UX STRAT 2013 Workshop Reviews

Redesigning Business Culture and Thinking Around the Customer

Reviewer: Pabini Gabriel-Petit

Presenter: Tim Loo

When I read on the UX STRAT site that Tim Loo, who is shown in Figure 12, was going to discuss “the role of the UX strategist, creating organizational change in customer experience, and the challenges and opportunities for the UX strategist in redesigning organizational attitudes and thinking around the customer,” it immediately became clear to me that this was a workshop I should attend—both because I find such discussions fascinating and because these are exactly the sorts of challenges I’m currently facing at work. At the beginning of the workshop, Tim invoked the Chatham House rule, which states that “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” He wanted people to be able to speak freely about their real issues relating to corporate culture without any fear of negative repercussions. The workshop opened with several table-team discussions.

Photo by Pat Lang

At intervals throughout the workshop, Tim played videos that his team at Foolproof have produced to communicate their UX strategies to their clients. These videos had high production values, depicted well-crafted scenarios, were well acted, and clearly communicated the messages that Foolproof wanted to convey to their clients. The workshop audience’s reception to these videos was enthusiastic. Videos showing customer scenarios are a particularly effective means of communicating customers’ painpoints to clients. “These are key journeys, or sets of interactions, that you have with your customers, that are probably totally invisible to you as an organization,” said Tim.

For one of the table-team discussions, Tim asked participants the question: “What are the behaviors and painpoints of an organization without a UX strategy?” While the discussions at my table were interesting, I became much more engaged when Tim delivered the first chapter of his presentation, “Defining UX Strategy.”

Tim’s passion for his subject is evident, his Aussie accent is charming, and he quickly drew his audience into a dialogue on matters that are of strategic importance to all UX professionals and the businesses who employ them. In fact, we became so engaged in these dialogues that Tim skipped over many of the table-team exercises that he had planned. The spontaneous discussions that transpired evolved much more organically, and many in the audience shared their personal challenges and triumphs.

Among the many emerging flavors of UX strategy, this is Foolproof’s definition:

user experience strategy—“A long-term vision, roadmap, and KPIs to align every customer touchpoint with your brand position and business strategy.”

Tim presented several slides that elaborated on Foolproof’s Experience Strategy Framework, concluding with that shown in Figure 13. A UX roadmap is a path to achieving the business vision, while KPIs provide a means of measuring the success of that vision.

In Figure 14, Tim summarized his thoughts on design planning versus UX strategy.

Tim asked, “What does your organization measure?” Revenues or the value that the business creates?

To kick off Chapter 2 of his presentation, “Engaging with Sponsors & Stakeholders,” Tim asked the table teams to discuss these questions:

• Who are potential owners for UX strategy in an organization?
• What other important stakeholders might need to be engaged?
• What are challenges of engaging with this audience?

Some of the challenges included a lack of time for UX design, a lack of knowledge about UX, an overemphasis on data, design discussions being driven by opinion, and a lack of empathy with customers. Tim spoke about how “effective stakeholder engagement and communication focus on stakeholder needs,” and advocated the use of storytelling to communicate personas’ painpoints in a way that is emotionally engaging and linked to business outcomes.

Chapter 3 of Tim’s presentation covered “Understanding & Communicating the Current State.” In providing an example of a story about painpoints, Tim related an amusing personal story in photos about arriving at the airport in Hong Kong, discovering that he was completely out of cash, and the difficulties that he experienced in using an automated teller machine when he hadn’t notified his bank in advance that he would be traveling.

A story is an effective way of communicating the painpoints that you derive from customer interviews or complaint logs, as is data visualization by mapping customer and business painpoints and holistic customer experiences. As Tim noted, “Long, detailed reports on UX do not get read by senior stakeholders. Tools [that] quickly and memorably boil down experience both functionally and emotionally can help.”

Customer journey maps show points of value creation and value leakage. As Tim said, “The key thing is putting people in the stories.” Tim suggested that we create experience videos to tell customer stories and communicate their painpoints effectively, after developing storyboards and planning our narrative. “Choose stories that seem important to a company—for example, that have high relevance or high impact,” advised Tim. “A meaningful painpoint describes the emotion someone would feel and what causes that emotion.”

Tim spoke about the importance of aligning UX strategy with business strategy. There may be a lack of alignment around customer painpoints, so collaboration through workshops is key. Ask:

• “Do we understand what the customer painpoints are?
• “Do we have a common view of what’s wrong?
• “What are the things that we agree are the priorities?

“Alignment is a key outcome of UX strategy,” said Tim. “Creating alignment and agreement is as important as presenting the evidence.”

In Chapter 4 of his presentation, Tim spoke about “Creating Experience Design Principles.” He said, “Experience design principles describe the core values of the user experience of a product or a service. They provide direction and intent for how we want customers to feel about the experience. Experience design principles should be aspirational and inspiring. They are stretch targets and measures for transforming your business and the customer experience.” Figure 15 summarizes the qualities of good experience design principles.

Once you’ve created good design principles, you can “always access the right information when [you] need it.” Use qualitative measures to determine whether your design principles are good. Design principles let us “make our expertise available to customers.” Therefore, the most effective means of communicating design principles is digital.

The key takeaway from Chapter 5, “Ideation & Envisioning the Future Experience,” was Tim’s advice to “create new future stories for customers showing outcomes—not outputs or specific features—based on the design principles.” One way of communicating desired outcomes visually is to overlay statements that a company would like customers to make—because they’ve achieved their business goals—on a photo of a customer.

In Chapter 6, “Creating a Delivery Roadmap,” Tim’s message was to use “future customer stories to identify enablers and drive the delivery and technology roadmap.” “List out and prioritize your objectives.” “You need data around business value and cost feasibility.” “UX strategies are delivered by teams, not by individuals.”

In Chapter 7, “Creating UX Key Performance Indicators,” Tim exhorted us to “make the organization measure and report on things [that] are meaningful for business and the customer.” “All these plans get thrown out once the numbers come back.” “How are we going to measure success? Do customer surveys. We have to measure the results of ideation and envisioning. Constantly measure.”

You can create a virtuous cycle by changing thinking—which creates empathy with colleagues and customers—and changing behavior—which makes stakeholders collaborate and share the customer perspective.

This was a great workshop that was thoroughly enjoyable, engaging, and edifying. Plus, as you can see from the example slides from Tim’s deck, his presentation was beautifully put together and provided a stellar example of effective visual communication.

Lean UX + UX Strat

Reviewer: Margie Coles

Presenter: Josh Seiden

The UX STRAT site described this workshop presented by Josh Seiden, shown in Figure 16, as a way to delve hands on into the Lean UX approach. Having just finished two books on Lean Startup and Lean UX—and plowing through a third as I arrived at the conference—I was really ready to dive into a workshop that would offer an opportunity for nuanced discussions of lessons learned and best practices. What I found, instead, was a workshop whose number of participants was of such a magnitude that it really made such discussions or the promise of guidance from Josh during the hands-on exercises a stretch of the imagination. I guess everyone else attending the Monday workshops was as interested in participating in a dialogue about Lean UX as I was.

No matter. I’m a fan of Lean Startup and Lean UX—and for that reason, I was happy to be in the workshop despite the confusion that arose during some of the hands-on activities.

Josh presented a quick overview of development methodologies. As UX professionals, we have needed to adjust to the realities of continuous change—starting with waterfall, then replacing that with agile; the birth of agile UX, which led to the obvious need to bring business into the cross-disciplinary team mix; then the birth of Lean Startup, and from that, Lean UX. Figure 17 provides an overview of the evolution of Lean UX.

Since Product Management, or Marketing, plays a critical role on our cross-functional teams, “the question becomes one of how to bring Marketing into the Lean fold,” Josh told us. “They seem to think they have it all figured out—just do another user survey, right?” This echoed a common sentiment that we encountered throughout the conference: our need—and perhaps frustrated attempts—to successfully connect with the Marketing mindset and move toward unified, outcome-focused strategies.

Josh presented an interesting video from Nordstrom Innovation Lab, where the team’s problem-to-solution delivery cycle is time-boxed in 1-week iterations. The team worked in public—in Nordstrom’s flagship downtown-Seattle store—to create a new iPad app whose goal was to increase sales in the sunglasses department. In the end, the team realized, in a big way, the importance of staying connected with its users over time. While it wasn’t entirely clear which outcome they were measuring, the “small batch size of work effort” ensured that the consequences of failure were very small. Josh’s point? Increase the size of the batch, and the risk of failure escalates.

Next, Josh covered the basic Lean UX cycle, which is a never-ending process of learning, as illustrated in Figure 18. Hypothesis creation and testing are at the heart of the Lean methodology, and this cycle of continuous hypothesis and validation exists within a culture that supports continuous learning.

Looking at the Lean UX cycle in more detail, here are the activities that Lean UX comprises:

• “State your desired outcomes.” Instead of creating a list of features and requirements, state the desired outcomes in terms of a repeatable business model.
• “Declare your assumptions.” To move from guessing to learning, do a 360-degree sweep, be specific, and test your riskiest assumptions first. View risk in terms of high project impact, plus the assumptions that are least understood by the team.
• “Hypothesize: write the test first.” Determine the riskiest assumption that you are going to test—an assumption that will influence outcomes both in terms of the business and the customer.
• “Design an experiment.” Write down your assumptions like this: “We believe [assumption]. We’ll know this is true when we see [qualitative and/or quantitative outcome].” Alternatively, your assumptions can follow this model: “We believe that by doing [this] for [these people], we will achieve [this outcome]. We will know this is true when we see [this market feedback].”
• “Make an MVP,” or Minimum Viable Product. This is the smallest thing you can create to test your hypothesis. It need not be real software.
• “Get out of the building,” or GOOB. This simply means spending time with real people who are engaging with your MVP or simply observing what they do or how they work.
• “Team synthesis.”  As a team, review findings that either prove or disprove your hypothesis.
• Then, repeat.

Josh reviewed the key principles of Lean teams. Here are a few important principles that I noted:

• small, cross-functional teams—These teams should typically be co-located to better build relationships.
• small-batch flows—Building and testing in small batches reduces risks.
• bias toward making—Build something small that you can use to test a hypothesis.
• continuous learning—By learning, you’ll have ample opportunities for course-corrections and, thereby, reduce your overall risk.
• focus on outcomes rather than outputs—Outputs are easier to measure, but ultimately less meaningful for the business and its customers.

Once Josh had provided this overview of Lean Startup and Lean UX, the hands-on portion of the workshop ensued. As I previously mentioned, the workshop’s large audience perhaps exceeded a size that would have been conducive to creating a fruitful context for team-based, interactive learning. My workgroup comprised six individuals. Before the day was over, I feared that we might drown in our sea of sticky notes. Sadly, the progression of charts that we created with our colorful swatches of paper caused me more confusion rather than leading to any new insights.

But Josh’s presentation “UX Strategy and Processes,” during the main conference, on Tuesday, totally regained my interest, venturing beyond what Lean UX is to insightful considerations for UX strategy. Stay tuned… 

Thanks to Margie Coles and Pat Lang for contributing their photos.