Category Archives: design

Your DX Testing Isn’t Done Till it Passes the ‘Buddy’ Test

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Buddy

“Do you think our customers will like the image of the kitten better than the one of the puppy?”

If you think digital experience testing comes down to resolving questions like this, you are missing the bigger picture.  I written before about how we should be designing for a frictionless experience, and testing is a large part of that process.

Testing Means More Than Click Troughs

Test to make sure that your content — text, graphics, video, audio — help drive the overall experience. It doesn’t matter if the kitten gets more hits than the puppy if neither helps the customer progress through the experience to get the information they need. Look at click-through rates and subsequent customer actions.

Check to make sure the graphics are composed and positioned to help the customer on their journey. For instance, shots that guide people’s eyes in the direction of the next call to action generate far more click-throughs than thoughtfully posed shots of smiling models looking straight out of the page.

Refining the digital experience focuses on the user interface as well as content design, but you also need to make sure you understand how they work together.

Test to make sure the page layouts, paths, text and graphics are market and culturally appropriate. Does the experience change based on the level of the customer engagement and where they are in their journey? Is the logged-in experience more personalized than the general ‘guest’ experience? It should be.

Do you have your customer journey mapped out and know which parts of the digital experience map to which steps in that journey?

How about the language you are using? Is your website, mobile app, augmented reality solution, digital signage or whatever you are using to deliver the digital experience littered with jargon, acronyms and industry terms understandable to you and your development team, but meaningless to customers?

Names are important. Think about what you call something. Don’t expect the customer to know the terms you use internally. Pick names that the customer will recognize and use them consistently.

Don’t Take it From the Insiders, Ask Your Buddy

Once you’ve done your final internal testing, and maybe even a focus group or two, I’d suggest you employ the final and best test: the “Buddy” test.

Ask your family and friends to walk through your planned experience design. Make sure whoever does the testing has no knowledge of your industry, your company processes, etc. The more removed they are from your role in designing, testing and delivering digital experiences, the better.

Ask them to do a task a new customer would want to do, like create an account and find some basic information.

It’s amazing how often designers leave out basic information from online interactions because once we become integrated into a particular environment, we get to the stage where we have an almost intuitive baseline of knowledge — knowledge someone outside of the community would not have. Answering “it’s obvious” to any question raised during testing is not acceptable.

If your other friends repeatedly ask the same question about a part of your digital process, that part of your process is broken. You need to fix it. And not in a way that makes it easier for you, but in a way that it makes it easier for the customer to complete their task.

Remember, it doesn’t matter which picture gets more clicks if I can’t find out how your products can help me, how to buy them, or even where you do business or what time someone is available for me to talk to.

Are you Delivering a Sunshine Experience?

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SunriseIt’s amazing how even the brightest ray of sunlight can ruin months of work. Several years ago I was part of an industry team working on developing a set of standards for a defined group of symbols and colors to be used in the way that automotive service information was to delivered. We worked diligently for several months to come up with the right experience. Then we built a prototype and showed it to several service technicians who all liked what we had done.

Then we visited one technician to proudly show of our work, but he didn’t want to meet us in his office. He wanted to use the prototype in a real-life scenario. Outside, next to a big greasy machine! It was all going well until the sun came out from behind a cloud, hit the laptop screen and promptly made everything we had done unreadable; the color palette we had selected washed out and everything looked the same. Back to square one on designing the experience!

I was reminded of this after stopping to get gas on the way into the office yesterday morning. My local gas station has pumps with a nice big digital screen front and center. Once you have selected your gas and started pumping it plays a mix of short TV news and entertainment clips, along with some marketing messaging. Yesterday the rising sun was at just the right angle to make the screen almost unusable for both delivering the step by step instructions for purchasing and pumping gas, and for any of the digital marketing designed to engage and entertain me for the few minutes it took to fill the car. A simple lip across the top of the screen that would provide some shade would have probably fixed the problem.

Recently a friend of mine tweeted that it’s a mistake to only test your marketing content on giant monitors. You should review content on the mobile devices your users will use. Excellent advice, but based on experiences like the ones outlined above I believe that to ensure the sort of customer experience that we believe we are designing and delivering we should also test indoors and outdoors as sun glare and lighting conditions can impact the experience.

And not just the mobile devices either; as the customer experience moves beyond the browser, we should also be thinking about embedded screens in “Internet of Things” connected products, or seat backs, digital signage, or other outdoor static screens. The list is growing and so are the environmental factors that will impact the customer experience.

 

Ditch the FAQs: Design for a Frictionless Experience

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2016-06-October-Making-Sushi

All I wanted was some sushi.

You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to find out if the any of the three sushi restaurants within walking distance of my hotel were actually open.

Their websites were full of text, explaining the ambiance, the chef’s background, even the history of the restaurant (and in one case the historic building that it was located in). The pictures of neatly arranged and presented sushi rolls and specialties looked pretty and further whetted my appetite.

But they still didn’t answer my question, nor did they help me navigate the website to provide the answer to my question — is this restaurant currently open?

FAQs Don’t Make Up for a Poor Site

I eventually found the information I wanted in the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Which got me thinking: If you still have an FAQ page then it means you implicitly acknowledge that you are presenting your customers with a digital experience full of answers and information that no one wants. You are ignoring the one question that will help you optimize your customer journey.

Why do your customers come to your website, or use your mobile app, in the first place? What are they trying to achieve?

I would think for a restaurant the three main reasons that people engage online are to find out location, opening hours and menu options.

So Many Pages, So Little Useful Information

I once worked on a project for a large company whose website was a perfect reflection of its corporate and business unit structure. It had a lot of FAQ pages — each business unit had its own.

Even the employees had a hard time figuring out where to find information.

But analysis showed that 80 percent of the traffic went to the website to look up product specifications, pricing, to buy spare parts or get support. Once we rebuilt the website around making those tasks as easy as possible, traffic, leads and online parts sales revenue increased.

Structure your digital experience around supplying the critical information your customer needs in the easiest way possible, then start to optimize the details through testing.

Your Goal: A Frictionless Digital Experience

Use testing to develop a frictionless experience. Test if the text and graphics you are using help drive the experience. It doesn’t matter if picture A gets more hits than picture B if neither help drive the experience. Look at click-through rates and subsequent customer actions.

If you are using graphics to drive the experience, check to make sure that the graphics are composed and positioned to help the customer on their journey. For instance, shots which guide people’s eyes in the direction of the next call to action generate far more click-throughs than thoughtfully posed shots of smiling models looking straight out of the page.

Test to make sure that the page layouts, paths and text and graphics are market and culturally appropriate. Does the experience change based on the level of the customer engagement and where they are in their journey? Do you have your customer journey mapped out and know which parts of the digital experience map to which steps in that journey?

Remember optimizing through testing is not about A versus B — it’s about removing the friction from the experience. I don’t care if the Dragon Roll looks prettier than the California Roll if I can’t find out when you’re open for business.

 

When customer experience needs to get physical.

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digital_physical_iface

 

It all started with a drip of water. You know that moment when you open the fridge door and feel a drop of water on your hand where you shouldn’t. It didn’t take me long to track where it was coming from, a dislodged pipe.

At least that’s what I thought it was. I managed to reconnect the pipe, but although the trickle of water lessened, it didn’t stop. Whatever was wrong was deeper in the workings of the fridge than I could see or reach.

No problem, the fridge was still under the manufacturer’s warranty. So I headed over to the manufacturer’s website and opened the online form to book a service call. It was all going well until I got to the line that asked for the fridge’s serial number.

It was back to the kitchen where I opened every door, and peered at every surface of the fridge writing down any number I could find; but it turned out none of them was the actual serial number. The serial number that was a required field on the service call form.

I called the customer help desk number, and the lady explained they needed the serial number so they could make sure they had the right information about model number for spare parts, and to check the purchase date and warranty coverage. That all seemed fair enough.

“So where do I find the serial number?” I asked.
“On a sticker on the fridge.”
“And where’s that sticker located on the fridge?”
“Oh, it’s on the back.”
“On the back of the fridge. The back that’s against a wall and enveloped in custom built kitchen cabinets? “
“Yes.”

This experience brought back memories of when I was working in the manufacturing sector. One of the companies I worked for also used the product serial number as the prime data point to identify a piece of equipment when customers needed service or spares.

An analysis of our online service portal showed that 70% of customers got the serial number wrong. They either guessed, or in most cases input the product’s model designation instead (the nice combination of letters and numbers painted on the side in a big bold color and large font).

The actual serial number they needed was on a small metal plate under a cover – but it told you how to find it in the owner’s manual, so there shouldn’t be a problem. Right?

Both are great examples of the disconnect that often happens when companies focus on the digital customer interaction without considering the actual physical product as part the overall experience.

Customer experience is a holistic exercise, and companies need to make it easy to transfer the process, and the data associated with it, from the physical to the digital, and vice-versa.

Think about your car. Need to access the VIN number for any reason, service, DMV registration, insurance etc. it’s right there at the bottom of the windshield where you can easily access it. Need to know the correct pressures to inflate your tires to – just open the car door and look at the stickers on the sill by the door catch.

The motor industry has done an excellent job over the years in standardizing how to provide essential information to the owner/operator in an accessible manner. It’s a lesson that many makers of many other products need to learn

As the internet of things comes to life around us, the boundary between digital and physical is fast disappearing and the customer experience needs to be an essential part of that evolution.

Color me this…

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The following are a few extracts from my latest feature cover article for INTERCOM magazine on Communicating with Color. 

 

My red shoes went viral on the Internet thanks to a photograph taken at the Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs back in February. Over the last couple of years I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with Converse sneakers, and as of today have nine pairs in different colors, usually worn to match whatever shirt or jacket I’m wearing. The red ones always seem to draw comments or, it seems, the occasional photograph.
However my interest in color goes beyond my choice of sartorial footwear, as I’ve long been interested in the use of color as a design element in communications and storytelling.
Color has always been around us, used by both man and nature as a means to communicate.  The bright plumage of a bird, or the striped fur of a Tiger are not an accident, they are an integral part of the way that the animals interact with each other and their surroundings. The same goes for the human species. We have long used color to communicate with each other and as a part of various cultural traditions. So why not use color as part of our technical communications toolbox as well?
….
Of course adding color to your technical communications deliverables isn’t as simple as just picking a few crayons from the box and coloring in between the lines. The use of color takes a lot of thought, and a new set of skills that need to be considered. In fact the color theory knowledge and experience of an individual can make a big impact.   
….
Think about the colors you see around you everyday and how they are used. Red for Stop or Danger. Green for Go etc. Your company probably already has some color standards overseen by the marketing group on how the company colors can be used. Think about how they can be incorporated in to your technical documentation. Even take a look at the colors used in the product you are writing about. How can they be used?

The full article is available in the print edition of the STC INTERCOM magazine, or on-line here.

What Do Stories Look Like?

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Book design guru Chip Kidd discusses how designing books is all about using visual design to convey the story contained within. He also makes some great observations about eBooks.

“Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.” (Chip Kidd)

Technically incompetent or just bad design?

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Last week I suddenly noticed that the Dell laptop I use for certain contracts was no longer picking up my home office wireless network. In fact it was telling me it was connected to an unrecognized public network without internet access. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to disconnect from that network and pick up the wireless.

On Tuesday afternoon I plugged the laptop directly into my ethernet cable and spent several hours disabling, and enabling network adapters, rebooting modems, and frantically googling various scenarios. Most of which told me the culprit was a well known Windows 7 bug related to a rogue ID file that showed up in the Windows Services menu. Except I couldn’t find that file anywhere on my machine. In the end I just reset everything and resigned myself to spending an afternoon on a help desk call.

But first I needed to be on-site at a client’s facility. Thinking the problem might be my home network, I took the laptop along hoping to connect to the client’s wireless – no such luck. I mentioned the problem to several people, and no one had any suggestions.

Then about 5 minutes before I decided to call the Help Desk someone who has the same model laptop asked me if the wireless switch was off.

What wireless switch?

Ah that one!!

A switch that in the five month’s I’ve had the laptop have never even noticed.

From a communications perspective a couple of things sprung to mind from this incident.

  • How about putting up a warning dialog on screen at boot up when this switch is switched to the off position (maybe with a location diagram) instead of leaving it to Windows to think it has connected to an untrusted network? Would have saved sveral hours of frustration. BTW when the switch is OFF it displays a red background – but let’s face it, who looks at the side of their laptop on a regular basis?
  • How about making switches a different color, better labeled and slightly more obvious? Most people reading this probably know I’m a big advocate of using symbols to communicate. But make them big enough and clear enough. For a guy of a certain age who wears bifocals, how am I suppose to know what that is?

Oh and who puts a switch that can disable a major feature in a position where it can slide on and off through the process of picking up the lap top and sliding it into a case? Not exactly a well thought out design there.