Making the User Feel Comfortable

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Just read a great article about critical interviewing.

One of the key points Kate Lawrence makes is that we need to make users comfortable.

I had a boss who insisted that my job as a usability researcher was to “serve it up cold” when conducting usability tests. “Be professional, yet impersonal,” he advised me, “and you’ll get solid results.” I suppose I did get solid results—if by solid you mean responses that are stale and forced. My test participants were never comfortable because I did nothing to help them feel at ease. Sure, I was professional, but professional without being warm and conversational.

 

Helping people to get comfortable in an interview, whether in a lab setting or in their own home is extremely important. Just being warm and genuine with people can go a long way and in the article she makes several points about this. One of the things she suggests that was totally new to me was this: Give the reward to the participant up front. This can help participants feel less like they might lose the reward if they don’t give what they think are the “right” answers.

One of the other ways that I’ve found works well is using a recording device or set-up that minimizes the feeling of being recorded. I record audio for interviews and love my handy-dandy Livescribe pen. It fades into the background almost immediately (though it’s a shame that, as a writing instrument it sucks so immensely). Using a large and obvious set-up can make some people nervous. When screen recording I prefer to use built-in webcams to pick up people’s faces. This is perhaps the only time I’ve cursed Apple for using a system-state indicator (a small LED) when the camera is on in their laptops. If at all possible I do not use one-way mirrors, but rather a hidden camera to get more stakeholders in on the action in real-time.

When possible I’d also recommend interviewing people more than once. During the second interview people are often much more comfortable. The other thing that is highly recommended I mentioned in my last post: Observe AND Ask. The person may have already been able to acclimate to you being around if you’ve talked to them briefly, broken the ice, and then spent time together while you observe them. The interview then can be much more comfortable.

Anyone else have any brilliant ideas on interviewing or how to help people feel comfortable?

 

Stop listening to your customers–The power of observe + ask

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I just read a really great article in Harvard Business Review by Steve Martin (not that Steve Martin) titled, Stop Listening to Your Customers. I got this from one of my colleagues here at Philips Laurens Massee via our internal social network.

The point is that people often report is that we’re not always very good at talking about causality of what we do or predicting whether we will do something in the future. From the article:

Not only are we pretty poor at recognizing what will influence our future behavior, we’re not that great at recognizing what persuaded us after the event either. In one well-known study conducted at a busy New York City subway station, after counting the percentage of commuters who donated to a street musician as they walked past him, researchers made one small change to the situation: Immediately before an approaching commuter reached the musician, another person (who was in on the act) would drop a few coins into the musician’s hat. The result? An eight-fold increase in donations. When interviewed afterwards, those who donated universally failed to attribute their actions to the fact they had seen someone else give money first, preferring instead to provide alternate (and incorrect) justification for their actions. “I liked the song he was playing”; “I’m a generous person”; and “I felt sorry for the guy.”

What I have to say is that

if all we do is ask & listen then we’re getting very poor data. Asking, especially survey work needs to be tempered and based on observation. Observation and getting people involved with actually buying, unpacking, and using our products and then asking them questions will yield yield much better data that can be used in powerful ways. This is not a quant vs. qual thing, it’s as my colleague Laurens says, the right tools for the right things.

In general organization have become over reliant on what is perceived to be cheap, easy to gather, often quantitative measures. This has to stop.

One last topic that we need to address is who does the studies. The article recommends small field trials. Who should conduct these? I suggest the use of outside agencies to help stage them and do recruiting as needed, but we actually conduct them by people inside the organizatoin, by someone who is on the team that will use the results, or someone trained to do them who is in-house who can then share them with the team. This way the knowledge of how to do them and the accumulated knowledge from study to study builds up inside the organization and not outside of it.

This is the power of both observing and asking. Doing just one or the other will not give you the best data.

What ration of observe to ask is appropriate though…. what do you think?

Putting the UX in our work

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UX is useless if the work never gets done, or WORSE, it gets done but not used or implemented. A few have talked about this, but there is clearly some discussion about this in the UX community (Those links represent most of the ones I know about). Last year I wrote a book chapter (forthcoming) and a position paper for a workshop asking the question: Since UX is so good at studying one group of people (users), why don’t we turn those same skills to studying the people we need to communicate and work with? We’re so good at empathy, let’s turn that to our colleagues. But how do we do this?

In my PhD dissertation, currently just over 1/2 written, I talk about how to communicate across organizational boundaries, what I call boundary communication. This short post is about the three basic things one needs to build up in order to communicate well: Common Language, Common Meaning, and Common Interest Common Language means you are using the same words, i.e. not too technical or if from the other side, not too business-oriented. Of course mutual education of what your specialized terms mean can also work wonders. When this is lacking those who don’t know the language are aware of it, often painfully, but this doesn’t mean that people always speak up about it. It takes straight forward honesty and humility to overcome this. Common Meaning is when you’re using the same words and you actually mean the same thing. I think we’ve all been in a situation where it’s become obvious after a while that while we’re both using the same word, but we mean different things. When this happens you may not know you have a problem until something blows up in your face. Common Interest is, in my opinion, the trickiest of the three. Certainly the most complex. Common interest is the personal and organizational interest, politics, and will to do something. This takes negotiations and frank conversations, and very importantly establishing the reason (the why), the goal (the deliverables), and the how (the timeline & methods) of the project. Below is one of my first attempts to visualize some of these principles Enhancing Boundary Communications I believe that many people are approaching some or many of the pieces of this, and of course are adding more ingredients, principles, and processes to this.
Yesterday I had a nice long talk with Galen Murdoch and Brian Ware of Veracity Solutions (after my fabulous cousin, Allia DeAngelis, connected me to them).
Their work with what they’re calling Blendsourcing (See the Forbes article on it), which mixes people, principles, and processes, focuses on establishing common interests among the team early in the project in order to really make things go. The extremely interesting thing about their approach is that it’s a blended approach, meaning the team is partly inside people from the company, and partly outside people from Veracity and their community of contractors (and I assume possibly still others too). So they make a high-performing team out of a diverse set of people from different organizations. Many organizations have a hard enough time doing that internally that the fact that Veracity is doing it across external organizational boundaries is amazing.

One thing that Galen emphasized several times in our conversation is that “there’s nothing new here.” I’ve gotten that about my own work, and in one way it’s true: there are no really new ideas here, BUT as my friend Christian Briggs has said to me on many occasions  ideas are cheap, execution is hard. Really being able to operationalize or make ideas on how to make great teams actionable is more important and difficult than ideas about it. The one thing though, that makes what Galen is doing though is the idea of apprenticeship. I.e. you learn how to do the same kinds things by doing, and not just alone, but doing it together with a master (or at least someone who has more experience than you). This means leaving time for reflection and double-loop learning, which I hope we all now know is one of the things that drives organizational change.
I could say much more about “the science of blending” and blendsourcing, and I will in future posts, so stay tuned.

I’m going to be continuing to collect more examples of other people and orgs that are using similar principles to the ones in my own research, this is one of the first.

 

Why UX and CX have to relate to organizational change (EX)

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User eXperience is all about studying people (usually qualitatively) in order to make better interfaces and experiences. You understand people then make, making is a key activity. This is focused on use of a product or service, along with interaction, engagement, entertainment, communication, and customization of experiences.

Customer eXperience is all about studying people (usually quantitatively) in order to tell others to take certain actions and change strategy across channels, media, touchpoints etc.  This is focused on the sale of products along with marketing, advertising, engagement

I think you can probably see the overlap there. It’s fairly significant in many ways.

In my last post I talked about the three lenses of innovation and this is further thought on this subject.

The thing is in order to create a truly great experience for users/customers it can’t just be your job as a CX professional or UX designer, marketer or whatever title you may happen to have. In order to create truly great experiences everyone in the company needs to be focused on the needs of the customer. Another way of saying this is you need everyone in a company to be able to articulate how what they are doing benefits the customer as well as the organization. This means engaged, happy, productive employees. Bored, disengaged, unhappy employees suck the life out the team, organization, and customer should they interact with them.

This last ingredient to the puzzle is what some people call employee engagement. I think though that it has to be more than just engagement. YES, we need engagement, but we need to look at it in a more holistic way. We need to design all the internal tools, mechanisms, reporting, processes, policies etc to be focused on the employee. We need to understand our teammates and employees as well as we understand our user and customers. I call this Employee eXperience (EX).

Employee eXperience though is a tricky thing. It’s not the same as just giving employees everything they want without regard to anything or anyone else. It’s not about usability in the same way most interactions demand, because people want to be challenged (in the right ways of course).

UX, CX, & EX First Draft

So what characterizes a good Employee eXperience? I liken this to education, student-centered education. Students almost always want a degree, but just handing them the degree without the work is ridiculous from any perspective. So teachers need to engage with students in a way that produces a state of flow, or is highly meaningful to their goals in life, or has big ideas and horizon-expanding vision. Some of the best classes I’ve ever taken were the most difficult (except that calculus class).

Those who are designing or wanting to improve Employee eXperience need to engage their employees in similar ways. Fitting people to jobs, or even better making jobs flexible so they fit the people can greatly enhance a state of flow, as well has product the desire to excel and improve. As Daniel Pink and showed us and psychology has been saying for some time now, we need to be doing something meaningful. Contrary to the many economic theories that include a rational (enlightened) self-interest and maximizing efficiencies etc, people are not REALLY motivated by making the quarterly numbers. Our organizations need to have a purpose well beyond profit.

EX takes these things into mind, and of course unless you have a start-up, this means organizational change. Not just another re-org, not another team building exercise, but genuine interactions among people who treat each other as people.

Where have you seen examples of this? What have your experiences been?

 

The Three lenses of innovation, CX & UX

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This is a graphic I used for a poster two years ago with the addition of the words Customer  Experience and User Experience.

What I’m communicating here are the three lenses through we we can see in order to create a new product, service or experience and bring it to market (innovation). I was trying to better understand the difference between the way that user-centered designers or UXers study people and how Marketers study people. There are clear differences but it goes well beyond just the quant/qual gap and so I tried to articulate those here, based not only on my own experience but also on a study I conducted in 2009 about how people understand innovation.

As I’ve began, in the last year to study customer experience I’ve been impressed by how very complementary UX & CX is. Then I read this very interesting article on Johnny Holland  by Greg Laugero about CX & UX and it got me thinking more about this distinction. I’ve been writing my dissertation so, I haven’t devoted much time towards it right now, but I still wanted to get this out there.

If we think about UX & CX in terms of the experience itself, not all the methods and history kind of stuff, UX is about the usage of the product itself, and you can include the set-up and maintenance of that product. It’s between the users and the product. The CX though focuses on the the interactions that person has with the company and the product. While both CX and UX approach branding, it tends to be in distinctly different ways. UX branding focuses on what elements in the product/UI/experience can be designed to be in harmony with the brand. Of course some people who do that will also advise companies on creating the brand itself, but very often it’s about giving that brand life in the making of an experience. CX tends to be less about the making of the brand experience, but defining it and then bringing it about via advertising. So while there is making, it’s about the making of the brand experience as it relates to impressions, advertisements, and the brand as it stands by itself, somewhat independent from the products themselves.

I don’t believe that the main message of this graphic is anything new, but it puts it all together in one place, and allows us to think about it in a different way. In particular I think this relates to the work of Tim Brown and design thinking (from his book Change by design, see a short bit on that from the post where I borrowed this image).

So what’s next you ask? Well I’ll talk more about how important the customer experience is as it relates to product and technical support which or course is directly related to how those interfacing with people treat them. So it can’t just be marketing/CX or Design/UX that is in concerned with people’s experiences, but it has to be of concern with the entire company, every employee.