else?
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The sad truth: most organizations don’t align on the
user experience.
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whose fault is it?!
Everybody’s. And nobody’s. That’s the problem.
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How do you take a strategic approach to creating a great
user experience?
Four very hard easy steps…
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a strategic approach to ux!
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.
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strategic user experience!
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!
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strategic user experience!
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.
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strategic user experience!
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.
And…document what you do and how. (More on this in a few minutes.)
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Yeah, but… how do I get my organization to do this?
“Initiative”
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Give yourself a new job: “Change agent”
Easy to say… harder to put into practice.
“Initiative”
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UX
What is a change agent?!
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
Six Sigma -‐ http://Isixsigma.com UXmatters -‐ The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent
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“Change agents must have the conviction to state the facts based on data, even if the
consequences are associated with unpleasantness.”
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http://www.isixsigma.com/dictionary/change-‐agent/
Successful strategic user experience is not just about delivering a design or testing
the user interface.
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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.
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If you’re doing your job right, you’re changing your
organization.
“Initiative”
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Here’s something I created to help me build a strong UX presence at my former
organization.
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THE STORY OF !THE UX KIT!
done!!
I could do the kit spiel in less than 5 minutes.
It’s actually quite boring taken alone.
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What’s interesting is why I needed one, why you probably need one… and what we should be doing about this.
here’s the story’s main point!
User experience practice needs to be embedded more securely into product development lifecycle activities.
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a proposition: !
Despite what we may wish or think, UX is still poorly integrated into product ideation, design, and development activities.
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gaps!
Like Jared Spool said in his UPA 2009 keynote, there are gaps in our field.
I believe that one of them is the lack of organizational structure and process guidelines.
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why?!
Why isn’t there good stuff out there on how to integrate UX teams into organizations?
There are some lists. A few books.
But there doesn’t seem to be many lively, ongoing discussions about UX and organizational structures, cultures, etc. 53
why?!
But isn’t setting up a team a precondition to actually DOING effective user experience work?
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my hypotheses!
1. It’s a trivial problem… I’m stupid and everyone gets this stuff but me. Note: this is a definite possibility.
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my hypotheses!
2. It’s a particularly thorny problem or a problem that our field is not equipped to work on.
But we have so many research psychologists in our ranks!
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my hypotheses!
3. It’s just not as interesting or sexy as other problems in our field.
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1. It’s a trivial problem… I’m stupid and everyone gets this stuff but me.
2. It’s a particularly thorny problem or a problem that our field is not equipped to work on.
3. It’s just not as interesting or sexy as other problems in our field.
I choose #3
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yup, that’s me…!
…always working on the unsexy problems.
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THE PROBLEM!
ux ino, or “cargo cult ux”!
I’ve worked in several organizations that claimed to do UX.
Some of them actually did…
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ux ino, or “cargo cult ux”!
Some orgs *thought* they were doing UX.
But what they were really doing could be called “UX in name only.”
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cargo cult user experience!
“A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in tribal
societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-‐native
cultures.”
“The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices…”
63 <Lazy>Yes I took this from Wikipedia too.</>
cargo cult ux!
“Cargo cults conduct rituals imitating the behavior they have observed among
the holders of the desired wealth in order to receive the wealth themselves.”
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pics or it didn’t happen!
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pics or it didn’t happen!
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can i hammer this point even more?!
“The term ‘cargo cult’ is invoked as an English language idiom meaning to imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance.”
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(not so) clever impersonation!
Some orgs do something resembling UX… but it’s not really UX.
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I think some of you have seen this too.
Yes?
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now you know my problem !
At a former company I was asked to help put together UX teams in other product groups.
It took me one failure to realize that I needed to give them more than this:
“You need a user researcher and an interaction designer and a usability analyst. And, uh, a
manager too.”
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my solution!
I did what PhD’s do best: I wrote a paper.
And then I remembered who my audience was, and cut it by 2/3.
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who was it for?!
Senior managers and directors who needed advice and consultation on how to set up a UX team.
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Most had no idea that they would have to change processes and procedures to benefit from UX.
what did I cover?!
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damn! that’s a lot.!
I know!
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what i said about process!
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roles and responsibilities !Product
Management Business &
Requirements Analysts
User-Centered Design
Development Quality Assurance
PMO
Ideation
Role: Approver/Driver Responsibility: Target audience definition, business model research, ID of value areas. Create customer use cases.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Review PM’s assumptions and high-level requirements.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Investigate target market needs at the level of individual users (workflow, success criteria).
Role: Informed Role: Informed Role: Informed
Design
Role: Approver Responsibility: Contribute to design process. Validate adherence to customer business model and value.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Create and maintain business and functional requirements and specifications.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Design to meet market & user requirements, within constraints.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Manage feasibility and other technical considerations.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Create test cases and test plan from scenarios, requirements, use cases.
Role: Driver Responsibility: Plan and manage plan for overall program of work.
Development
Role: Approver Role: Contributor Responsibility: Ensure that development meets requirements, elicit unknown/latent requirements.
Role: Informed Role: Driver Responsibility: Implement the solution, meeting requirements within constraints.
Role: Contributor Responsibility: Conduct iteration testing as modules are completed.
Role: Informed
Validation
Role: Approver/ Contributor Responsibility: Ensure that solution meets use case requirements and delivers customer value.
Role: Informed
Role: Driver Responsibility: Conduct customer validation research to ensure solution viability.
Role: Informed
Role: Driver Responsibility: Assure quality – minimal defects, adherence to requirements.
Role: Informed
Release
Role: Approver Responsibility: Approval authority for release signoff.
Role: Informed Role: Contributor Responsibility: Approve enhancement from customer view.
Role: Informed Role: Driver Responsibility: Release management.
Role: Informed
Discipline
Phase
ux team services!Service Phase Description Provides:
Contextual inquiry Ideation Investigation of users’ goals, objectives, tasks, and limitations/constraints; at the users’ place of business (or other appropriate use context). Rich descriptions of users’ goals,
motivations, environment.
Task analysis Ideation Step-by-step, granular identification of users’ work tasks. Details of the users’ processes.
User profiling Ideation Detailed reports of real users; what they do, how they do it, etc.
A “library” of user profiles that can be used to guide design.
Persona creation Ideation An abstracted description of users, based on the attributes of real users.
A “design target” specifying who the design is aimed at.
Role/task matrix Task/object matrix Task frequency & criticality ratings
Design
Additional details about who does what in a particular environment, as well as the importance of particular tasks. “Quasi”-quantitative information
about users, roles, tasks, etc.
Scenarios Use cases Process flows
Design Designs describing the flow or transformation of information through a system, and how the system and user interact with each other.
Information about how a design should work in the “real world” when implemented.
Early-phase usability testing Design Testing the process flows and scenarios to ensure that they
meet real users’ needs. Validation of the design and correction opportunities.
Wireframes & prototypes Validation & documentation
A lo- or medium-fidelity representation of the feature or product.
A working system that can be tested in late-phase usability testing.
UI / interaction spec Validation & documentation
The formal, complete documentation of the feature or product’s user interface.
A specification to code and inspect against.
Visual design Validation & documentation
Formal documentation of the visual design for the product or feature.
A specification to code and inspect against.
Late-phase usability testing
Validation & documentation
Usability testing using a working prototype or mockup. Validation of the design and correction opportunities.
Summative usability testing
End-of-cycle validation
Usability testing of a finished version of the product, measuring key indicators such as average time-on-task, error rate, etc.
Information to feed into the next lifecycle’s activities.
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ux team services (again)!
resources in the kit!
I provided crazy amounts of templates, data sheets, recruiting forms, report formats, etc.
None of this is brand new; most of the content has been around in various forms.
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When you steal from me, you’re stealing (at least) twice!
what did i tell the leaders?!
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what did i tell them?!
Hire at least 3 direct contributors – user researcher/usability analyst, interaction designer, visual designer. You may need more than one of each, depending on the size of your product.
Hiring a manager or a director is also highly recommended.
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what did i tell them?!
Budget for between $20,000 and $60,000 USD in research expenses, depending on the size of your product team and how many products you support.
But if you can only get 10K or 5K… so be it.
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what did i tell them?!
You can spend as little as $5,000 or upwards of $75,000 USD on usability and user research equipment.
(Update for 2013: you don’t really even need much equipment today!)
In any case, build the team and budget the research dollars first.
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and the big one…!
Be aware that you will HAVE to change your ideation, design and development processes in order to successfully implement user experience. If you don’t explicitly make room for design research, ideation and iteration in your processes… you might become a “cargo cult” UX team.
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the results!
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so how did the kit go over?!
Meh. At first, anyway.
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but after a while…!
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but after a while…!
It took more than a year. But eventually the product groups started making the transition to more fully incorporating UX activities.
They didn’t always go as far as my original team. But they went further than they had ever gone before.
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things i wish i had covered!
§ Agile and other methods
§ How to deal with force reductions
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caveats!
My UX kit has gaps. It doesn’t cover smaller orgs or startups. Use at your own risk!
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was it worth it?!
Absolutely.
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snappy conclusion!
Be bold, but patient.
Organizations resist change.
But they need change to grow and improve.
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YOU can be the change agent, with your mad UX skillz.
parting thoughts!
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.
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resources!
The UX Kit: http://shermanux.com/_files/UX_Kit_v2.pdf This deck (updated September 2013): http://www.slideshare.net/PaulSherman
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some other takeaways!
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. J)
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