Optimal Insight | A Magazine For All Things UX, Research And Design

A magazine about user experience

1ST EDITION

JULY 2020

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Hello! from the Editor Welcome to our first-ever UX magazine. Well, it’s technically the first magazine of any kind that we’ve put together, but anyway. Here we are.

What we’ve got here is a collection of the best insight from Optimal Workshop and some of our friends and partners in the industry. We hope it’s all useful and timely, but if it’s not that’s OK! We really want to continue to iterate on this first version and publish additional magazines in the future. As for timelines and what those magazines will look like, at this point we’re not entirely sure. That’s OK too.

We’re in a pretty fortunate position to be able to publish this magazine. In New Zealand, and at Optimal Workshop, we’ve been able to weather the storm of the pandemic and keep working to make our platform of UX tools the best it can be. This position obviously extends to every other part of our organization. We’re here, we’re available to support you and we’ll continue to do so. Enjoy this magazine. Oh, and if you’d like to be part of any future issues – get in touch.

David Renwick Editor / Optimal Workshop

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Message from Andrew

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How to create a UX research plan

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Marketers need to understand the value of UX research

Intro to ResearchOps

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e g a s s Me from w Andre

Twenty twenty... Until recently, saying this number twice usually related to perfect vision, either literally, as in how well you wish you could see, or in terms of understanding events over time (foresight and hindsight). Now, in the midst of a relentlessly strange year, twenty twenty might be re-construed to mean anything goes, as long as itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bizarre, an eye roll, or just somehow worse... Twenty twenty, aye.

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It’s been a rough year so far, that’s for sure. But, perhaps there will eventually be some diamonds born of this pressure? At least, I like to hope so! Some enduring value or beauty we can either learn from or look forward to. Side note: When you find it, please do tell me all about it. At this moment it’s all a blur of chaotic change. Some things do seem to be moving forward at pace. Like flexible working arrangements for knowledge workers. I definitely feel like we’re suddenly 5 years ahead on that one. And other things are perhaps regressing just as quickly. Like the sense that we might get back to addressing the not so little issue of climate change after the pandemic. At Optimal Workshop, we’ve always been living ever so slightly in the relative future (thanks to New Zealand being on the front of our shared globe). Now that we in NZ have been privileged enough to return to our offices, schools, bars, and concerts (fingers still crossed) largely without fear of catching COVID-19, everything feels somewhat surreal. After all, some of our team, most of our customers, industry peers, and many of our friends are... everywhere else. As humans, and as a business made up of humans, staying informed and relevant, studying behavior, mindsets, motivations, real user needs and being contextually considerate has never been more important than it is right now.

Patterns are evolving. Black Lives Matter. Consequences matter. Our planet matters. Empathy matters. Systems matter. Why, matters.

It’s not just what you’re making it’s how you make it. It’s not what you’re doing it’s why you’re doing it. Now is the latest time for the change, this has never been clearer. If they’re not scrapped already, scrap your plans and make better ones. Twenty twenty. Thank you so much for reading our little magazine. Thank you for what you do, too. As a user experience practitioner, whatever your flavor, I appreciate the good intent that you undoubtedly bring to what you do. That you have devoted this chapter of your life and your career to helping real and individual people everywhere to find what they need, understand what they’re doing, and perhaps even to enjoy their productivity – a fair trade for loyalty? – is truly a noble service. Thank you. I imagine your work has helped many thousands of people to get on their way, to do something small that might have been big, and to come away from the experience with a smile and some extra minutes to spend with their kids or their hobbies or their cat that day. Here at OW we are doubling down. There’s too much wild reason and not enough shared understanding. There’s plenty of tools jostling to be some part of a better brain for your organization. Optimal Workshop aspires to be a better heart. Remember too, it’s good to be you. Turn some of your UX’n skills back on yourself from time to time – find your current why, decide who and what matters to you, trim any excess feature bloat, pay attention to what affects your own experience and to the experience of those around you. Andrew Mayfield CEO

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o t o r Int h c r a e Res Ops

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Back in early 2018, user researchers from around the globe got together to try and define an emerging practice – ResearchOps. The project eventually grew into a significant research effort called #WhatisResearchOps, involving 34 workshops, a survey that garnered over 300 responses and reams of analysis. The goal was quite simple. Generate conversation around the work that researchers do in order to support them as research grows, with an eye toward standardizing common research practices. It’s an important undertaking: a UserTesting report back carried out in 2017 found that 81 percent of executives agreed that user research made their organization more efficient. Further, 86 percent believed user research improved the quality of their products. It’s clear that many organizations are starting to understand the value that user researchers bring to the table, it’s now up to the researchers to operationalize their practice. But for the uninitiated, what exactly is ResearchOps? And why should you care?

What is Research-Ops? To start off, there’s not a lot of literature about ResearchOps as of early 2020. Right now, it’s a practice that can certainly be classed as ‘emerging’. This is partly why we’re writing about it. We want to add our own kindling to the ResearchOps conversation fire. ResearchOps as a practice has 2 main goals: • Socialize research: Make it easier for the people in an organization to access the insights generated by user research, and allow them to actively take part in research activities. • Operationalize research: Standardize templates, processes and plans to reduce research costs and the time required to get research projects off the ground. Or, as Vidhya Sriram explains in the post we linked above, ResearchOps “democratizes customer insights, takes down barriers to understand customers, and makes everyone take responsibility for creating remarkable customer experiences.”

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ResearchOps certainly hasn’t achieved anything close to ‘mainstream’ understanding yet, so in order to give ResearchOps the best chance of succeeding, it’s quite helpful to look at another ‘Ops’ practice – DesignOps. As 2 ‘operations’ focused initiatives, DesignOps and ResearchOps share a lot of the same DNA. According to Nielsen Norman’s DesignOps 101 article, DesignOps “refers to the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale”. Author Kate Kaplan goes on to flesh out this description, noting that it’s a term for addressing such issues as growing or evolving design teams, onboarding people with the right design skills, creating efficient workflows and improving design outputs. Sound familiar? The world of DesignOps is a veritable smorgasbord of useful learnings for researchers looking to grow the practice of ResearchOps. One particularly useful element is the idea of selecting only the components of DesignOps that are relevant for the organization at that point in time. This is quite important. DesignOps is a broad topic, and there’s little sense in every organization trying to take on every aspect of it. The takeaway, DesignOps (and ResearchOps) should look very different depending on the organization.

Kate Kaplan also touches on another useful point in her Nielsen Norman Group article; the idea of the DesignOps menu: This menu essentially outlines all of the elements that organizations could focus on when adopting practices to support designers. The DesignOps Menu is a useful framework for those trying to create a similar list of elements for ResearchOps.

Why does ResearchOps matter now? It’s always been difficult to definitively say “this is the state of user research”. While some organizations intimately understand the value that a focus on customer centricity brings (and have teams devoted to the cause), others are years behind. In these lagging organizations, the researchers (or the people doing research), have to fight to prove the value of their work. This is one of the main reasons why ResearchOps as an initiative matters so much right now. The other driver for ResearchOps is that the way researchers work together and with other disciplines is changing fast. In general, a growing awareness of the importance of the research is pushing the field together with data science, sales, customer support and marketing.

All this to say, researchers

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Enlarge image The DesignOps Menu.

SOU RCE: N I E L S E N N ORM AN G ROU P

are having to spend more and more time both proving the value of their work and operating at a more strategic level. This isn’t likely to slow, either. The coming years will see researchers spending less time doing actual research. With this in mind, ResearchOps becomes all the more valuable. By standardizing common research practices and working out ownership, the research itself doesn’t have to suffer.

What are the different components of ResearchOps? As we touched on earlier, ResearchOps – like DesignOps – is quite a broad topic. This is necessary. As most practicing

researchers know, there are a number of elements that go into ensuring thorough, consistent research. A useful analogy for ResearchOps is a pizza. There are many different components (toppings) that can go on the pizza, which is reflected in how research exists in different organizations. The real point here is that no 2 research operations should look the same. Research at Facebook will look markedly different to research at a small local government agency in Europe.

We looked at the DesignOps Menu earlier as a model for ResearchOps, but there’s another, more specific map created as part of the #WhatisResearchOps project. Like the DesignOps Menu, this map functions as a framework for what ResearchOps is. It’s the output of a series of workshops run by researchers across the globe as well as a large survey.

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Who practices ResearchOps? By now you should have a clear idea of the scale and scope of ResearchOps, given that we’ve covered the various components and why the practice matters so much. There are still 2 important topics left to cover, however: Who practices ResearchOps and (perhaps most interestingly) where it’s heading. As the saying goes, “everyone’s a researcher”, and this certainly holds true when talking about ResearchOps, but here are some of the more specific roles that should be responsible for executing ResearchOps components. User researchers / Self-explanatory. The key drivers of research standardization and socialization. UX designers / Customer advocates to the core, UX designers follow user researchers quite closely when it comes to execution. Designers / Add to that, designers in general. As designers increasingly become involved in the research activities of their organizations, expect to see them having a growing stake in ResearchOps activities. Customer experience (CX) and Marketing / Though they’re often not the foremost consideration when it comes to research conversations, marketing and CX certainly have a stake in research operations. There’s also another approach that is worth considering: Research as a way of thinking. This can essentially be taken up by anyone, and it boils down to understanding the importance of a healthy research function, with processes, systems and tools in place to carry out research. 10

What’s next for ResearchOps? As Kate Kaplan said in DesignOps 101, “DesignOps is the glue that holds the design organization together, and the bridge that enables collaboration among cross-disciplinary team members”. The same is true of ResearchOps – and it’s only going to become more important. We’re going to echo the same call made by numerous other people helping to grow ResearchOps and say that if you’ve got some learnings to share, share them back with the community! We’re also always looking to share great UX and research content, so get in touch with us if you’ve got something to share on our blog.

How to deal with the admin overhead of ResearchOps One of the most common topics of conversation that I come across in research circles is how to deal with the administrative burden of user research. I see it time and again – both junior and experienced researchers alike struggling to balance delivering outputs for their stakeholders as well as actually managing

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the day-to-day of their jobs. It’s not easy! Research is an admin-heavy field. All forms of user testing require a significant time investment for participant recruitment, user interviews mean sorting through notes in order to identify themes and different qualitative methods can leave you with pages of spreadsheet data. Staring down this potential mountain of administrative work is enough to make even the most seasoned researchers run for the hills. Enter ResearchOps. Sprouting up in 2018, various researchers came together to try and standardize different research practices and processes in order to support researchers and streamline operations. It may seem like a silver bullet, but the fundamental questions still remain. How can you, as a researcher, manage the administrative side of your job? And where does your responsibility end and your colleagues’ begin? Well, it’s time to find out.

Putting ResearchOps into perspective As we touched on in the introduction, ResearchOps is here and it’s here to stay. Like its cousin DesignOps, ResearchOps represents an earnest and combined effort on the part of the research community to really establish research practices and give researchers a kind-of backbone to support them. Carrying out effective user research is more important now than ever before, so it’s key that vetted practices and processes are in place to guide the growing community of researchers. ResearchOps can also be instrumental in helping us establish boundaries and lines of communication. But, it’s important to frame ResearchOps. This new ‘practice’ won’t magically solve the administrative burden that comes along

with doing research. In fact, it’s likely that simply by having access to clear processes and practices, many researchers will identify more opportunities to run their research practices more effectively, which in many cases will mean, yep, you guessed it, more administrative work. Interestingly, Kate Towsey (one of the ‘founders’ of ResearchOps), best summed this situation up by describing ResearchOps as an API – elements you can ‘plug’ into your own research practice. In dealing with these issues, there are some key questions you need to ask yourself.

Who owns research in your organization? If you speak to researchers from different organizations, you’ll quickly realize that no two research practices are run the same way. In some cases, research teams are very well established operations, with hundreds of researchers following clearly set out processes and procedures in a very structured way. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ve got the more haphazard research operations, where people (perhaps not even ‘researchers’ in the traditional sense) are using research methods. The varied way in which research practices operate means the question of ownership is often a difficult one to answer – but it’s important. Before we get into some of the strategies you can use to reduce and manage the administrative side of user research, you need to get a clear picture of who owns research in your organization. A fuzzy understanding of ownership makes the task of establishing boundaries near-impossible.

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Strategies to manage the administrative burden of Research

Understand what your colleagues expect from you, and what your organization expects from you. Knowing where your job stops (and where the jobs of the other members of your team begin) is key to the smooth running of a research practice. We’re talking about you – we’ll get to how research as a practice interacts with other parts of the organization in the next section. If you’re one of 5 researchers in your organization, a lack of alignment will lead to duplication of work, missed opportunities, and, in many cases, more admin. This is a constant issue, and it’s not one that researchers alone deal with. Needing to scramble to set up a meeting because 2 teams realize they’re both working on the same project happens all too often, in every type of business.

SOU RCE: M E DI U M/M U R AL

Research is an admin-intensive practice. There’s no getting around it. And, while it’s true that some tools can help you to reduce the day-to-day admin of your job (typically by making certain methods easier to execute), there’s still a fair amount of strategic thinking that you’ll need to do. In other words, it’s time to look at some strategies you can use to ensure you’re doing the job in the most efficient way.

1. Know where your job stops

Suse: Alt text: A chart showing all of the different elements of ResearchOps.

The #WhatIsResearch Ops Framework. Learn more here.

Enlarge image

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2. Establish clear boundaries

Research, as a practice, can touch nearly every area of an organization. This is both by design and necessity. Research is consultative, and requires input from a number of parts of an organization. If not managed carefully, operating your research without clear boundaries can mean you’re stuck with significant amounts of administrative work. Think about a typical research project: i. You might start by meeting with stakeholders to discuss what questions they want answered, or problems they want solved. ii. Then, you may engage other researchers on your team to solicit their opinions as to how to proceed. iii. You might test your studies with staff before taking them “live” and testing them with your target users. iv. Depending on the research, you may need to engage with your legal department to work through risk assessments, consent forms, risk and ethical issues. v. At the end of your project, you’ll probably need to take your research and store it somewhere, a task that will involve more data governance conversations. vi. The ResearchOps community put together this fantastic framework (below) which maps out the majority of research processes.

“You can’t possibly handle any one bubble without touching many of the others, so it’s important to establish clear boundaries for what you, as research ops and as a person, cover,” Kate Towsey explains. As for how to actually establish these boundaries – and in turn reduce the chance of an administrative overload – turn to conversations. One of the best ways to clear up any fogginess around remit is to simply pull the different parties into the same room and talk through your perspectives. 3. Outsource (if you need to)

In certain situations, it may make sense to outsource. Of course, we’re not talking about simply taking your research practice and outsourcing it wholesale, but instead taking select components that are well suited to being managed by third parties. The obvious candidate here is participant recruitment. It’s typically one of the most time-consuming and admin-heavy parts of the research process, and coincidentally one that’s also easy to outsource. Participant recruitment services have access to tens of thousands of participants, and can pull together groups of participants for your research project, meaning you can eliminate the task of going out and searching for people manually. You simply specify the type of participant you require, and the service handles the rest. Of course, there will always be times where manual participant recruitment is preferable, for example when you’re trying to recruit for user interviews for an extremely niche subject area, or you’re dealing with participants directly from your customer base.

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4. Prioritize your research repository

Taking the time to establish a useful, usable repository of all of your research will be one of the best investments you can make as a researcher. There is a time commitment involved in setting up a research repository, but upsides are significant. For example, you’ll reduce admin as you’ll have a clear process for storing the insights from studies that you conduct. You’ll also find that when embarking on a new research project, you’ll have a good place to start. Instead of just blinding going out and starting from scratch, you can search through past studies in the repository to see if any similar research has been run in the past. That way, you can maximise the use of past research and focus on new research to get new insights.

What a good research repository looks like will depend on your organization’s needs to some extent, but there are some things to keep in mind: • Your research should be easy to retrieve – There should be no barriers for researchers needing to access the research data. • You should be able to trace insights back to the raw research data – If required, researchers should be able to trace the outputs of a research project back to the initial findings/raw data. • It should be easy for others to access the findings from your research – Thinking beyond your cadre of user researchers, your repository should be fairly accessible to others in the organization. Marketers, designers and developers alike should be able to retrieve research when required. • Sensitive data should be secure, or deleted if it’s not necessary – Your entire research repository should only be accessible to those within your organization, but you may need even tighter restrictions within that bubble. For example, you don’t want even the slightest chance of sensitive data leaking. By that same token, delete sensitive information when it’s not absolutely essential that you keep it.

Wrap-up User research is always going to require a fair amount of administrative work, but there are actions you can take to minimize some of these more arduous and repetitive tasks – you

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Remote research allows you to reach a more diverse range of participants [Author name required] PaperGiant This is Part 1 of our deep dive into the benefits of remote research. This is bad for organisations, who are missing out on a huge segment of the people they’d like to reach, and it’s bad for users, who can feel shut out of the services they’d like to access. Remote research allows you to address common diversity and inclusion challenges of in-person research, and create a better product or service as a result.

Occupational diversity

While you’re probably already making considered attempts to include a diverse range of participants, the reality is that many people are simply not able to participate in research. Some people cannot make it in to your research facilities for an hour on a weekday for an in-person interview — not now and not pre-pandemic either. That list includes single parents and other full-time carers, who are overwhelmingly women. (It’s also likely to exclude people with mobility challenges and certain chronic illnesses.) One of the greatest strengths of remote research is that it enables asynchronous responses, which means people can fit it in whenever it makes the most sense for them. This makes it easier to research with shift workers, night owls, and people in precarious contract work, who may not be able request time off.

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Geographic and cultural diversity

Research is mostly good at including people that are nearby, with spare time, and with the means to come and go as you require them to; they’ve got to fit with your schedule and your project plan. Planning your research to be remote by default allows you to work with and around these constraints in ways that will improve the validity and richness of your data and insights. As an example, Paper Giant recently worked with Atlassian to conduct research with knowledge workers. Using remote research methods, we were able to speak to people in workplaces from multiple countries in North America, Europe and Australasia. This is far more representative of Atlassian’s user base than if we had only interviewed participants local to us, and helped us avoid treating Australia’s workplace culture as universal. Neurodiversity

Remote research also allows you to speak to people who might be uncomfortable with the intensity of a one-on-one interview in unfamiliar surroundings. For example, autistic people commonly report finding eye contact overwhelming, but no one quite makes direct eye contact on video calls anyway, so this is one less thing they have to manage. Body language is harder to interpret over a video call, which means remote research works best when it doesn’t rely on nonverbal cues. This equalises the process for everyone.

Research shows that non-native speakers, people with auditory processing disorders and people with high anxiety “often prefer text channels so they can have more time to process messages and craft responses.” Inclusion challenges

Inclusion is a challenge as well as an opportunity when you’re using digital tools for research — such tools rely on digital literacy and digital infrastructure that people might not have. It’s worth remembering here that remote research doesn’t have to be digital. It can mean a phone call; it can mean sending something through the post. This means you need to know who your users are and take into account any kind of access or inclusion issues they may have. For example, when Paper Giant has worked with participants with low literacy, we’ve designed comics as a way of getting people’s feedback on stuff rather than relying on words — those can be sent through the post. We’ve also used Easy English principles in documents for people with acquired brain injury. Many people are only turning to remote research now, as a response to COVID-19. But it would be a mistake to view it as the fallback option. Remote research allows you to engage a much broader diversity of participants, leading to richer and better validated insights. Paper Giant writes about research, design, innovation and ethics in our fortnightly newsletter – subscribe here.

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Remote research opens the door for richer, higherfidelity insights [Author name required] PaperGiant This is Part 2 of our deep dive into the benefits of remote research. As a researcher with 15 years’ experience, I have made use of the traditional, face-toface interview hundreds (if not thousands) of times. It’s a basic tool in the researcher’s toolbox for a reason: it allows you to build rapport and understanding quickly. Over time, however, I’ve found ways to improve on it, ways to enhance its strengths and counteract its weaknesses. These ways are incredibly well suited to remote research, and I hope that any organisation pivoting to remote research now will be excited about the possibilities that have opened up to them. In traditional, face-to-face interviews, participants often feel pressured – they’re in someone else’s office, being asked to

reflect in ways that are new to them, by someone who’s paying them. They’re outside of their comfort zone and may find it hard to tap into what they would “naturally” do when, say, accessing a website. Participants want to be helpful, and this often means telling you what they think you want to hear. Similarly, the research team can feel pressured to get everything they need out of an interview because they know it’ll cost money and time (both of which may not exist) to get back in touch to follow up. The traditional research interview takes a Q&A approach: you ask a question, they give you an answer, and then there’ll be a follow-up question and answer. The downside to this approach is that your research insights are limited by the assumptions you walked in with. You might be able to confirm or disprove your hypothesis, but you’re unlikely to get much insight beyond that narrow scope. The methods made available by remote research shift you away from that Q&A dynamic to one where you collaborate with the participant over time to build a shared understanding.

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Asynchronous responses are fresher responses

When you interview someone at a prearranged time, you’re asking them to remember incidents or events that may have happened days, weeks or even years ago. It’s human nature to forget situations or misremember details. But asynchronous communication allows a participant to tell you about something immediately after it happens. In a recent research project with Atlassian, we spent an hour interviewing each participant over Zoom, just like we normally would in-person. But we also created ways for participants to report back to us what they were doing, why and how, and what they thought about all of that, no matter when or where it occurred to them. (We paid participants for their extra time.) We wanted to know how participants were collaborating with their colleagues, so we gave them a structure to instantly report an actual moment of interaction with a colleague, what it was about, and how it happened. This also took pressure off the participants because they didn’t have to remember — they could just tell us what they literally just did. This allowed the interviews we conducted with them to run more smoothly, and it gave the research team an opportunity to follow up with their own questions. Pre-interview: ‘priming’ participants with small tasks or questions ahead of time

In research, we talk about ‘priming’ participants, where you give them a task or a question ahead of time for them to

complete or think about. This is commonly accepted as leading to more productive, relaxed conversations. Preparing a pre-task of some variety is a great way of empowering participants with richer storytelling tools. Instead of relying on their memory or on an offthe-cuff response to your question, you might prepare a diary template for them, request that they bring certain objects or artefacts, or ask them to think about specific examples a week or two before the interview. This is a great way to help participants help you. It gives them more time. At Paper Giant, we have had the privilege and opportunity to conduct research into grieving and memorialisation a number of times. One example of ‘priming’ in these projects is to ask people ahead of time to find a photo of a loved one who has passed away. Our research in these contexts is often emotional and challenging, because we’re interested in the challenges that people have faced when navigating the administration or bureaucracy when someone close to them has died. By asking them to find a photo to show us ahead of time, it primes them to talk about this person in a way that is less likely to trigger negative emotional responses. It also allows them to tell their story in a more meaningful way, so that we better understand their perspectives. Remote research is ideally suited to asynchronous activities, where the researcher doesn’t need to be observing in real-time. Thinking about things that people can do before and after your interactions with them can help your research uncover deeper understandings.

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During the interview: Giving people more tools to express themselves with

When you move away from the face-toface interview as a default mode of data collection, you give participants more choice on how they present information to you. Pre-task become highly valuable tools to use during the interview, to externalise a participant’s experience and allow them to reflect on it. Sending a small survey ahead of time, or asking people to prepare some material for the interview, not only primes them to talk about something, but it also helps them tell their story. In a project with a cemetery client about the experience of grieving, we asked participants to bring a photo of their loved one and a photo that shows how they memorialise them. Both of these photos helped the participants externalise a tough topic, but also express themselves. If your pre-task is a survey or diary-study, then the interview can be used to reflect on the participant’s responses. When participants see their own experiences laid out visually in front of them, it sparks new and deeper reflections that you don’t get when you’re asking them to draw wholly from memory. Post-interview: Continuous engagement lets you validate and deepen your insights

Remote research creates the conditions for more collaborative knowledge-building between yourself and the participants. It’s more of an open dialogue over time — you’re not just relying on that one hour that you have to get everything you need from a person. In our Atlassian project, we had our ‘official’ research interactions, but then we

maintained a relationship with that person for about two weeks afterwards. That allowed us to do synthesis on the data as we normally would, and then also play back some of that synthesis and validate it with participants. It gave them the opportunity to correct our understanding if we hadn’t got it 100%, or tell us new things that our synthesis brought up for them. I think we’ve all had times when we look back on an interaction and think “Damn, I should have said…” or “that’s a way better way to explain it…”. In our experience, participants appreciate the opportunity to come back and clarify their thoughts with us. Collaborative research interviews leave the participant feeling validated

At their worst, Q&A-style interviews can leave participants feeling used or drained, like their experience has been taken away from them. But when you give participants the time and tools to respond in their own way, they describe the experience as cathartic, occasionally even therapeutic. They feel like they’ve been given a platform, and that what they have to say is worthwhile. Researchers work for the client, but we also have a responsibility to the people we research with. It’s our job to represent their voice back into the organisations that have hired us, and to get the most true picture possible of their concerns and stories. Remote research opens up a huge number of ways to empower participants and to give yourself a better chance to have a valid understanding of what’s going on. Paper Giant writes about research, design, innovation and ethics in our fortnightly newsletter – subscribe here.

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Customer empathy: the new metric for success [Author name required] UserTesting.com If you take a moment to think about all the companies and brands you like doing business with, they probably have one thing in common—empathy. And that’s likely because customers value the experience of authentic empathy. Whether that experience is easily filing a claim with your insurance

provider, being able to return clothes free of charge, or being able to get through to customer support without a battle, customers want to know that they can trust a business and its products and services. However, becoming a business that evokes feelings of trust and loyalty doesn’t happen overnight. These companies put a focus on all of the possible interactions they may have with their customers, small and large, across multiple touchpoints. In this article, we’re going to show you what it takes to become a customer-centric business by way of empathy.

What is customer empathy?

Empathy is an abstract concept that we think of as being hard to measure. It’s defined as the feeling that one person understands or shares another person’s experiences and emotions; or the vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. In general, we think of empathy as something that’s humanto-human, however, that’s not always the case.

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In our latest industry report, When business is human: insights drive innovation, we discuss how companies can work toward a culture of empathy by committing to understanding their customers. This may sound squishy, but hang tight—it’s possible to make the intangible concept of empathy concrete and tie it to business impacts and outcomes. The new metric for success

It’s not uncommon to hear executives and decision-makers throw up their hands and give up trying to put a number to empathy because it seems impossible to create a model for measuring complex feelings. But the fact of the matter is that leading companies are already creating exceptional and measurable customer experiences that define who they are as a business. Companies like Apple, Coca-Cola, Edward Jones, and USAA, to name a few, are picking up on the signals of empathy that can be measured through customer interactions. In other words, they’re connecting the dots between their business and their customers by using defined goals tied to key CX metrics in a consistent and thoughtful way. To go one step further, they’re not just examining micro-interactions or a specific journey flow—though they are very focused on optimizing and measuring the effectiveness of each—but also customer lifetime value (CLV). They know that by projecting authentic empathy as a company, they will drive trust and loyalty that will make customers think of them first when they want or need another product or service they offer.

Customer empathy requires a change in how we connect business goals to outcomes

At the highest level, every business wants to drive the bottom line and in the most efficient way that it can. That’s why they build and test new products, create effective marketing campaigns, and generate efficient processes with the end goal of making (and saving) money. However, these sorts of activities can be measured with industry-accepted metrics like daily average users, conversions, and cost-savings respectively. But how does a business really measure empathy?

In order to do this effectively, it requires businesses to rethink what it means to be customer-centric. Not just in the products and services it provides, but at its core— what it really stands for. If you think of your business’ mission statement as the anchor to your brand, then you’re off to a good start. Your company’s mission statement should define your why, and really get to the heart of why your company does what it does. If you’re able to define your why, then you’re able to connect that mission to tangible initiatives and business outcomes that tell the story more effectively around how well your company is projecting authentic empathy. Customer empathy in practice

Let’s say that your company has a highlevel mission of ‘keeping it simple’ for customers. One way that you intend to do this is by ensuring that your customer touchpoints are straightforward and

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accessible. Hopefully, this will give off the impression that your company is easy to work with. So this becomes your top-line goal. To make progress on this goal, your company decides to undertake a series of initiatives, across multiple teams, focused on optimizing customer-facing touchpoints. A few examples might be to “reduce the number of steps required to buy online,” “improve the self-service experience,” or “right-channel the purchase process”. These initiatives get selected based on the expectation that they will drive improvements to key CX metrics. We often do “what-if” calculations to understand the costs and benefits associated with these projects so that we can reduce the risk of investment and understand what the potential business outcomes will be. We do UX research to understand the needs of our customers to ensure that we build what they need and avoid costly rework too. This is the core value of UX research. It guides business decision-making so that we can move the needle in the right direction to pick successful approaches that address true customer needs.

Customer empathy is based on insight

The key to great CX starts with putting human insight—which helps build meaningful connections with customers— into the hands of all teams. And the shift to a culture of empathy must happen in tandem, by connecting your company’s mission to business goals and metrics (like the example above). We can’t express this enough: your business activities should be driven by the needs of your customers. With a human insight platform, companies are able to have remote access to more than a million consumers around the world so they can see, hear, and talk to their customers to understand their needs and concerns. It’s from there that you’ll be able to bring customer empathy into your company’s strategy and mission, to help make customer-centric business decisions the only type of decisions you make.

It means that human insights are critical to ensure that your company is making the right decisions for your customers. Whether you reduce the number of steps required to make a purchase or reduce the amount of customer support calls, you will be able to tie these metrics back to your goal of becoming a more empathetic organization—that keeps it simple for customers.

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