Things a Marketer Needs to Know About User-Experience Strategy

Think of the experience of drinking espresso. Rich flavor that delivers an immediate catalyzing effect in a rapid-fire format. Here we present the mission-critical, key concepts of user-experience strategy in espresso format—fast, concentrated, immediately useful. 

While we can’t solve all of the business challenges, the knowledge presented in this chapter explains the key concepts that underlie the development of successful user experiences. Customer-experience owners can use this framework as a checklist at the outset of their strategic-planning process and as a basis for organizing brainstorming sessions to drive a Web strategy. Like the espresso, it’s fast and concentrated. 

The best way to approach the strategic-planning process for user experience is as a business case—with a plan for how the experience will satisfy the market and drive profitability, and a strong plan for execution. With a strong strategy, relevant value proposition, and robust execution, the likelihood of success is increased. Such an approach should address the following strategic issues:

·         The user experience is the vehicle for building relationships online and transacting commerce to maximize profitability.

·         Retention is a measure of success, which is critically dependent on the user experience.

·         Usability directly impacts retention and experience engagement.

·         Opportunity cost is correlated to the user experience, a competitive advantage on the web.

·         Next-generation user experiences will deliver more personalized, more useful, and proactive experiences to a wider range of customers.

·         Marketing is now responsible for revenue and will own the user experience. This situation will demand new skills for architecting, driving the process, and measuring success.

·         Social media influences must be accounted for as a component that raises and lowers the expectations and norms of the online shopper. 

Capture What Customers Expect in the User Experience

When it comes to creating a “best practices” prototyping culture . . . the rules of the game appear to be shifting. To succeed today, the prototype can’t be seen as the property of the engineers, designers, or marketers—it has to be seen and treated as community property. And the most important member of that community must be the customer.

Successful user experiences begin with a clear vision of the end in mind: What will the ultimate user value in the experience? What are the qualitative aspects of the experience that will delight customers? What are the quantitative aspects that will answer their needs and allow them to complete tasks in the most efficient manner? How can the user experience answer needs such as “I want the experience to be as easy as finding the books I want on Amazon.com” and enable efficiencies like “I need to see the price in one click; I can’t waste my time looking for it”?

The best way to gather this kind of rich data is to ask your customers what they think. Showing customers a prototype of a user experience will help you to gauge their reaction and gather critical input early in the process, which will enable you to narrow the scope of possibilities and evolve the design toward the optimal solution. Well managed time spent early in the design process to validate a prototype with customers is money well spent if it prevents a $1 million investment (loss) in an unusable user experience. It can also flag critical gaps between customers’ expectations and what the user experience will deliver and help you to correct the course quickly. 

Studies show that most products are successful if the voice of the user is incorporated early in the process and, as evidenced by the successful lightning-fast development process of Microsoft’s Windows 8 a working version has been placed in the hands of customers at the earliest possible opportunity This factor will continue to be a critical one in the success of more transactional and ubiquitous user experiences—experiences that customers cannot necessarily see and feel. Validation of such experiences must be done early in the design process to ensure usability and usefulness.

Narrowing Design Choices Earlier

A successful customer model includes prioritization of what customers expect in the experience. For example, it should address the commonly expressed need: “More than anything I want to be able to see the people I know and interact with them at my convienance and lesuire. Get updates about their lives and share mines on my cellphone and home computer alike.” I would imagine this was a huge obstacle to over-come for the designers and developers of Facebook as the site took a stake in the world of personal and business communications. 

Early decisions about critical aspects of navigation—users demanding “user-centric” navigation and the ability to navigate from any screen—were probably not surprises to the design team until customers asked for these elements of the experience in reaction to the first versions they saw. This kind of rapid feedback process can help narrow the options early in the design process and help ensure that the user experience is satisfying the target audience. 

Coupled with pre-existing customer knowledge and quantitative data such as transaction history, these inputs should form the basis of an accurate model of how the user experience needs to be designed to ensure that it delivers the right experience. 

Leveraging pre-existing models of behavior in the common social environments, I’m sure helped to  establish the model of behavior for the online experience. How to design the next-generation online interactions? Clearly define customers’ goals and behaviors while they engage in business and other more personal activities in the real world. Find out what they value highly in experiential terms for the online counterpart to say hanging out in the student union or by the water cooler experience. Observe their daily behavior in their natural environments to determine their goals and tasks. These observations of usage and behavior should influence the design of the experience, and form the core components around which revenue-generating opportunities will be woven.

Sharing this customer intelligence rapidly throughout the enterprise and among different owner groups helps the process keep moving. Circulate the customer model to owner groups such as product development, marketing, and the technology team for their feedback and reactions. Often, after a day of brainstorming, rough notes and sketches can be posted to the corporate intranet for sharing and feedback among the different groups. 

Iterations of prototypes should be posted on the intranet as well, to be shared among the different groups who are involved. A prototype provides a visual talking piece, which is especially useful for owners who won’t actively participate unless they can see how the experience is going to impact them. It helps catalyze discussion among these distinct groups, accelerating the process.

Carefully capturing the expectations of customers in the planning stages can help keep a user experience from compromising the business strategy. An example of such an impediment is a site that delivers a rich experience on one platform but, as the business evolves to include new delivery channels, fails to deliver equivalence of experience on another. 

Currently, industry is struggling with quality issues relating to evolving experiences from the Web to handheld and wireless devices: Surfing the Web using a cell phone is a painful experience, as evidenced by the numerous key modes needed to just input the “http:” part of a URL. So, before planning a cell phone user experience, it’s important to look at whether the experience will deliver enough value to the user on the device to satisfy the business goals. However, with the advancements in mobile application technology today and all the available data to overcome these obstacles, I would never recommend a serious business to neglect planning for mobile. 

The entire team must keep the customer’s environment in mind as the experience evolves, and the team must understand the revenue implications for compromising on delivery. The ultimate owner of the experience—the product manager or marketing manager—must drive the process through to execution with the target audience always in mind. An eCommerce site architecture for creating community among fans of a broadcast television show looked great when demonstrated on the T1 line at the major ad agency that designed the site. But somewhere in the process, the target user’s profile got lost. When asked about the platform and connection of the target users—in this case women and girls ages 14 to 36—the answer, that the speed of the typical receiving modem was 56 kilobytes per second, meant the creative team had to go back to the drawing board. They were not happy. Otherwise, trying to deliver the design-intensive information over the connection would have been like pushing a Thanksgiving turkey through a straw—an experience that no consumer would relish.

 

Link Usability and Profitability: Metrics for Success and Ease of Use

The success measures for business:

• Revenue
• Retention

The success measures for end users:

• Ease of use in completing transactions and satisfying goals
• A solution to their frustration

Empowered customers want an experience that delivers value—and on their terms. Success means achieving goals and completing tasks with a minimum of pain, a maximum of efficiency. Site owners measure success in terms of channel efficiency, on the return on investment. So while business goals guide the development of site experiences, the success metrics for the experience measure totally different aspects such as ease of use and degree of engagement.

This mismatch of measurements of success must change so that what constitutes success for customers aligns with what constitutes success for the business. Nowadays, nonfinancial metrics are suspect. Ultimately, will the only metrics that matter be the financial ones that all companies were held to before the Internet economy? Probably, but they’ll probably now reflect more process than pure financial results. Most likely there will be both process and results metrics, and the former will be as important as the latter.

Business success can mean a range of things: It can mean monetizing the user experience so that it delivers optimal revenue opportunity. It can mean a relationship-furthering experience, which leads to an enhanced relationship for both prospects and customers. Prospects feel compelled to contact the organization and ask for more information. Customers engage at a deeper level, by signing up for added services for their pre-existing account. The success metrics for the user experience are connected to the business metrics, yet they demand a new set of softer metrics that reflect the quality of relationships. 

New metrics will be needed to map usability to profitability. Customer-centric firms such as Emode.com, a firm that has over 9 million registered users who visit the site to take personality tests, continually measure the aspects of the user experience that impact their business. Emode.com does so using 16 different variables—and they do it every week. As part of this model, they measure what people are doing, determine where in the site they are going, and analyze users’ responses to new features as they are added. This kind of rigorous model and measurement is the only way to know if the user experience is doing what it’s supposed to do. 

Gathering and analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data about users’ experience—from the first site visit throughout the entire customer life cycle—will become the means for proving that user experiences are delivering utility and value. Some of this data gathering is done by hand—analyzing log files and tracking user activities and behaviors—but new tools to automate and enhance the measurement and analysis are now becoming available. 

Measuring success of the user experience is a combination of science and art. It involves using the hard metrics (such as revenue and number of new accounts) and the soft ones (such as conversion rate, look-to-buy ratios, degree of engagement, or the number of unique visitors). “The value is in the aggregation of several methods of measurement,” says usability consultant Chauncey Wilson, “and you need to convert them to ROI. At one firm we noticed 20 percent of the usability problems came from error messages, so we redesigned the error system and were able to reduce it by 30 percent. To do this required us to analyze the monthly expenditures on error handling—reviewing the usage logs and monthly budgets from technical support—and we had to convert this into ROI. It’s really difficult to do this.” He notes that the process takes time: “After setting up the metrics it can take months to have a few answers.” Analysis demands an ongoing process of measuring and adjusting the experience to continue delivering the best value, the best experience, on an ongoing basis. 

A way to think about ROI for different user-experience options is to develop a subjective measure—a scale such as 0 (Very Bad) to 5 (Excellent)—that ranks both the quantifiable and the subjective benefits of each option (Figure 2-1). For example, if a company wants to develop an enhanced user experience for a new ecommerce site, it must compare the two options (version A in column 1 and version B in column 2) for specific benefits—such as increasing the number of accounts. Comparing the aggregate rankings and assessing costs offer a way to determine the best design approach