5 Reasons to Invest in Research

Customer research (also known as user research) is a powerful business tool to understand people’s behaviors and the cause and effect those behaviors have on purchase decisions and usage patterns. The business world instinctively grasps this value on a fundamental level, yet sometimes skips it anyway. Some common reasons they choose to skip include time, cost and a belief that the factors for customer success are already known. While I wouldn’t dismiss any of these reasons outright, my experience tells me they’re often myths. Research needn’t be a speed bump, budget buster, distraction or inconvenience. Rather, it’s a practice and mindset that comes with the following positive benefits.

Make better decisions

Whatever your skill set and role, researchers collectively bring strategic thinking, tactical skills, best practices and intuition to the table. Research brings another voice to the conversation — your target audience’s — that is objective, free of organizational bias and able to surface ideas that may otherwise not be seen or considered. These outside perspectives can profoundly change how the world is understood and, therefore, how it needs to be approached.

Reduce risk

Research allows project teams to better pinpoint where attention, time and money are best spent. A team that has a comprehensive understanding of problem(s) will also be a team of effective problem solvers. And while research does come with financial and timeline implications, it reduces or completely eliminates the greater costs incurred building problematic or failed products and services (not to mention the costs needed to fix them).

Fill knowledge gaps

Intuition, experience and personal observations get teams far. Research, in combination, takes them farther. It brings more voices to bear, more subtlety and nuance to what may otherwise be broad generalizations, and pointers when the path ahead is unclear. It also helps surface biases and cultural norms that may negatively impact the project’s success.

Improve organizational dynamics

Research can provide a framework to align people and departments through collaboration and a shared understanding of customers, their problems, and how well the organization is positioned to serve customers and address their problems. Research can rally a team by injecting it with purpose and inspiration.

Speed development

Some perceive research as slowing down a team’s progress. If speed to market is the goal, then this perception may be correct. But if the goal is to build the right product or service for the right people and for the right reasons, then research actually speeds the development process. Teams will ultimately reach success quicker with research than without it and will do so with fewer public stumbles.

If space for research is included in the design and development processes, teams gain an ability to effectively manage and apply their time, money and attention. The results are more likely to be exceptional products and services that customers are willing and happy to buy and use.

Personas and Jobs To Be Done

I read more articles over time decrying personas in light of the jobs to be done (JTBD) framework. I generally favor JTBD myself, but I, like others, are not ready to proclaim personas dead yet. Every tool has it’s time and place.

The issue that comes up in articles seems to center on the personas that promote a shallow characterization of customers. This is indeed an issue for the UX and product management world. However, personas come in many flavors and each has strengths and weaknesses. The question is not whether personas are good or bad generally, but whether or not they convey meaning for a specific purpose. The three persona types below each lie along various continuums of time and effort needed to create, depth of insight given, etc.

Proto persona
Proto personas are making inroads given the trend toward lean principles. They’re initially created from best guesses until customer contact provides information on which to revise them. This is acceptable as long as there’s follow through to ensure greater accuracy.

Demographic/marketing persona

These personas are the ones that rile people. They go something like this: Steve the Stereotype has a wife, two young kids, likes to golf, is 35-45, etc. These are acceptable for some marketing and advertising purposes when you’re looking to reach a block of people who share some similarities and, based on that similarity, can be reached in a consistent manner. ESPN reaches sports enthusiasts, for example. I wouldn’t use these for UX or product decisions. These are the types of personas I rail against too.

Design/user persona

Kim Goodwin has a robust, thorough methodology to create design/user personas (that fits within an equally robust and thorough product creation methodology). For me, it’s the gold standard of personas because they’re built upon solid research of real people. I reserve the right to question the addition of personality details, but those can help create empathy which isn’t a bad thing.

Empathy persona

If your intention is to create empathy among staff who don’t or can’t get regular customer contact, an empathy persona can offer a decent alternative. They’re not perfect, but they do provide a reminder that humans are the beneficiaries (or victims) of our product choices.

My preference is to create proto personas, though I would rarely share these with my client. They’re lightweight, quick and nimble which works for the equally lightweight, quick and nimble way our company works. They’re a means to an end in my workflow and needn’t be a milestone deliverable. Create ’em if you need ’em.

In reality, I’m more apt to filter the best from the design/user persona approach using jobs to be done thinking. I believe well crafted personas have a lot in common with JTBD analysis, it’s mainly a difference in focus: “According to Clayton Christensen, the customer is the wrong unit of analysis for innovators to focus on. Instead, focus on the job that customers are trying to get done when they use your product or service.” In effect, JTBD keeps the goals, needs and behavioral aspects of the best personas—the “what” and “why” of understanding customers—and drops most of the “who” information found in demographic data and filler background stories found in demographic/marketing personas. You end up wringing out the personal notes in order to distill and clarify jobs, situational awareness, desired outcome states and the causality, motivation and triggers that tie all these concepts together. In a sense, JTBD cuts to the chase which is useful in an agile workflow. It prioritizes information, focuses effort and clarifies the root issues at hand.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Explore Pixar‘s Relationship with Their Customers

Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, was asked to comment on kids as consumers. Specifically, the question asked about Pixar’s views on the trends they see amongst their five-year-old demographic (skip to the 24:10 mark in the video). His answer:

Five year olds actually haven’t changed as much. Clearly, the teenage world has changed a lot more because of the way media is spread. So that’s actually the bigger change. For the children, we haven’t seen much. In terms of the way we think about our stories though, we don’t segment them in that sense. That is, we do make movies that children can enjoy but we also make films that we [adults] can enjoy. And we believe very strongly that children live in an adult world. So we want things in the films which they don’t understand. Not that we’re trying to do it. But what makes things interesting for children is they’re figuring out the world. And if you try to make something in a movie so that it’s all easy for them to figure out, you’re actually having a distortion of the world they operate in and that they like to be in.

Does his response indicate that Pixar takes a jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach to their films? It’s certainly a stretch to definitively say they do based on one question and answer exchange, but let’s dive in a bit as a thought experiment.

A tenet of JTBD is that segmenting markets by people (i.e. demographics) is the wrong unit of analysis when building products. Instead, the jobs and the  situational context within which they exist provide a clearer link between people and their actions. It would appear from the exchange that Pixar does not ask “what movie will five-year-olds like and want to see?” but rather “what job do people hire films to get done?” Are they hired to entertain? To act as cheap, temporary babysitters? To momentarily escape from normal, daily life?

We can analyze and debate films’ JTBD and the situations in which people hire them, but instead of going down that path let’s consider how Mr. Catmull thinks about it based on his Q&A session.

For Catmull, Pixar isn’t making movies for five-year-olds, he’s making movies that transcend the simplicity and one-size-fits-all mentality that comes with demographic segmentation. He acknowledges that children are customers, but also acknowledges that the end result doesn’t revolve around them to the exclusion of others. He’s more motivated to tell a story about the world we live in—a world in which kids and adults are participants. Therefore, Pixar is less interested in telling a story that only addresses the cognitive abilities of children and more interested in telling a universally accessible story about the world we all experience, young and old. This approach cuts across demographic segments making them an ineffective and counterproductive way to consider customers.

We could argue, upon deeper reflection, that a Pixar film’s JTBD is to explore and examine the human condition through the perspective of fictional characters that resemble the world, but are not of this world in order to reconnect with our own humanity. In essence, Pixar reminds us we’re human in a world that so often doesn’t treat us as such. If you buy that (and it’s not important that you do—this is an mental exercise after all), then it’s a small step to realize how such a job wouldn’t fit neatly into carefully considered demographic segments.

Catmull provides additional information for our exercise at various other points in the interview. At one point, he explains Pixar’s belief that personal investment on the part of a director is key to making a film special. He citesUp’s achievement in this regard. It went “…above and beyond the standard vocabulary that’s used in storytelling.” In essence, Pixar entrusts new product development (and the massive investment that comes with it) into a single person’s vision. And it’s expected that the director’s vision will connect with moviegoers on a deep level. We could translate that to mean this: Pixar expects their films to address the unmet or underserved needs amongst their customers to feel human instead of creating films to fit perceived opportunities in a demographically sliced and diced market.

Catmull also suggests that Pixar doesn’t focus group their films. Instead, directors periodically and regularly present their films to a brain trust of internal staff who give feedback and offer commentary. What this tells us is that, again, the vision that drives the film is not limited by superficial market segments. It succeeds because it addresses a latent need that exists in the world. You don’t have to be five to enjoy Up nor do you have to be 35. You don’t have to be male or female, wealthy or poor. None of that matters because the film taps a deeper link with people along the jobs-to-be-done spectrum that would otherwise be missed if demographic segmentation were the only yardstick.

What’s most interesting about the lead quote from Catmull’s above is that Pixar avoids the trap of considering itself a maker of films for kids which ultimately drives their success with them.

Book Review of Remote: Office Not Required

I read Remote: Office Not Required over the weekend (it’s a fast read) to see what I could learn about working with remotely located coworkers. I came away with a simple change of perception that will likely change the way I operate in the future.

Our company has two offices which, in a sense, makes us a remotely located group. I say ‘in a sense’ because those offices are, at most, 30 miles from one another. Before reading the book, the idea that this small distance made us a remotely located organization seemed far fetched. If I needed to talk to someone face-to-face, we’d simply go to the same office. Or, more often than not, the people who I interacted with most already worked from the same office I did- nothing remote about that, right? Well, now I think differently.

The book explains the simple concept that even if you’re across the street from your office working at a cafe, you’re effectively remote. People at the office can no longer physically walk up to you. Yes, they can walk across the street, but otherwise need to make contact via some other method, many of which are asynchronous and therefore don’t require immediate attention like a physical interruption does. That’s working remotely. It’s so simple that, in hindsight, I’m surprised I didn’t make the connection. Just because many of us are in the same office for lengthy periods of time doesn’t mean, as a whole, that we’re not a remotely oriented team. Just the opposite: many colleagues are not in the same office as me and therefore, each and every day, half or more of our staff are effectively remote. And then there are our clients who are hardly ever in our office.

The simple change in perception the book gave me is worth the price of admission. From there though, I didn’t get much tactical value. I found significant portions of the book covered workflow adaptations we’ve implemented and tools we already use. It was great to compare notes against what 37signals does and the other companies they highlight. I suppose some of that does have tactical value, but it seems minimal compared to the larger shift in mindset I took away.

I don’t have much more to say at this point other than a quick critique of the writing and format. Once again, 37signals has published a book that strikes me more like a collection of blog posts than a streamlined, cohesive narrative. This might leave a bad taste in your mouth, but it certainly makes for a quicker, more consolidated package. And who won’t benefit from a quick, weekend read with takeaways you can put to use the same day?

Elevate your understanding of the Jobs-to-be-Done Four Forces Diagram

“Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption” by John T. Gourville provides support and context to better understand The Rewired Group’s Four Progress Making Forces Diagram. In particular, the article provides context for the push and pull concepts within the four forces diagram outlined below (and includes some of Clayton Christensen’s innovation concepts aded for good measure).

The Four Progress Making Forces Diagram

The article explains the psychology behind consumer behavior and how sellers (or product designers) can tap it to increase sales. Some takeaways:

  • The likelihood that someone will buy is based more on perceived value than actual value.
  • Consumers use a reference point—something they already own or use—as a way to compare a potential new purchase.
  • This reference point acts as a way to judge the new option. If the new option is perceived to be better than its reference point, it’ll be viewed as a positive or a gain. If it’s perceived to be relatively inferior, it’ll be seen as a negative or a loss.
  • Losses have greater psychological impact than similarly sized gains and will therefore lead people to value that which they already own or use (the “endowment effect“). Buyers value losses at about three times the rate of gains while sellers value gains by a factor of three over losses. Combined, the gap between buyers and sellers can be 9x.

All of these points and the supporting documentation that Gourville includes speaks directly to the idea behind two of the four forces– the habit of the present and the anxiety of the new. They help you understand why people resist innovations, even ones that will benefit them.

On the flip side are the other two forces—the push of the situation and the magnetism of the new—that entice and encourage the adoption of new products and services. The article explains that anything new is ultimately judged as a series of trade-offs. A consumer will gain something here, but lose something there. If, in aggregate, the gains outweigh the losses, the new thing can win a convert.

One way to view the landscape is to say that sellers “…create value through product change, but they capture that value best by minimizing behavior change. That results in a simple but powerful matrix.”

behavior/product change

As you might guess, sellers want to find themselves in the “smash hits” quadrant. They typically require consumers to change their behavior as little as possible while experiencing great gains in terms of what the new product or service offers. The trick is to reduce behavior changes on the part of consumers and/or increasing the value gained in switching to the new offer. Some advice:

  • Be patient: Adoption will likely be slow, so plan on that being the case. This obviously has implications on how you manage resources since you may need to run lean for longer than you’d like.
  • Strive for improvement: Increase the perceived gains so that they outweigh perceived losses as much as possible. Perhaps this means you need to delay a launch or wait for the status quo to naturally change in your favor.
  • Eliminate rival products or services: This is easier said than done, but you can tip the scales in your favor through regulatory bodies who can use their powers to help your cause.
  • Align behaviors: Build products or services that work with customers’ current behaviors, if at all possible.
  • Target non-consumption: You can avoid the endowment effect by finding customers that don’t already use an existing product or service. That population won’t have ingrained behaviors that could pose a problem.
  • Preach to the choir: Seek out people who are actively willing to adopt your innovation and let them advocate on your behalf.

My First Concert

I headed to my first concert three days before I turned 20 to see PJ as they were breaking big on MTV. Because I designed promos and ads for the events council at CU I was able to get in early and free. I stood right in front of Stone Gossard (he’s the one with the long hair… oh, wait…).

I have two vivid memories of the event. One, the hearing loss from the terrible opening band who set their amps to 11. Second, a recollection of the scene in the room after the show ended. Since I stood in front of the stage all night, I was among the last people to head toward the door after the fun ended. I remember a ton of clothing on the floor (surely lost by the body surfers, right?). T-shirts, bras, shoes, pants (pants? Really?) and other unidentified clothes-like crap.

Good times.

Change and the Habit of the Present

Christina Wodtke gave some needed depth to an old cliché: people don’t like change. Whether or not change is adopted, she argues, is not determined by a simplistic and innate dislike for new things. It’s determined by how well the change is communicated and how smoothly people transition to it. Wodtke writes:

“…when a big change comes, the end user is focused on what they have lost: productivity, comfort, familiarity. And the user weighs that loss as three times more important that any gain that company professes to offer.”

Her thoughts are like those that underly the ‘habit of the present,’ one of the four Progress Making Forces. Understanding why people stick with their present set of products, services and solutions is fundamental for product designers who want to grow their customer base. Two important points are highlighted in Wodtke’s work and we’ll explore them below:

  • Good enough: Two different solutions to the same problem can co-exist, even if one is clearly superior to the other. How? Via Clayton Christensen’s “good enough” concept– some people actively expend extra effort that an inferior solution requires compared to its superior alternative because switching has too many costs in terms of productivity, comfort and familiarity. You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon yourself. Think about a product or service that a friend has recommended you use, but you haven’t. Why haven’t you? It may be because your current solution gets the job done well enough and switching to the new solution will cost you too much in other ways.
  • Active resistance: Better solutions may be actively fought by people and systems that stand to lose in some way if it’s adopted. Lobbyists , for instance, will do all they can to torpedo new laws that threaten the status quo and the mechanisms by which they benefit from them. David Gray has researched change within organizations and has concluded that to affect change necessitates a deep understanding of culture– knowing what is and isn’t possible so that opportunities can be taken advantage of while challenges can be addressed before they cause trouble.

To overcome the good enough mentality will not only require you to sell the advantages of the better solution, but also require a transition plan for those using the existing (i.e. “inferior”) solution. Wodtke gives examples of how some sites have done this, but ultimately failed in their execution. Why? Because not enough effort was expended to acclimate customers to the improvements so that they would feel impelled to adopt it.

Active resistance is often political. It requires good salesmanship toward customers, but also to other stakeholders, direct or indirect, who feel they’ll lose something real or perceived. You may need to haggle, coerce or compromise in order to ease the pathway for these constituents who could otherwise actively work to thwart your efforts.

Of course, all of this is moot unless the new thing is actually an improvement over the old. Your ideas are vetted along the way, right?

Bad Feedback

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 10.53.01 AM

I visited Ustream’s website and needed to update my password. The form they offered to do so indicated that what I entered wouldn’t work. The error it gave me said I used an illegal character, but they didn’t indicate what character was the issue. I’m left to guess what character is problematic. Why not tell me? Why set my expectation that I was entering a valid password (“Password strength: high”) next to the form field only to find out that it wouldn’t work?

A better site experience would work like this: as I’m typing, the site tells me an issue exists with provides me helpful text showing me what the problem is and how to solve it.

The best site experience would work like this: let me use whatever characters I want as part of my password sidestepping any problems at all.

The Fundamental Higher Ed Website Issue: Centralization vs. Decentralization

You can’t talk about centralization unless you first talk about how things currently work under a decentralized system. So I’ll address that first.

Many traditional universities (most? all?) take a decentralized approach toward their websites, both in terms of creation and maintenance. It’s thought that a decentralized structure where each division, school, college, department and administrative unit effectively controls their space and content on the web is the best way to manage the overall site. Core web teams tend to be small given the size of a university’s online presence so the thinking is “why not shift maintenance of each section of the site to their respective owners?” With a content management system in place, this becomes a matter of simplicity and smart workflow. The core web team creates the initial site based on each unit’s needs and wishes, the site is developed within the CMS, each unit gets trained on how to make updates through the CMS, and then the web team is freed up to go through the same process for the next unit on campus. Conventional wisdom would say this is a rational and reasoned approach, right?

Maybe, but I think the opposite approach — centralization — reaps greater rewards. I’m not against decentralization completely, however. There’s a place and time for it, but to revolve your web efforts around the promises of decentralization will only lead to trouble. There is a happy medium. I’ll cover the benefits to centralization in a moment, but first, here’s a list of issues decentralization wittingly and unwittingly creates:

  • Inconsistent experience: With so many different units within the organization, the umbrella website amounts to a consortium of marginally related sub-sites. Each unit independently decides what their needs and wants are and isn’t required to consider other units or the overall experience of the umbrella site.
  • Little focus: When a site communicates to a diverse range of audience needs within the same space, it becomes schizophrenic at best, confusing and frustrating at worst. Should information that satisfies one need sit next to information for a totally different need? Separation along people’s jobs-to-be-done could clarify an organization’s message and offer a better overall visitor experience.
  • Poor navigation, Part I:  Since every unit gets a semi or completely custom made site, consistency of navigation isn’t ensured. Decentralization allows even similar units to offer completely different sets of links even though their audiences’ goals are relatively homogenous. Take a centralized view of audience needs, build a navigation system that speaks to it (and do it only once) and then roll it out to the necessary sites.
  • Poor navigation, Part II: The kind of navigational inconsistency above can be remedied relatively easily. What’s harder for the organization is to break away from the idea that navigation should mimic its org chart. Our research has found that students largely don’t know and don’t care that psychology is to be found via the Psychology Department’s site which is itself found via the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences site. Furthermore, why would we expect them to know the difference between the Psychology Department and the Professional School of Psychology? People think in terms of subject areas, so let’s use a navigational scheme that works with that in mind.
  • Disjointed marketing efforts: In effect, a decentralized world creates barriers between internal groups. Since units are largely independent from one another, it’s difficult to see, let alone create, symbiotic relationships. The web offers an alternative where all internal groups can cross promote events, programs, people, research, etc. to maximize the impact of communications. Some level of centralization is needed, however.
  • Reactionary processes: If the web team is utilized as a simple vendor who delivers websites for each unit of the larger organization, then the team’s expertise is never fully brought to bear on the broader, umbrella site. Centralization allows a web team to proactively make the site better for all since it’s the only group that’s cognizant of the overall experience.
  • No accountability: A decentralized structure spreads accountability of the site’s overall success or failure among a large number of people- so many that the site is effectively unaccountable to anyone or any group. Global decisions or mandates that would introduce economies of scale (as outlined in this very list) are impossible to enact in this climate. Centralization places control and responsibility in the hands of a few. It’s not a power grab, it’s efficiency (see the next point). Accountability creates the motivation to continually create high quality work.
  • Inefficient use of resources: Content might be needed in several places on the site. In a decentralized world, that content is likely duplicated in the system as people in different units post the information to their independent sites. Duplicated content = duplicated efforts to maintain = inefficient use of people’s time.
  • Slow turnaround time: To create and maintain independent sites causes longer timelines than necessary compared to a centralized world where there is only a single visitor experience to manage. Build it once and then reuse. If you make a change, it’s globally deployed.
  • Unsustainable, Part I: As internal groups begin to harness the web’s power beyond static pages, the web team becomes ever more strained to keep up with individual, unit level requests. Centralized efforts allow the web team to prioritize requests and projects based on institutional goals and customer input. The most important projects with the greatest overall impact get the attention they deserve, while less important projects are accomplished as time allows, if at all.
  • Unsustainable, Part II: Another aspect to consider are the ongoing costs of maintenance. As sites grow, so too does the effort to keep them up-to-date. The big advantage to decentralization revolves around just this problem — allowing the masses to create and maintain sites after the web team gets it launched. But it’s not without pitfalls in terms of ensuring consistency of content, keeping links from breaking, ensuring new content is created often enough and so on. Are the resources in place to realistically accomplish this?
  • Decades of expertise go untapped: The web team, in aggregate, probably has decades of web experience under its belt. Decentralization empowers relatively unskilled web workers to affect the site’s overall visitor experience in potentially negative ways. While it makes sense to decentralize some aspects of a site’s maintenance, why not tap the breadth and depth of the team’s skills and knowledge for major decisions?

Next, I’ll discuss the advantages of centralization. But before I get into it, let me provide context to the discussion.

I have no issue whatsoever with decentralization in terms of content. What I do have an issue with is decentralizing the management of other aspects of the web effort — strategy, IA, design and code. Decentralizing those aspects result in the pitfalls I outlined above. Now there’s always an exception to the rule, but those should be few and far between and that mantra holds true in this case.

In a nutshell, centralizing a site’s management should manifest itself in the opposite ways already outlined. Here’s the quick rundown:

  • Greater consistency in design, navigation, functionality, overall experience
  • Better focus and clarity in communicating the organization’s messages and goals
  • A more symbiotic effort toward marketing the organization to a diverse set of audiences
  • A systematic, proactive approach to improving the visitor experience
  • Single source accountability for many of the site’s performance metrics and marketing goals
  • Greater efficient use of time, effort and resources
  • Faster project turnaround time
  • Generally, a more sustainable approach
  • A happier web team/better morale

However, all that said, centralization does raise issues. Most prominent is the fact that it’s a huge break from the past. The university has long given individual units large latitude in terms of how to run their groups. So much so, that the bigger units don’t even bother with the web team. Instead, they hire outside agencies to knock out whatever it is they need to accomplish. That’s just decentralization by another name though. Our biggest hurdle is the perception that centralizing the site will mean an inability to uniquely market each unit. The argument will go something like: the anthropology department will look like the political science department which will look like the music department and so on down the line.

That’s where the decentralized approach to content comes back into the picture. Content is the best, most efficient way to make your pitch. Yes, design, layout, colors, etc. influence decisions, but (and this is coming from a designer) it matters less that photos are floated left versus right compared to what those photos depict. It matters less that copy is Helvetica rather than Georgia than what the copy says. The ability to determine content is the ability to market.

What centralization ultimately allows is efficient, planned out efforts to roll out improvements and functionality in a consistent, controlled and timely manner based on visitor and university needs. The organization and visitors benefit while the web team stays sane.