• Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter: I came by a conference video of Aarron Walter the other day that was pretty well done. If you haven’t read his book yet and want to get up to speed on Designing for Emotion I recommend it.
• I’m always a big fan of User Focus and in their April newsletter I found it a wonderful reminder of the practical level of knowledge to expect from general users. My favorite quote from this issue is “There’s an old rule in marketing that says you don’t tell people about features, you tell them about benefits” because it helped me to write some more usable copy for a project I’m working on.
• Speaking of copy. Another great article I recently came by is Writing Microcopy by Joshua Porter. A nice reminder that the little details even in copy can make a big difference in the overall conversation a user has with your website or application.
• I’ve also been exploring inspiration websites like Behance, Dribble and Pinterest for inspiration with a project I’m working on. I’m loving the way Behance shows portfolio work in a vertical scrolling image list similar to an infographic. I think this is a great way to market not only the product, but the UX process behind it. Dribble is fantastic for inspiration, but I found their “bucket” adding feature a bit kludgy compared to Pinterest. I’ve officially become addicted to Pinterest, aside from my normal personal boards I’ve now added 8 or so UX boards and counting like UX – General, UX – Wires and Prototypes, and UX – Design Inspiration.
• One bit of inspiration I found that helped with a drag and drop interaction specification and some edit interactions was Bill Scott’s Designing for Interesting Moments presentation on Slideshare. I particularly enjoyed slides 40, and 43 where he brings light to methods of detailing interaction specifications and interface discoverability.
• Finally, I’m seriously digging the new Facebook feature that adds emotions, and what you are doing. I did a similar design with social emotions for a client a couple years ago, unfortunately it never went to market Alas, so cool to see the idea taken on by such a major player. Hopefully this will help kick off the trend of designing more emotion into our applications and websites.

As always, if you want to be totally overwhelmed with UX happenings in the industry feel free to check out my UX feed board on Netvibes.

Alto Inbox

If you’re anything like me, you have a Gmail box that your almost afraid to open because of the masses of emails you’ll need to dig through. I use the star prioritization and folders, but somehow it doesn’t seem to help other than to flag things I need to try to respond to sooner rather than later, or for quick finding like a flight reservation that is upcoming. If you’re like me you also associate AOL with a dying company and the sound of a dial-up internet connection.

So when I saw the title of this article “AOL May Have Invented Email’s Next UI Paradigm” you can imagine my curiosity was peaked. I began reading, and I can say I am seriously impressed and recommend reading the article to get a good perspective on it’s functionality.

Below is a quick write up of some other popular websites and applications that I feel helped trend this new direction of design. To be fair, I have requested a beta but have yet to have the chance to play with it, so I’m judging my evaluation on screen shots and the linked article above. Still, it seems like the perfect amalgamation of Pinterest, IA Writer, and a real world sorting paradigm which is what has me excited about the direction.

Pinterest

Pinterest

This is no doubt my favorite online time suck. It is a tool that visually pins links, recipes, photos, articles, etc. from the web to a board so that you can save and sort through things visually. It allows you to choose the image from the source that you would like to associate with the pin, and organize the pins into an array of self-created boards. Referencing notes from an IA summit talk I attended: “There are more brain resources devoted to vision than to any other sense.”, and “Picture superiority effect: We have a better memory for pictures than for words”. I think it’s not surprising why visual pin boards are seeing such success as a way of organizing information and why Alto has chosen to use visual boards as a way to help organize the piles of mail they allow you to create.

IA Writer

IA Writer

IA Writer is one of my favorite iPad tools for writing because the toolbars, navigation, etc. get out of the way. It allows you to focus on what you are trying to do, and minimizes the cognitive load of the interface to support your concentration. While Alto hasn’t taken things to an extreme with your email, there is an obvious attempt to reduce the chrome per say compared to most current tools like Gmail. A lot of trends seem to be moving in this direction, which is something I’m looking forward to, websites and applications that get out of the way, and support the goals at hand.

Real World Mental Models

Finally, I’m really excited to play with the way Alto is using piles. From what I have read this idea came from real world research into the way that people sort their snail mail. I believe it, because I do exactly what they said they found people doing. I walk in the house with a load of mail in my arms and immediately being making piles. Things to read right now, bills, friends/family, ads/coupons, and trash. I also can relate the research to another IA summit talk I attended about clutter and the types of piles people create on their desks, and how the relationship of piles in space corresponds to their relative importance and faster organization. I am very excited to import my Gmail and see what these piles can do for me.

I am definitely excited about the direction that Alto seems to be going, and can’t wait to get my invite to play in the beta.

Without distinction in the industry, I worry that the mastery level of both specialties runs the risk of becoming lost to a single intertwined role that doesn’t explore either side as extensively as possible, resulting in reduced value across the board. While I strongly encourage cross training and knowledge of all aspects of the field I also believe it is important to find your niche and I believe both IA and IxD are entirely different specialties worth exploring.

A Google search of the difference between two roles didn’t provide much in the way of confidence for the respect of the distinctions, therefore I have decided to take a moment to try and illustrate my opinion on the differences, with the hope of sparking a conversation around these unique but related roles.

Information Architecture

When I think Information Architecture I think organization, literally the architecture of information. I think of Peter Morville’s seminal book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

…chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, and searching; and a new chapter on thesauri, controlled vocabularies and metadata will help you understand the interconnectedness of these systems. The authors have expanded the methodology chapters to include a more interdisciplinary collection of tools and techniques. They’ve also complemented the top-down strategies of the first edition with bottom-up approaches that enable distributed, emergent solutions. - Book Description

An Information Architect is like the Librarian for your website. Just as you could enter any library anywhere in the world and with relative ease find the exact information you are looking for, the IA is responsible for making this possible in interactive software and websites. It’s about finding useful and relevant information quickly as well as maintaining that information over time. This includes things like your sitemap, the structure of your content, the hierarchy of your content paths, the inventory of each of your pages, the taxonomy and thesaurus, and the metadata that describes it all.

Interaction Design

When I think IxD I think behavior. How does a user interact with the interface to carry out their goal? What control should be used, how would a user manipulate it, and how will the interface react to that manipulation? Do the interactions take into account proper affordances, constraints, mappings, and feedback? When thinking about interaction design I think about books like Robert Hoekman’s Designing the Obvious.

Designing the Obvious explores the character traits of great Web applications and uses them as guiding principles of application design so the end result of every project instills customer satisfaction and loyalty. These principles include building only whats necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity. – Book Description

Interaction designers are like industrial designers in the virtual world. They are concerned with improving the user experience through an interface that provides users with the tools necessary to accomplish their goals in a simple and intuitive way. Related artifacts are task flows, wireframes, prototypes, pattern libraries, annotations, storyboards, scenarios, etc.

Scratching the Surface

While this post just begins to scratch the surface I hope that it starts the conversation in a way that provides meaningful examples of the distinctions between he two specialties. While IxD and IA are only a part of creating a solid user experience I find the other specialties, such as research, visual design, etc to be better defined in the industry and therefore did not see the need to expand on them here. What skill sets do you have, and how do you define your role in the industry?

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is a simple way to compare two or more versions of a page with slight changes to see which one attracts more attention to the area you are focusing on (higher conversions). Using a service like Optimizely you can load in the different designs you want to compare, and people who come to your website will randomly be presented with one of your versions. Their activity is tracked and then you can view a report showing the differences.

Sidelinesapp.com from 5% to 55%

Vinay Kuruvila’s talks on his Tumblr page about how they used A/B testing to increase their page conversion from 5% to 55% on Sidelinesapp.com. Some of my favorite parts of this article are in his explanation and analysis of why certain changes resulted in increased conversions.

Graphics

They started their homepage with a screen shot of their product, a pretty common design trend to help provide clarity and set expectations for the user. They even validated the screen shots with others and received positive feedback. However this converted poorly, why? Kuruvila’s analysis is:

…with certain types free consumer apps, simplicity and an eye-catching photo works much better than clearly trying to explain your product with screenshots.

The screen shots didn’t help to clarify the product because the type of product they had leaned heavily on conversational interactions and sharing behaviors that required users to interact with it to fully get it. So they tried something different, showing a picture next to their signup instead of the product screen shot. They choose a picture that would resonate emotionally with their audience, one that would probably have been a topic of high conversation in the website, a Super Bowl photo that would be highly identifiable with the target sports audience. This improved their conversions from 5% to 17%. Next they decided to expand on the photo idea, and choose a sports photo as a large background image, placing their signup prominently in the middle of the screen with the tagline. This increased their conversions to 25%.

Content

Now that they had imagery pretty locked down it was time to focus on their text. They looked for a solution that would help identify what their value proposition was, while being succinct and vague enough to still peak curiosity. By changing text from a focus on sharing, to a focus on consuming information about sports they further improved their conversions from 25% to 40%.  Kuruvila noted that most users start as consumers, then once they become more involved begin to become contributors. Therefore, this change in messaging better targeted new user signup.

Final Details

Some final changes to allow users to use their email if they weren’t comfortable with the Facebook or Twitter login, and some research on their biggest demographic groups provided the final set of changes landing them at a conversion rate of 55%.

37Signals.com

Highrise Signup Page

One of my favorite A/B articles to send around for the past few years was done by 37Signals on their headline for their Highrise signup page. They tested five different headline and subhead combinations to measure the number of conversions.

Their original design headline focused on the call to action “Start a Highrise Account” with the subhead “Pay as you go. 30-day free trial on all account. No hidden fees.”  The other versions they tested all shared a very similar theme but changed the focus to emphasizing things such as testimonials, additional features, and immediacy.

The winner, put the focus on what the user gets out of it “30-day Free Trial on All Accounts” and used the subhead to emphasize the ease and quickness of the signup process and instruct on next steps “Sign-up takes less than 60 seconds. Pick a plan to get started!” This version did 30% better than their original.

Highrise Home Page

In going back to their blog Signals vs. Noise to re-read the article for this post, I found myself clicking around a bit and found that 37Signals has since posted some additional A/B testing articles on the changes to their Highrise home page with some fascinating results emerging between long form design and big photos of smiling customers.

Have a Good Example?

I would love to hear about any good articles you may have come across that I can add to my collection!

Field Research for User Experience

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The first thing I did at UPA this year was a fantastic workshop by Danielle Cooley. I don’t think it could have gotten much better. Of course I can’t complain after getting a limo ride to Zappos headquarters to do some onsite contextual inquiry work… did I mention we got free lunch too!

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Danielle had lots of great tips about conducting successful research as well as nice comparisons between field research and other research methods.

Keynote: Myths and Truths About Leadership and Developing Your Personal Leadership

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The keynote was done by Ronald E. Riggio and focused on the key point that good leaders are made. He noted two types of leadership, personal and team leadership. To be a good leader communication skills and ethics are paramount. You must be motivated, have a model to guide you and be able to do a clear self-analysis. Riggio proposed a four stage model that starts with the ability to inspire, this is followed by being a positive role model and being able to connect and communicate. Finally you must be able to challenge people in a positive way. I especially enjoyed his comment that leaders must also be good followers.

Why games like Farmville grab attention, shape interactions and drive sustained behavior.

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Being a bit of a psych junkie I particularly enjoyed this talk by Kath Straub. She talked about engagement and persuasion in popular facebook games.  There are three main principles she noted, first the ability to beg for stuff, second the ability to brag, and finally recognition of tiny victories. Although she specifically called out those principles the presentation was filled with many more valuable nuggets from short and long term goals to engagement and rewards. A good takeaway she gave at the end was that just because gaming principles are found in popular games doesn’t mean that they have to be made into a game to be successfully applied in business.

Remote Fieldwork at AutoTrader.com

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This was a insightful case study of how AutoTrader.com does remote research by Emily Schroeder. She made some excellent points about how to carry out remote contextual inquiry. Her general outline for the session is a remote screen connection that can be recorded, an intro, an interview, then open observation led with a prompt like “show me what you did to…”, this is followed by closing thanks. Its an easy, convenient, and cheap way to get open-ended observations from anyone on an interface.

Reading Body Language during User Testing

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Brooke Baldwin gave this presentation which focused on gestures, movements and mannerisms. Reading body language is really just about listening and watching the things that we naturally do, its just a matter of spotting the clusters of behaviors. Baldwin gave a couple good tips for facilitators, such as chair position, and watching your own body language. She noted the popular TV show Lie to Me which successfully demonstrated many principles of reading body language and recommended the TED talk How to Spot a Liar by Pamela Meyer.

Segmentation: The Shadowy Side of Persona Development

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This was a interesting presentation by David Siegel about the data we use to create personas. He showed some very interesting examples about the ways we interpret data based on the dimensions in which we are viewing it. For example a picture of a chicken on screen is a chicken, but add it with other animals and it become a bird, put it on a plate and it’s dinner. “Changing the vantage point changes the information.” He recommends thinking about the dimensions in which the data is valuable more than thinking about how the data creates a persona.

10 Tips for Better Surveys

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This was a nice recap of the basics for good survey design by Caroline Jarrett. I think the sketchnotes wrap it up pretty well. I’m looking forward to her book on surveys that will be coming out soon: Surveys that Work.

Putting Personas to Work

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While this was a intro level talk by Carol Smith it was a great review of things to remember when creating and advocating for personas. She started by reviewing some of the things that should be included in personas, and tips for managing them after the fact. The meat of the talk was in techniques for adoption within the company through multiple sharing channels such as a persona character book and email addresses for the persona.

Living Social Dying Digital

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I really enjoyed this presentation by Suzanne Long, partly for its uniqueness, and partly because it really is very relevant and often overlooked. It was in interesting inspection of the way that different social media sites handle accounts if a user passes away. She also discussed some of the issues. For example if you have a friend that passes and their Facebook page isn’t memorialized, you may still see suggestions to play games like Words with Friends with them. This is a very real issue with roughly 19k Facebook users passing everyday. Long finished the talk with some examples of ideas people are talking about for dealing with this type of thing in the future, such as Social Account Executors.

How to Lead Multinational Research Studies

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This was an insightful talk by Jakob Biesterfeldt. He had some good tips such as starting international research with your lead county instead of trying to tackle multiple countries at once, more countries = more money. He also suggested using consultancies in your target country as they will be familiar with the cultural nuances required to adequately carry out the research. Other useful reminders included being mindful of currency conversions, going there yourself, and keeping track of local holidays and cultural work breaks.

Closing Keynote: Leadership in Practice

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The closing keynote by Dennis Wixon was a nice presentation about 13 principles that provide a foundation for good leadership. The principles can be grouped into three categories: foundations, techniques, and adaptations.

Designing with the Mind in Mind

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Friday I attended one final workshop by Jeff Johnson, the author of a book with the same name. I very much enjoyed this talk as it got into some of the human factors principles that provide the foundations for the design principles we use in our work. While I had familiarity with some of it, there was a lot of new information and it was all presented with fascinating examples. He started with perception and then moved into vision. He talked briefly about memory and focus before ending with some interesting numbers on our “brain clock rates”.

What is a sketchnote?

Before I begin with my sketchnotes it might help to describe the method. Sketchnotes are a form of visual note taking where the author creates notes in the form of text and doodles as a presentation is being given. To paraphrase an article from Core 77, it’s a from of rapid vizualization that forces you to pay closer attention to the content, while simultaniously vizualizing images that will capture the idea. According to Wikipedia, doodling like this can improve your recall of the content by up to 29% while helping you to pay attention and stay focused.

You can see some great sketchnotes at Core 77′s Sketchnote Channel, at Sketchnote Army, or in a book like Sketchnotes 2011 by Eva-Lotta Lamm

Midwest UX Sketchnotes

Let’s Sketchnote!

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This was a workshop by Veronica Erb, Binaebi Akah, and Charlene McBride. At the beginning of the workshop we watched a video called Step Outside Your Comfort Zone and Study Yourself Failing that we used to try our hand at sketchnoting for the first time. It was a really great video about learning new things by practicing until we can get to a point of auto-pilot or the “autonomous” stage. Then how to push beyond that to achieve greatness by not becoming complacent at this stage.

We then got lessons in organizing our page, trying to focus on the number of points for the talk and basic sketching tips and tricks.

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Once we were done learning some pointers we got to try a second video, unfortunately this was definitely a more complicated video and I had a little trouble with it. This was a TED talk by Manuel Lima about complexity. RSA Animate has done a fantastic job with a visual production of a similar talk that Lima did which puts my sketchnotes to shame, but I did find it fun that I used some of the same graphical representations that they did.

Designing for Social Innovation

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This workshop was originally titled Design Mobile Apps for Behavior Change and was presented by Haig Armen. It had some excellent exercises for example our group was tasked with making a mobile app for a hipster that involves nature. Having a somewhat of a target audience was nice, but not having a need was challenging. We came up with an organic farming app where local growers and local shoppers can connect with out a middle man like whole foods. We envisioned it having a Yelp like feature where you can rate farmers, upload pictures of crops, and share on social sites. The talk covered principles by many well know experts in the field like B.J. Fogg as well as discussing the  parts of the Business Model Generation Canvas as shown at BusinessModelGeneration.com.

Keynote: Ubiquitous Information Architecture: A Framework for Cross-Channel Strategy

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The keynote was given by Peter Morville and was pretty much a solid summary of the workshop I attended by him at the IA Summit. He started by introducing the term intertwingled and discussing how we define Information Architecture. He then moved into cross-channel design, and how you can’t build on top of an existing foundation, you have to consider channels and your architecture together. This was followed by a couple examples of good cross-channel design and a note that what Steve Jobs was in charge of accomplishing made him the best IA ever. He wrapped up the talk with some tips and things to remember when building a cross-channel communication strategy.

A Brief History of New Media Art

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This was a fascinating talk by Matt Nish-Lapidus. Much of what he showed I had never seen as far as modern art. The presentation began with a brief rundown of how technology has impacted art for example with the photograph. Then explained that art isn’t about the artifact, it’s about time and space in which the art exists. He showed a couple examples of Fluxus art of the 60′s followed by Post/Transhumanism. He then moved further into the 80′s with art involving tv’s, music, static, and robots. Finally we took a quick peak into how technology is affecting design today with augmented reality.

Content Hoarding

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This was a fun 20 minute talk by Matthew Grocki. He started with a story about the clutter in his house and then related physical hoarding to digital hoarding. Just because it isn’t in the psychical space doesn’t mean we aren’t becoming seriously overwhelmed by content and hoarding it. In fact, digital hoarding could almost be considered worse. He recommends organizing and pruning content regularly.

Information Overload is Opportunity

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Karl Fast presented on this topic which was a nice follow up to Matthew Grocki’s presentation. The key takeaway for me was his comment that information is cheap, but understanding is expensive and that is where UX becomes valuable. He also had two great pictures of Steve Jobs that really brought the point home. In the first picture you see Jobs young, sitting cross legged in a serene open space that is a clean and crisp as the devices he would later design. But, this is not reality Fast points out then showing the second image of Job’s office later in life that appears to be in the basement of his home with cluttered bookshelves and stacks of stuff all over the floor.

Bring the Future to Life

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This talk was done by Colette Vardeman at Lextant and focused on a generative research model. By anchoring people in today first, and then getting them to think about the future and giving them a way to express their thoughts you can dig into the ideas they have. Then you just need to analyze and visualize it. Throughout the talk she showed a lot of examples of final designs by Lextant that I really enjoyed.

Keynote: Post Digital Experiences

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We had a day 2 keynote by Nathan Martin CEO of Deeplocal that I really enjoyed. It wasn’t specific to user experience as much as digital experience in marketing, but it was fascinating and very inspiring. I particularly respected the amount of skill he and his colleges had as well as their ability to prototype and deliver amazing experience in very short time frames. He showed a lot of videos of things his team has done, so I used those for my sketchnotes.

Upselling UX – Pixels to Strategy

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This was a 20 minute presentation by James Laing that talked about strategy. Strategy and design, he says, are both relative. First you have to understand what’s going on by asking a chain of why’s, then you can work to identify the weak links. With this information you can begin to help shape a stronger strategy for moving forward. He also talked about the need for building trust through demonstrated value.

Mapping the Experience

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This was a good talk by Chris Risdon that focused on user/customer touchpoints. To make a good experience or journey map you have to first to the customer research. Then focus on the touchpoints that express what the user is thinking, feeling and doing in a particular time and place across channels. It’s important to ensure stakeholders are involved in the process and that the final artifact compels action for change and improvement.

Designing for Disagreement

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This was an interesting talk by Boon Sheridan and my last sketchnote of the conference (hand cramp, I’m used to typing). I really enjoyed his approach of designing for disagreement in the sense that it was a cute way to say start early and iterate. You have to put your ideas on paper, and show them to people in order to get the feedback that is critical for shared understanding. He suggests showing the mock-up and saying “read through these ideas and tell me what you disagree with”. He also had a great suggestion of making workbooks for everyone that attends a review with copies of all of the designs being shown so that they can write their own notes in the respective areas throughout the meeting and you can keep them as a reference for the next round.

I was bowled over by the simple, clean layouts; full bleed photography and stunning use of typography. My eye was naturally drawn into the page and guided to all the key areas of information through the perfect use of visual hierarchy. Allowing profile pictures to fill the entire screen makes for an emotionally engaging experience. Let’s face it, first impressions are everything at this point of the dating game and eHarmony does a great job of eliminating any potential distractions and facilitating those awkward introductions.

If I like what I see, I simply click the big arrow to the right of the pages and I get to see a little bit more each time, gradually building anticipation but, only if I initiate the conversation. Although I’ve been out of the dating scene for a long, long, long time, I feel that eHarmony really gets to the core of how we behave in this context and creates an experience that feels natural. By visually getting the all-important questions out of the way first by visually displaying information icons for smoking and drinking habits and whether you have children or want children. The pages are perfectly balanced with just the right visual treatment, placement and amount of information. This is what I call the ‘sweet spot’! The designers at eHarmony have done a fantastic job creating an elegant and engaging user experience but the real kudos should go towards the people who made this happen. It is tough strike a balance between great creative, business goals and technology but eHarmony have cracked it.

About the Author

Christie currently works as a User Experience Researcher and has a history of consulting with award winning brands in the US and London such as Nike, Ogilvy and Adobe.  She has a keen eye for good design and enjoys a good pair of shoes. She can be found on Twitter @BlondeOrange.

The Necessity of Complexity

Complexity is necessary. In order to have mega systems and scientific breakthroughs, everything can’t be simple. We need to allow people to get from novice to master. The iPhone is often touted for it’s simplicity, but when you think about the engineering that went into the product when it lead the market with the technology, that was not simple. Complexity is everywhere, it is natural and beautiful.

Why We Fear the Complex

We fear complexity because of the cognitive overload and chaos. We prefer quick easy thinking, however slow thinking has been shown to be more accurate.

Dimensions of Complexity

There are three dimensions of complexity each with specific attributes.

• The Human Dimension – Skills, Education, Language, Culture
• Volume & Quantity – Data, Objects, Tasks, Rules
• Change over Time – User Skills, User Behavior, Product Focus, Product Features

Complex Applications

Things like Logistics, Remote Monitoring, Database Management, Accounting, Analytics, Finance, 3D Modeling, and Engineering are very complex.

Complexity Toolkit: Heuristics & Solutions

• Prioritize Tasks – Use things like weighting, rankings, segmentation and grouping.
• Patterns – Use patterns and consistency. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.  Research whats currently being done.
• Data Visualizations – Tell a story and make it beautiful. Interesting visualizations, graphs, charts, etc. Data is rich and full of insight, show that visually.
• Roles – Match the UI to the roles people play. People use software differently, don’t reveal complexities of roles that don’t matter to the current user.
• Learn  - Learn and adapt based on  the user. Personalized experiences.
• Reveal – Expose complexity when necessary. The cockpit of a jet should be complex.
• Zoom - Re-frame what the user is looking at. Org Chars, Maps, Document Views. What level of data exposure is needed, and how can they move in and out.
• Social – Social and emotive design can mitigate complexity and provide motivation. Competition, Leader Boards, Rankings, Sharing, Cooperation.
• No UI – The simplest UI is no UI, what can be done by the back end, or through another medium?

Recommended Reading

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Slides

In order to get from the problem to the solution multiple decisions need to be made. Those decisions are the how and the what and they create agreement and clarity.

There is unhealthy conflict, and healthy conflict. Healthy conflict is important in fostering creativity and encourages momentum while making decisions. Conflict is necessary to create a shared understanding.

The Conflict Resolution Model

The conflict resolution model Dan presents has three parts, each mutually impacting:

• Situation – A scenario involving conflict between two or more people. Ex. Purpose, Plan, Performance
• Patterns – Behaviors that enable people to resolve conflict. Ex. Empathize, Involve, Redirect, Reframe
• Traits – Aspects of your personality that describe your preferences and style of working. Ex. Style, Agenda, Circumstances, Knowledge

Situations/Traits

• How I perceive a situation.
• Whether I aggravate a situation.
• Whether I’m prone to create a situation.

Traits/Patterns

• Which patterns suit me best.
• How I apply patterns.

Patterns/Situations

• How patterns address situations.
• How situations benefit from patterns.

Using the Model

For each situation many patterns can be used to foster healthy conflict and create a shared understanding. To get better at understanding and applying the right patterns to situations Dan suggests his game Surviving Design Projects.

Slides

Customers Leave Because of Bad Service

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) study is a 3 year study that surveyed over 75,000 customers across multiple mediums and industries worldwide. They found that 89/100 of the customer service heads they surveyed said their primary strategy was to go above and beyond. Zappos is an example of a type of company that is known well for their customer service efforts. However the study also found that this extra effort made only a little difference to customer loyalty. 84% of customers surveyed said that their expectations weren’t met with their most recent company interaction.

The study found that while customers primarily stay for a product and partially due to the brand, the main driving factor for customers leaving is poor customer service.

The main reason customers become unsatisfied is because of effort. The more work the customer has to do to get their problem solved, the more likely they will leave. The most typical culprits of effort are repetition and channel switching. Repetition happens when people have to contact customer support over and over for the same issue. Channel switching takes place when the channel the user is trying to use doesn’t support the desired task. An example of this is reaching a department who can’t solve the problem.

Channel switching is a big problem, because departments may be logging calls like this as a success, as the customer is successfully redirected. However, this is really a failure, because the issue still hasn’t been solved, and it causes repetition. This is an example of a company metric versus a consumer metric.

“22% of repeat contacts come from downstream issues related to the original contact, even if the original contact “resolved” the problem.”

Focus on the Right Metrics

Current metrics are identifying the issues. The Customer Effort Score outperforms the Net Promoter Score in predicting behavior. The Customer Effort Score asks:

“How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”

This is measured on a scale of 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort).

Some additional metrics that can be focused on are the number of calls per event, or an audit of every time a customer is told “no” and why. These types of metrics will help identify the customer service problems that cause people to leave.

Summary

Focus your service teams on the unsatisfied customers and reduce their effort. Get rid of repetition and channel switching and zoom out your metrics.

Read Stop trying to delight your customers a full report provided by CEB and featured in the Harvard Business Review.

Slides