UX Strategy Paper Ke Zhang | I544 Experience Design| Spring 2014
The Settings and Challenge ExactTarget is a provider of digital marketing automation and analytics software and services. The new ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub was released in 2010, when the software's user interface was re-done, and serves as the software's primary user interface for managing communications and content through different mediums. ExactTarget had built a powerful and successful product over several years. They collaborated with a UX team to examine their usability issues and help them to implement the product as a whole. This brought a burgeoning period for the company. However, at the end of 2013, the company only hired two UX designers to deal with their user interface and the partnership with the other UX team is coming to an end. Meantime, ExactTarget has been bought by Salesforce, facing a personnel adjustment within and also beyond the company. Therefore, it’s time to establish our own UX department to bring in professionals.
Source: http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/salesforce-exacttarget_616.jpg
What is User Experience? Experience is an ongoing reflection on events. As Forlizzi and Battarbee said, it is a constant stream of self-talk. It “focused on the interactions between people and products, and the experience that results. This includes all aspects of experiencing a product — physical, sensual, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic”. We are continuously in a flow where events and reflection going on alternatively. Similarly, Russon noted that “Experience is not a two-stage process in which we first get data and then construct an interpretation. On the contrary, it is only as already Shaped by our interpretive orientation that our experience ever begins.” Event
reflection
Event
reflection
Event
Event
These events, mainly refer to user-product interaction, are temporal, with a definite beginning and end. What makes this experience stand out from the endless and integrated stream of experience as an experience as John Dewey defined is the quality of interaction per se, which means what is perceived and felt by the users decides whether the product is a good one and moreover whether it is worth for them investing on. Users know do not necessarily know clearly what they want, it is our responsibility to dig the aspiration out through professional consulting. However, there is one thing they know well and there is no other way to address for them--a constant and momentary feeling of pleasure and pain in various intensities from a first person perspective. Consequently, a moment of feeling will have a decisive influence on whether to keep or abandon this event, in our case, using our product. The importance of UX will be articulated
later. To a more detailed extent, user experience is something users continuously feel during the interaction with our product: “it is so easy to use” versus “it’s depressing to figure out how it works”. . It's comparatively easier to evaluate the external quality of a product, for our main service, the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub. We have strong background of technology, the powerful and flexible functions earned the primary market share for our company. However, the internal quality is subjective and judged by users individually. The momentary reflection keeps changing the judgment during the stream of selftalk, which makes the user experience.
reflection
Source: Jodi Forlizzi and Katja Battarbee. 2004. Understanding experience in interactive systems. In Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (DIS '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 261-268. Russon, John Edward. "Chapter One/Interpretation." Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life. Albany: State U of New York, 2003. N. pag. Print.
Why UX is important? The goal of user experience design is to improve the pleasure and satisfaction during the process of interacting with a product. Why does it need to be esthetic? John Dewey mentioned: "the experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement.” Therefore, this positive feeling would keep our customer using our product. The market share we are holding now achieved the short-term goal of our company. Since the company established, our technology department worked hard to bring the Hub to life. But the needs of users are changing, how to keep pace to the trend and satisfy the users? The answer is a composition of effort from all the departments in the company but one thing has been witnessed during recent years in the industry--establishing user experience department, for our users' benefit and ultimately
for our own. The reason of it is a positive judgment can bring customer loyalty. Earning customers means earning the market. User experience is not only being considerate for the users, but also bring revenue for our company, which ultimately transfers to higher ROI (return on investment). Therefore, to have a grasp of building UX culture, with understanding of our users and also our stakeholders, our product can stand out even in a long-term competition with other companies in the industry. What will happen if we don’t pay enough attention to UX? Take SONY as an example. SONY had been a leader in electronic appliances for decades. Owning a Walkman was such a cool thing to brag about. Their management believed that they know what customers needed and they could create a need and decide for them. However, the arrogance was proved toxic. SONY has been losing market to newer electronic company like
Source: Dewey, John. "Chapter Three/ Having an Experience." Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch, 1934. N. pag. Print
SAMSUNG. It’s cold outside baby. The market is always brutal and we can’t really imagine the needs and experience on behalf of our users.
Where we want to be…
User Experience Strategy
Where we are now… Customer Experience
Where we are now? Take an instant view of what’s happening now both internally and externally benefit for our company. ExactTarget has been leading the email marketing service for years. Back in 2010, the user interface of our main product, ET Marketing Hub, was redesigned in order to keep up the newest design trend, which basically meant the visual effects. "The interface becomes the manifestation of what can be done with the machine.“ We did improved our software aesthetically, but does a better-looking user interface provide our customers with a more delightful using experience? As it’s mentioned before, when a customer uses our product, s/he is experience all aspects of the product - physical, sensual, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic. Apparently, aesthetics is far inadequate. At that time, the tasks for UX team were merely evaluation from a industrial design perspective and always ended up with interface design. Admittedly, a beautiful interface did give our users an I titian good
judgment towards our product in 500ms, technically. Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson argued for the importance of aesthetic experience: “Respondents described their perceptual appreciation in terms of a rather well-defined classical conception of beauty. That is, they characterized the works with which they had had significant encounters in terms of the ways the works reflected or embodied certain traditional principles of order, harmony, balance, and the like.” However, the relationship between users and our product was neglected. That ended up with losing some customers at the end of 2010. From 2011, we partnered with an UX team which help us keep building and experimenting a novel ET Interactive Marketing Hub. Since then, our company has doubled in size and revenue. Our product is consistently praised by experts and customers for its power and usability. As of this writing, “ExactTarget, which counts Microsoft and Groupon among its customers, is projected to
more than double its revenue in the next two years, a higher rate than 93 percent of U.S.-based information technology software companies valued at more than $1 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Indianapolis-based company’s stock is up 25 percent since its initial public offering.” The success is a composition of right business and management choices and increasingly positive feedbacks from our customers. And as we can see here, the reputation we’ve been building and addressing is about a powerful and easy-to-use user experience which differentiates our product from others and makes it in the leading position with impressive revenue. However, the partnership with the UX team will be ending and it’s the urgent time for us to actually develop our own UX department and also to transform to a uxbased company culture.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-24/oracle-s-e-mail-marketing-need-signals-exacttarget-deal.html http://www.designmap.com/case-studies/exacttarget Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Rick Emery Robinson. "Chapter Three/The Major Dimensions." The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. Malibu, CA: J.P. Getty Museum, 1990. N. pag. Print. Janlert, Lars-Erik, and Erik Stolterman. "Faceless Interaction - a Conceptual Examination of the Notion of Interface: Past, Present and Future." N.p., n.d. Web.
Where do we want to be? Initial Vision For our product, ET Marketing Hub should be paid more attention to since it will going to become our core service and the platform for customers to operate. That is, it will be, not necessarily, the main strength to keep our company competitive. Especially the market is increasingly expanding and meantime this pie is going to be divided by even more numbers of companies that have novel conception about product and management. Indeed, we are leading the email automation marketing field currently but being arrogant and bragging about success for the past three years and ignore the changing user needs can be extremely harmful. To avoid a stagnant growth as in the case of SONY and keep or even increase the market share, we need to fundamentally change how we and our coworkers view user experience. Hereby is the UX maturity model (UMM) used to make an assessment of the organization’s capabilities and competencies. So far, our company is at the second stage, barely reaches the third, which means we did invest money on UX design, but UX is not integrated into the company culture. So our initial vision is to build another UX department and make the UX design a part of the product design.
Source: http://johnnyholland.org/wp-content/uploads/UX-maturity1.png
Where do we want to be? Expanded Vision Our long term vision is to make the company driven by UX design and to build an entire future ecosystem for users to step into. It is our responsibility to foresee what our customers want and to anticipate on their needs from a user’s perspective. In contrary to SONY, Apple has been building UX driven culture for years. Apple is known for their innovation of their product at an early age. As time went on they started to focus more on weaving a seamless experience into their products. This leads to a unique ecosystem which makes customers attached to the brand and ultimately increases customer loyalty. “Because of people’s natural tendency to perceive personality in things, they also tend to form relationships with those things based in part on the personalities they perceive.” Customers have the tendency to remember the experience and emotions they had
before and they will take this into account for future products. “Emotions and other affective states like moods, sentiments and personality traits influence every aspect of our interactions with brands, products, and websites (Forlizzi & Battarbee, 2004).” This is the main reason for our company to build an ecosystem, which interact with people through understanding their emotional feedbacks. Ultimately the company will be more stable in the market because the system is more stable than the product. Another vision is design for the future. “Together, we are creating the future of marketing”. It is important to make sure that we design a product that not only suits the needs of the users now, but also suits the needs the users might have in the future.
Source: Trevor van Gorp and Edie Adams. 2012. Design for Emotion (1st ed.). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA Norman, Donald A. "Chapter Six/Emotional Machines." Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic, 2004. N. pag. Print.
How will we get there? Involve UX in general The first step is to set a goal. Creating a better user experience is not a good goal because it is too generic, instead we need to focus on a specific way to enhance the user experience which is design with empathy. It is reported that 2014 will be The Year of Empathy. According to McCarthy and Wright, “Empathy has been used as a defining characteristic of designer-user relationships when design is concerned with user experience.” “From the pragmatist perspective, understanding an other or more specifically, ‘knowing the user’ in their lived and felt life involves understanding what it feels like to be that person, what their situation is like from their own perspective. In short, it involves empathy.” Therefore, empathy is not only a philosophical term as to wear others shoes, but also a powerful tool to dig deep in what is the true anticipation beneath.
“As companies increasingly focus on customer experience in 2014, they will recognize that their organizations lack a deep understanding and appreciation for their customers. It’s not a flaw in the people, just a natural result of an internal focus on day-to-day operations.“ It has been witnessed that the most significant trend is and will be around the blurring of lines between creator and user. “Ben Shneiderman (2002, p. 2) has recently argued that we are entering an era of “new computing”: “The old computing was about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies are those that are in harmony with users’ needs. They must support relationships and activities that enrich the users’ experiences.” Designers have the ability to cross the line easier through empathy and bridge users and product with interactions. “When, for example, one of us
experiences America as "home," this is not because there is some intrinsic property to America that makes it "homey." Rather, what we experience as the character of this object is fundamentally a reflection of our own expectations of security and ease of operation, based upon our memories of, and habituation to, this place.” The home created by designers doesn’t necessarily make it a sweet homey. Instead, what has been experience by the users does. Therefore, involving users in the design process, whether from the very beginning or later on, is becoming a widely adopted technique.
Source: http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2013/12/30/14-customer-experience-trends-for-2014 Russon, John Edward. "Chapter One/Interpretation." Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life. Albany: State U of New York, 2003. N. pag. Print. McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. "Chapters One & Two." Technology as Experience”. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004. N. pag. Print. Wright, Peter, and John McCarthy. "Empathy and experience in HCI." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2008.
How will we get there? Involve UX in products - I Because building a better user experience is too general I will introduce a specific UX criteria that we can adopt during the design process, which is based on the SMART principles. Specific Measurable Actionable Relevant Trackable
The original SMART principles are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based.
These criteria can be applied to the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub by the following examples. • Specific：To integrate all our services to the Hub and enhance the experience of onestop service. • Measurable: In order to encourage customers to explore our other services after they finish their task, we can measure the amount of the time they stay in one page and where they see the most. The reason why it should be measurable will be explained in next page. • Actionable: According to the results, we can take detailed actions to achieve the specific goal. Such as, while waiting for the task to be finished/loading, customers will be
Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/13/the-s-m-a-r-t-user-experience-strategy/
presented with ads and links of our other services. • Relevant: The specific goal should be relevant to the high-level requirements of the project. If the high-level requirement is selling more copies of our apps/software, a goal like to make the payment procedure with less steps may not suitable. • Trackable: We need to track how often a customer clicks on a certain advertisement so we can provide him a targeted advice in order to encourage commitment to the product.
How will we get there?
Source: http://hyperdrivei.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/HUB-view1.jpg
How will we get there? Involve UX in products - II There are some other aspects that should be paid attention to during the design process. Measurement According to Tullis and Albert, “measuring the user experience offers so much more than just simple observation. Metrics add structure to the design and evaluation process, give insight into the findings, and provide information to the decision makers” User experience is subjective but through certain techniques we can measure it to get qualitative and quantitative data. Complexity The other specific goal for the ExactTarget
Interactive Marketing Hub is to make it easy and pleasant to use for customers. That is to decrease the external complexity of the Interactive Marketing Hub. Since it is a highly integrated platform, the internal complexity is decided, which is in fact a good quality. “Complexity is desirable when it serves the purpose of improving security, economy, sustainability, power, range, flexibility, situatedness, and subtlety of function.” Our task is to examine through which way we can use interaction to mediate external and internal complexity.
art of appreciation, criticism is the art of disclosure. Criticism, as Dewey pointed out in Art as Experience, has at is end the re‐education of perception... The task of the critic is to help us to see.” Thus, being rigorously honest to think deep about pros and cons is crucially beneficial.
Critique Similar as customer’s reflection during interaction with product, critique is for designer’s reflection during design process. “If connoisseurship is the
Source: http://www.exacttarget.de/sites/exacttarget/files/styles/half/public/uploads/fuel.png?itok=HokdLrM2 Tullis, Tom, and Bill Albert. "Chapter One." Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2008. N. pag. Print. Janlert, Lars-Erik, and Erik Stolterman. "Complex interaction." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 17.2 (2010): 8. Smith, M. K. (2005) ‘Elliot W. Eisner, connoisseurship, criticism and the art of education’, the encyclopaedia of informal education
Logistics 1. To establish a UX department with clear role definition. Through research I estimate that the UX department should be divided in 4 functional teams which are UX research, design, development and documentation. The roles of each member should be very specific and the tasks should be well divided, however the different teams should be working together closely. It is recommended that the teams ask each other for input on their work. Here is an organogram of how the department is built.
UX Director
UX Department
1
Project Manager
Flexible
• “User research is the process of figuring out how people interpret and use products and services.” • The documentation should follow a standardized template which includes all the diagrams, prototypes, wireframes and process explanation.
UX Researcher
UX Designers
6
UX Developers
10
5
UX Documentation Recorder
1
• Teams should report to the project manager who is responsible for the communication between the different teams. The project manager is also responsible for making the work plan. Source: Gvero, Igor. "Observing the user experience: a practitioner's guide to user research by Elizabeth Goodman, Mike Kuniavsky, and Andrea Moed." ACM SIGSOFT (2013): 35-35.
Software Engineering Notes 38.2
Logistics 2. Work closely with universities and colleges to recruit prospective students. For example attend career fairs. 3. Raise awareness of the importance of UX design within the company. The company should move towards a UX based culture where everyone acknowledges this fundamental change.