TibetanTailor

When a company uses the products that it makes it is called “eating one’s own dog food.” The intent was a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products.  MillerCoors has done that a step farther. They have a “bar” located in the HQ in Chicago. Yesterday I was invited their with Michael Leis to meet up with Rob Saker who works there.

It was a great space. The bar is located right next to a couple conference rooms. There were numerous tables for small gatherings and conversations. What a great way to experience what you sell. I kept thinking that that is why I love working above a Sears Department Store. It offers a similar benefit. Having easy access to “experience” your brand. Now the MillerCoors bar isn’t for the public so the employees aren’t shouldering up to regular customers, but its a great idea and speaks to knowing your products and services on an personal level.

References

Video of The MillerCoors HQ Bar

Here is a an example of a setting analysis I did this for the myford experience.

The main structure of the setting analysis is based on Space, Actors, and Activities.  Spaces have Places and Objects. Actors have Feelings and Goals. Activities have Act, can coalesce into events, and different kinds of time.

One of the most important implications for User Experience Designers is the Actors and their feelings.  Too often we just put in the goals of actors.  The two feelings area does get into branding and sometimes interaction design or information architecture doesn’t yet have the tools to go there, but diagrams like this help step in that direction.

Now a setting isn’t an experience.  And the truth of the matter is that we can’t create experiences, but we can arrange settings in which people have experiences.

References

How to do a setting analysis

myford navigation OR Global Navigation for World Domination

Your job title is User Experience Architect, or User Experience Designer, or Information Architect. One question on your mind is probably when will I get to be a senior? What do I have to do to get promoted to a senior?

Getting promoted or moving companies into a new position as a senior is a big step. It means that you are experienced, skilled, and a leader.

A Senior User Experience Architect

• More than 5 years experience in UXA
• Can lead a small temporary team, including external people
• Well experienced with all the skills of UX
• They have the skills and experience to support almost every one of the UX values. There might be one or two they are learning.
• They teach and inspire others in supporting the 8 UX values.

Before you start on your journey to be a senior you need to make sure you have mastered all inner circle things. You need to then start to master the 4 things below.

Knowing the large – This means knowing what you competitors are up to (both direct and indirect) as well as how your customers are changing.  Even larger context issues such as twitter, something that just 2 years ago was just starting which is now a major force.

Discussing the different – This is the respectful voice that allows the senior to build experiences that are owned by all stakeholders. It is a difficult role, but we need to facilitate the conversation. These conversations can include external stakeholders and executive clients.

Dreaming the better – This is the ability to generate great ideas, collect them, and have them at the ready for other projects or later phases.  These is related to service design, product roadmaps, white-papers, business modeling, vision prototyping, and conceptualizing.

Measuring the impact – Seniors need to be able to predict the impact of our different recommendations.  This means watching the different metrics. Omniture, Customer Satisfaction, Search Logs, etc.

Here are the details for the Manager – User Experience Research position.

User Experience Research Lab Manager
Business eCommerce – ALL
State/City IL Chicago – Downtown
Job Description Sears Holdings is seeking an experienced Research Lab Manager to join our User Experience Team.
The Manager is responsible for managing the research team. The ideal candidate should be able to creatively envision, evaluate, and contribute to the design of successful user experiences.

The Research Lab Manager will receive and review all requests to use the Usability Lab. The Lab Manager will decide if the request fits within the guidelines of our policy and can be accommodated in the schedule. If a conflict arises, the Lab Manager will involve the User Experience Managers to resolve the issue. The Lab Manager will also be responsible for ensuring that appropriate training and use of the Lab occurs.

Additionally, the Lab Manager will determine what type of support the requestor will need, such as a usability test facilitator, notetaker(s) and recruitment of users for testing. The Lab Manager is responsible for the Testing Room and the Observation Room as well as the hardware and software support them.

As an integral part of the User Experience team you will work closely with multidisciplinary teams, including user experience architects, product managers, visual designers, and front-end developers to conduct the research and support development of features to be studied through surveys, card sorts, task-based findability and goal-oriented studies, as well as rich interactive prototype testing.

Your responsibilities will include making informed recommendations on design strategies, leveraging best practices, accurately estimating and tracking your time across multiple simultaneous projects, as well as working with the User Experience Management Team to develop and document methodologies, standards and best practices for the lab.

Currently, we are interested in candidates with 5+ years of demonstrable experience and who have had a background involving large scale web initiatives or software. The ideal candidate will have exceptional communication and analytical skills, be well versed in user-centered design research practices, and familiar with the day-to-day operations of running the lab.

**Please note – this is not a design position. However, the Lab Manager is expected to participate and collaborate with the User Experience Architecture team on recommended design solutions.
Country United States
Responsibilities/Skills/Experience Requirements Qualifications:

• Have an attention to detail and a passion for improving the user experience.
• Experience conducting user research and competitive analysis using industry standard practices.
• The User Experience Research Manager will also be responsible for managing our in-house usability testing lab, including lab equipment, software, policies and procedures.
• Be comfortable working in a fast-paced environment. Familiarity with iterative design-agile environment a plus.
• Work closely with user experience managers, product managers, business analysts, user experience architects, visual designers, and front-end developers to understand business requirements, user goals and objectives, in order to define tactical solutions that improve conversion rate and enhance the customer experience.
• Continue to improve our research process for testing product changes and gathering user feedback throughout the product development lifecycle.
• Advise and guide project teams in planning user research activities that inform and support product development; help teams determine best research methodology to use in order to meet business objectives.

Key skills:

• Experience managing test recruiting, partnering with vendors to recruit external test candidates and recruiting external/internal users when necessary.
• Help product teams plan and execute external user-research and usability tests with research vendors as needed.
• Supporting and conducting usability studies both in the lab and remote sessions– preparing test plans, recruiting participants, facilitating test sessions, collecting and analyzing data, and preparing reports.
• Developing, prioritizing, and documenting recommendations.
• Tracking usability issues from discovery through resolution.
• Presenting usability results to various levels of the organization.
• Experience with Morae.
• Experience with Tobii a plus.
• Experience with survey construction and online surveys a plus.
• Experience with Omniture Web Analytics a plus.

Requirements:

• Direct experience managing an in-house testing lab and basic A/V knowledge.
• 5+ years experience designing and conducting user-centered design research and usability testing for e-commerce and/or software.
• Ability to work collaboratively on multi-disciplinary teams.
• Excellent communication skills (verbal and written).
• Manages time well, and is very organized.
• Ability to manage overlapping assignments.
• Works well with others.
• Adept at handling change and shifting priorities
Requisition ID 74634BR
Preferred Minimum Education Bachelors Level Degree
Years Experience 5 – 10 Years Experience
Travel Requirements On Occasion (Less than 5%)

A recenter article in the NYTimes talked about how abstract thoughts prompt literal physical responses.

This is the basic idea behind of the magic of bodystorming. Natalie writes “participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized . . . ” and this is exactly what happens with bodystorming.

But because bodystorming is done as a group with more than one person, there is “communication” that occurs at the level of body language, kinestics, gesturing and promemics. It is a very high context communication. And people talk about the death of powerpoint because it is a low context communication method.

The result is not just faster and better collaboration with participants, but faster and better communication to your clients. And if those clients are VC funders, this is the fastest way to get your ideas across in a rich and high context way.

Reference
“Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally” By Natalie Angier
Feb 1, 2010, NYTimes

Yes, I am looking for a Manager, User Experience Research.

Forget that title – I need a Manager of “How we are doing”

This is more than just usability testing.

I like questions. I’d expect this person to be good at asking questions and even better at figuring out ways to answer those questions.

The most basic question that I need this person to ask and answer is “How are we doing?”

Now, I know the financial numbers and every hour I get my reports as to what is selling and what people are searching for. But I need this person to be about to ask “How are we doing?” from an experience point of view. Listening to our current customers of course. But also seeing if those customers and their lives are changes and how we might need to change with them in order to stay relevant. Even looking for new types of customers that we might be able to earn the right to serve.

I want this new manager to be able to lead their team forward in any way necessary to answer that driving question. If it is focus groups, usability tests, remote interviews, card sorts, ethnographic-like observation, surveys, in-store intercepts,
Did we get better over the last month?
What do our users want?
What is the job that our experience needs to do for them?

This person should make it easier for me and my managers to earn their bonus, get promoted because we will know how the experience is doing and how it has changed since last month, last quarter, last year.

Is this too much to ask? Am I just desiring too much insight? Yes, I would like a combination of a mind-reader, cultural anthropologist, private investigator, time-motion studier, analyst and talk-show host.

Here are all the nitty gritty details

Yesterday. the WSJ wrote about Burger King and how they were successful for the last couple of years focusing in on their “super fans” but lately Burger King has been falling in sales, perhaps the article suggests because BK ignored mothers and kids while the “super-fans” changed over time.

From a UX point of view – how long do we want to do our research impacts to last? How long do we expect our customer segments or personas, like “super fans,” to last?

How long do we go until we need to go back and re-examine? What is the half-life of our recommendations?

In a proposal to a client last year (successful won too) – I wrote up three different variant of the proposals. The more expensive option had a longer half-life. More research allowed finding “deeper-patterns” and the deeper patterns have a slower rate of change and thus opportunity build on those would last longer too. The straightforward logic was if you invest more time in research looking deeper, you will find deeper patterns, the insights and the opportunities that come out of those will then last longer and your payback will last longer. It is a better amortization schedule of research over a longer quantum of ROI.

For most of the work I am involved in and the usual research phases I see it possible to have good ROI for 8-12 months out. WIth more involved research, a few of the projects I can see about 18-24 months. My goal is to push for 5 years of impact. But that is quite a stretch goal.

What is your intended quantum of impact? Have you ever had a conversation with your clients about how a deeper research dive can result in longer ROI. Yes, it complicates the ROI calculations, but I think it is more honest and takes the conversation up a level to where we should be talking. When you are doing a project for a client, do you tell them up front how long you think they can wait until they need to look again at the customers, the experience, and the match between those two. If BK would have had and followed such advice it is possible they might not have found themselves in the situation they are in.

Reference
“As Sales Drop, Burger King Draws Critics for Courting “Super Fans”” by Julie Jargon
Wall Street Journal, Monday, February 1, 2010, Marketplace section, Page B1 & B2

Happy customers are the secret to success.  By putting out good products and services that people like and are willing to pay for is the most direct route to corporate success. Here are two diagrams that show that visually.

In the above diagram the customer experience starts off with the “?” circle which in the potential customer has an experience and becomes either a “happy” customer or a “sad” customer. After that initial experience the customer can continue being a happy or sad customer, or they can switch from “happy” to “sad” or vice-versa.  Then they can be a ex-customer, though one who talks about their experiences with your products/services.  Of course it is possible that the ex-customer can once again become a happy or sad customer.

In the above diagram. You can see three types of value/feedback from the customer that go down the left side..  You can earn there money right now in exchange for a product or service. They also have money in their wallet which is the potential for you to earn their money in the future. And lastly, they can talk/write about their experience with your product/service, aka word of mouth. Across the top are the 4 stages of customer experience. These related to the previous diagram, a “potential” customer, a “happy” customer, a “sad” customer, and an “ex-“customer.

Lastly, above is another diagram that also visually explains “Happy Customers.” This was done by Livia Labate. It is about happy customers leading to happy employees and how that creates a virtuous cycle that creates profit for the organization making the shareholders happy.

References

For more about how focusing on your customers, making and keeping them happy by providing things/services they value see my post on the Age of Customer Capitalism

See also How to measure the happiness of customers

Reflections on “The Age of Customer Capitalism” by Roger Martin

A great article on the different kinds of capitalism. 1932 with managerial capitalism, 1976 with shareholder capitalism. And now the third era: customer-driven capitalism which aims to maximize customer satisfaction.

He writes about P&G and J&J being customer focused and doing better than GE and Coca-Cola.

Martin says Drucker had it right “that the primary purpose of a business is to acquire and keep customers.”
The biggest implication for user experience professionals when Martin calls for “determining what your customers value and focusing on always pleasing them . . . ”

He concludes with “if more companies made customers the top priority, the quality of corporate decision making would improve because thinking about the customer forces you to focus on improving your operations and the products and services you provide, rather than on spinning lines to shareholders.”

References
“The Age of Customer Capitalism” by Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review January-February 2010. It was brought to my attention by Michael Simborg.

See my HAPPY CUSTOMER diagram about the customer experience life-cycle and how it “earns” money for the business.