#ux userexperience

[artisantherapie-blog]

Discovery via Digital Academy. Great website and interestingly written.

[workoffahimmd]

Tinkoff Bank

Tinkoff Bank increased credit card sign-ups on its website, by following a methodological approach to Conversion Rate Optimization, using A/B Testing.

3 Ways Tinkoff Bank Optimized Credit Card Conversions – Case Study

[zacknaylor]

Your World Is Bigger Than You Think- Customer Experience and User Experience (part 1)

Customer service. I can feel confident saying that all of us at some point in time have had a run-in with customer service. Let’s wager a guess that the interactions you’ve had with customer service probably involved your dissatisfaction about a product or service and a phone call with a person from that company assuring you that everything would be ok. No? Then it must have been a time when you had a really tough error or confusion with a product or service and you contacted “customer service” for help, hoping they would walk you through the event.

There’s more to customer service than that. As it turns out, many organizations are beginning to understand that our current delivery of customer service, in and of itself, is actually incomplete. Usher in the term customer experience. No, this is not just a new label for the same old tricks. Customer experience, for those who’ve adopted such a term, means a great deal more than simply reacting to problems. For this, seemingly select, group of people, customer experience is:

“the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier” - source Wikipedia

Well, that sounds a heck of a lot like how I tried to define experience strategy. Specifically, my thoughts were:

“Fundamentally, experience strategy is the orchestrated direction for the design of a product or service (or set of products and services) that incorporates any existing relevant products, services, apps, or websites for the design being created. Additionally, it accounts for both the online and offline touch points with the organization serving that design, even those not immediately within the realm of direct influence by said organization. Further, experience strategy offers an intentional, structured, engagement model to which the audience is meant to interact with the design.”

So, Where Are We?

Okay. Those two definitions are not the same verbatim. There is, however, enough overlap that makes me scratch my head. Admittedly, my first reaction felt kinda like this. This is not a situation where someone got their customer experience in my user experience. We’re actually trying to do the same things. Customer experience is trying to account for the all experiences a customer has with their respective organization. That’s a tall order. Let’s also remember, that the biggest function of a user experience designer is to define and design touchpoints and interactions between people and organizations. Wow, sounds like a match made in heaven. The main wrinkle comes in when we start to talk about UX beyond a single touchpoint. What happens when we start to look at things like service design? Uh-oh. Looks like we’re stepping on the proverbial toes of customer experience professionals. We must have taken a wrong turn.

I don’t think we have though. I believe what has happened is a revelation on both sides (UX and CX) in different ways. First, I believe that UX is much, much more than simply designing a single touchpoint to artfully crafted perfection. So do other UX designers. There is a groundswell in the UX community that seeks a greater purpose and provide value beyond what interfaces we create.

On the other end, we see what traditional customer service is starting to do. The welcoming of a more holistic view of customer service is on the rise. Of course, with the term customer experience, these professionals are also seeking to provide value beyond a simple reaction to a problem (see: call centers). What this means to me is two groups of people inching from opposite ends of the spectrum toward the same, unified purpose; creating better experiences for the people they serve.

Traveling to the Same Place

While customer service has long been a substantial part of overall business strategy, UX design has not. Customer experience is beginning to recognize that a proactive approach to defining the touchpoints someone will have with them is important. Meanwhile, we UX designers are seeing that we have the ability to provide value further upstream, in defining all of the touchpoints and how they weave together to create a comprehensive, beautiful, consistent experience with a single organization. Both of our professions have realized that our worlds are, and should be, bigger than we originally thought.

Customer experience seeks to define the execution of the touchpoints they've identified, which are largely reactionary in nature. User experience design aims to use research and design strategy principles to help define entire company customer experience strategies. There is a clear partnership to be had. UX design can, and inevitably does, fulfill the execution of initiatives and touchpoints defined by customer experience visions. While each group aims to dip their toes further into the others responsibilities, we should determine what the most meaningful partnership looks like. Customer experience likely hopes for aid in defining how they will actually create some of the defined touchpoints of a customer experience strategy. User experience design certainly has the capability to define larger strategic initiatives, informed by customer research. Further, UX design has the ability to execute, with targeted intent, on each of those touchpoints.

The Map of Our Worlds

As we take a look at the obvious overlap in disciplines between customer experience and user experience design, we can see partnership on the horizon. UX design can inform what customers are doing now, and what they expect to do, feel and experience. Customer experience professionals are able to translate business strategy into a set of initiatives to deliver a customer experience that aligns with business goals and vision. UX design can start much earlier than it’s currently allowed to. Customer experience is a major area of opportunity for UX design to take on a more strategic role and have a much needed earlier impact to an organization’s overall strategic goals for the experience it provides to its customers. Experience designers can do this by helping customer experience efforts define and later design touchpoints to a total customer experience.

In part 2, I’ll write in more detail about the things customer experience professionals aim to accomplish, how UX designers can support those efforts and how to forge a more meaningful partnership between the two that can lead to more valuable interactions between people and organizations.

Update: Part 2 here!

[zacknaylor]

Anatomy of Experience Strategy

This was originally posted on The Nerdery Blog

In the Beginning, There Was An Idea

A typical scenario here at The Nerdery is a client that approaches us with an idea. That idea can be for a new product or service, or one that already exists. The most common request is one where the client asks, “Can you help me design my idea?” Most often, that request really means, “Can you do my project?” The answer is obviously, yes. We often find ourselves asking, however, “Where did this idea come from?” For optimal design solutions, it’s necessary to understand, especially for existing products/services, the history of the idea, how it’s evolved and the aim for the future. Answers to those questions, among others, empower our UX team to provide rather innovative solutions to a design problem. As user experience designers, we analyze problems differently than most people, and through methodologies we build in design work we’re regularly able to synthesize data about the problem to make an informed decision on the solution.

But, what if there’s more? Such a narrow scope of designing a solution to a singular problem, at its core, ignores the very fact that solving that design problem creates a ripple effect in the lives of the audience it’s meant to serve, as well as the business or organization serving the experience. Accounting and planning for this change, dare I say, designing with intent for it, fosters an environment for the product or service to reach optimal success. Enter the experience strategy.

Experience Strategy: An Offered Definition

Experience strategy for The Nerdery UX team means a number of things. Fundamentally, experience strategy is the orchestrated direction for the design of a product or service (or set of products and services) that incorporates any existing relevant products, services, apps, or websites for the design being created. Additionally, it accounts for both the online and offline touch points with the organization serving that design, even those not immediately within the realm of direct influence by said organization. Further, experience strategy offers an intentional, structured, engagement model to which the audience is meant to interact with the design. This engagement model acts as a customer journey that supports not only the introduction to the design in question, but the means by which that audience might find motivation to its continued use. Moreover, the experience strategy speaks to the recommended approach for establishing a continuous feedback loop with your audience to employ informed decision making to the necessary evolution of the design itself, without which, no amount of strategy can fix.

Where to begin? 
As with most effective designs, a thorough experience strategy begins with an understanding of the business organization’s intent and goals, balanced with a healthy baseline knowledge in the audience behavior and needs. From there, we examine areas of opportunity to support a singular design with contextually relevant influencers, such as those supporting websites, apps or services. This comes from a deep understanding of organization design. Is there a customer service department? Do you have physical locations or trade-show/conference events that can feed into the digital or non-digital experience we intend to design? Here, we can identify where opportunities to integrate and augment the design in question and further support your audience’s mental model.

Mapping Success & Accountability

This all sounds great, but how do we know it will work? In beginning with the high-level initiatives of the business, we will presumably have defined metrics that map back to those goals. From here, it becomes a matter of priority exercises to identify the highest impact feature(s) and functionality within the larger strategy of the design and, most importantly, the currently existing products/services – and where they can integrate. Once identified, we map those back to a set of success metrics for the business. Those metrics and initial priority in design execution directly inform the approach for the oncoming feedback loop with the audience necessary. In order to truly track the success of a design, a regular and consistent plan of attack for learning from your audience and internal business leaders is critical. Our experience strategies inform that feedback loop – how often it should occur, how to use that information and, finally, how it should map back to the original business goals of the design (or, how it supports new found or changing business goals). A common business goal of our clients is increased engagement with the design. The first step with our team is defining what engagement means for their product or service. Then, we set up quantitative tracking mechanisms, such as a web analytics package to measure the frequency part of the engagement equation. Next, by finding patterns in frequency, relevant to certain design or business KPI’s, we determine where we need a deeper, in-person, qualitative understanding. User interviews, ethnography and on site observation are all ways in which we gather such qualitative feedback. The real key is, that the hard metrics (the quantitative stuff) actually informed our needs for the additional research. Even further, all of those research and feedback-loop goals were constructed based on a set of business goals, identified with that organization’s leaders. Finally, we start building models of what this data means, in essence, synthesis. From that set of exercises comes design recommendations, or, solutions to the problem we’re solving.

The Formation of a Product Roadmap

From this comprehensive understanding of business goals, user needs, the surrounding ecosystem in which the design lives and how it all maps back to defined success metrics, naturally, a product roadmap will emerge. A roadmap of this kind can be a daunting and uncertain endeavor, but through the prioritization exercises coupled with informed decisions steeped in user research, the patterns begin to almost show themselves. This usually takes the form of development schedule or cadence (depending on your chosen development philosophy of waterfall, Agile, etc.) and the task points to integrating supporting products or services into the new design as well as creation of new feature(s) and functionality. Those tasks can be seen as the traditional “project” that incorporates a set of actions to improving or modifying the product or service. This step can often include a recommendation for phased rollout in alpha or beta releases with a limited set of the targeted audience, as part of the aforementioned “feedback loop”.

Does Your Product or Service Have an Experience Strategy?

“Projects” are a natural part of creating any experience. But creating them within a silo – without careful consideration of the entire ecosystem in which a design will live – decreases the chance for success. Projects executed on a whim, without defined business goals and supported audience behavior can sometimes feel like a fool’s errand. An experience strategy provides companies and organizations with a toolset for informed decision making in product and service design by acting as a lighthouse in the fog of redesigns and endless design improvements. Inject confidence into your product and service development by knowing your product’s next three projects, rather than reacting to the last release.

[zacknaylor]

Measure Twice, Cut Once - An Approach to Sketching

A colleague of mine recently attended SketchCamp Chicago. She was talking to me about all the things they discussed and ways of using sketching that she hadn’t readily thought of before. We ended up talking about how she was going to take pieces of what she’d learned and apply them to a current project on our team to design a mobile app.

Forgotten But Not Lost

This conversation reopened my eyes to something I’ve been doing for nearly my entire career thus far of calling myself a UX designer. Sketching is so often overlooked in the shuffle to produce visually compelling, highly polished documentation. I personally was able to take for granted that the “real” effort behind any design is the thought work that goes into creating the document, not the document itself. That is to say, the document deliverable is only a communication of that idea or concept. We all too often lose sight of where the priority should lie in our effort; the thought work.

Measure Twice

Sketching allows us space and freedom for the thought work effort of a design. More importantly, it provides the much needed oil for our creative engines. We’ve all read articles or seen presentations about the importance of sketching and the perils of starting too early in a higher fidelity medium. The former is well tread in the UX community and in general tells us that sketching helps generate better ideas, while the latter often cautions us that a higher fidelity medium can be limiting in our creation of a concept. My intention isn’t to revisit those statements but rather take a different outlook on it and share my own approach. Measure twice, cut once, is an English proverb that suggests exactly what it means. Traditionally, it was an axiom for craftsmen and carpenters that served as a reminder (and caution) to carefully plan their approach before engaging creation. It’s relevance in what we do is incredibly powerful. In experience design, sketching is measuring.

The Measuring Tape

I’ve always been a relative fan of constraints. Not the kind that stifle creativity or limit an idea, but ones that actually do the opposite. The way I’ve always designed has started with sketching, but as I progressed through my career, I added little bits along the way that I felt made sketching even better. The idea of “measuring twice” is great, but examining the ruler every once in a while is useful to ensure the right measurements.

In starting most design efforts, I begin using the 6-up sketching template I found by Leah Buley. The 6-up template forces me to think through, at minimum, six different ways a screen interaction might work. In this case, I’m “measuring” up to six times, or sometimes more! The way I’ve always used the template is to generate a number of ideas in a short time frame. This 6-up template has several benefits:

it forces me to think through at least 6 different ways a set of interactions could work

it requires priority as the windows of the template are small and simply cannot contain everything the screen may have

it shows me the graduation of my design ideas in progression, all in one place

Boxing Yourself In

When sketching, sometimes I go free-form and just explore ideas, but more often than not, the exercise of sketching is more structured for me. I’ll start by using the blank 6-up template. Here’s the catch though, I actually “time-box” myself to 15 minutes. I force myself to come up with 6 different designs for the particular problem I’m trying to solve within 15 minutes. Has to be six different designs, has be to done in 15 minutes. Why 15 minutes? Well, in truth it was an arbitrary number I placed on myself a long time ago that felt right when trying to solve a design problem quickly. I hardly ever expect to have the answer after 15 minutes, but I DO expect to have a bunch of ideas. I’ve found that it actually goes one of two ways. Either I end up scrambling to fit everything in within those 15 minutes, or I actually find myself struggling to fill all six of the the boxes with newer ideas. There are huge advantages to each situation. If I’m struggling to fit all my ideas into 15 minutes, the time constraint forces priority in my thinking and focused restraint to meeting the goal of that interface. If I find myself “done” with only 2-3 boxes sketched out after 5 minutes, it then forces me to explore my design ideas more deeply. In essence, the exercise does not allow me to take my first ideas at face value, nor does it permit me to meander in concepts for eternity. Here’s an example of the approach I take, showing the progression of a comparison screen interface I did a while back:

I start with Leah’s 6-up template.

Then, giving myself 15 minutes, I force myself to come up with 6 different sketch concepts of the interface I’m trying to design. You’ll notice how the idea visually progresses, building on itself from left/right, top/bottom. I’ve often found that I continuously “steal” things from the prior sketch, however small. There are times when I’ll actually run through more than one 6-up template if I don’t feel like my concepts are sound enough for a particular interface. In that case, I simply repeat the cycle; another 15 minutes, another 6 concepts.

Finally, once I feel as though I’ve explored the majority of possibilities for the screen I’m working on, I’ll move to the 1-up template.

If you notice from the 6-up template, there are several items that ultimately made it into this larger version. From the 6-up template, I was also able to explore specific parts of the interface in subsequent sketches with a bit more detail. That later allowed me to add such detail to this larger version and bring together several ideas in a single interface.

Cut Once

Ultimately, I was able to make a ton of revisions during my sketch cycles, rather than wireframes or, worse yet, development effort. With all the “measuring” I did, I could feel confident in moving to a higher fidelity medium knowing I had accounted for all of the possibilities available for the interface. In this case, it was an information-heavy page, which also gave me a head start on prominence, priority and hierarchy of that information. That’s something a little harder to do if you’re jumping right into a wireframe.

The final wireframe ended up looking like this:

A recap of the sketching process I usually take is:

Start with the 6-up template

With a time limit of 15 minutes, generate 6 concepts for the interface

Review and repeat the 6-up if necessary; otherwise…

Move to the larger, 1-up template

Again, with a time limit of 15 minutes create 1 comprehensive sketch for the design based on your ideas from the 6-up template(s)

Repeat 1-up as necessary

Move to a higher fidelity such as wireframes, prototype, etc. (if the situation calls for it)

This approach has helped me rapidly explore ideas for complex interactions. Just as it would be difficult to measure while you cut, the challenge persists for designers to create concepts and explore ideas as they’re attempting to communicate those ideas. Sketching allows us to understand our own ideas, refine them and plan for the best way to communicate them thoroughly.

[contextualinquiry]

When you click and hold the send button in Gmail then mouse off while still holding the click, the send button turns red letting you know if you release your mail will be not send.