Day 2 Session Notes–Increase Productivity and Drive Business Impact

— Hello and happy to be here to talk about increased productivity and business impact

  • Starting a new role as experience strategist and talking about UX impact

— Speaking through experiences and strategies

— Talk about how to maximize productivity and drive business impact for design

 

— Current state of industry has atmosphere of gloom since heights of hiring during pandemic

  • 500,000 impacted by layoffs and decrease in job postings and UXR jobs

— There are opportunities out there though, with businesses looking to do more with less, and be more customer-centric

  • User customers are willing to pay more for great experience and problem of evaluating impact of UX and design teams and take deeper dive into it

— Quote from David Wilson

  • Most creative teams are teetering on edge of greatness, but why does impact fail to show up in end-of-month graphs?
    • Why are we adversely impacted with layoffs?

— Let’s touch upon UX maturity and interesting topic for conversation

  • Start talking about type of research and design perspective and skills of UXR and more about how positioned within organization

— From project level

  • Tactical elements and getting things out the door and shipped. Focus on teams and how they collaborate
  • Strategic elements are those figuring out direction and vision of organizations

— All too often we end up in tactical space as UXers, and are service driven

  • Connecting dots between tactical level and strategic space

 

 

— What insights drive decisions internally for organizations?

  • Business insights on what business needs to achieve
  • Marketing insights—Stuff like competitors analysis and SEO
  • Digital Analytics—Set behind websites and social media
  • AB Testing for Metrics
  • Technological Insights— What can technology do and its capabilities
  • UX Research— Insight from users

 

— Trend in types of insights between what UXR does and other insights

  • All other insights are quantitative, while UXR doesn’t have same quant edge

— Metrics are crucial element that needs to be combined with qual data, and provide grand perspective

— Jakob Nielsen where quant data shines is in boiling complex situations to easy numbers that can be discussed, and tackled

  • Numbers drive conversations and decisions. They are the executive language

— We need to get closer to those numbers

— We often take backseat to product delivery, with nodding heads and rueful smiles

  • Orgs are doubling down on agile and lean. Driving the speed of delivery as quickly as possible
  • UXR slows down processes and impact across the board, but too many mistakes are made when UXR is ignored

— AI won’t make things better in near future, through making data more accessible in many ways, but this increases the demand

  • Forecasting trends and data driven experiences

— Content more readily available to more people

—

— It can also mock UX research tasks like personas for. a made-up app

  • Why would product team wait for weeks for UXR to generate value
  • Have less time and patience to wait for process

— Need to earn trust

  • But they still need to validate data used to generate AI is accurate

—

— The result? Frustrated design teams, with subjective decision making with highly important people in the room, aka HIPPOs, driving decisions

  • Design by Committee Culture

— Designers paint by numbers to recreate vision of what app may be to look like

  • Problem is poorly defined and no ‘why’ behind a decision

— Designers lacking in information and following subjective track that follows internally

  • Risk of wasted effort and constant rework for poorly shipped product

 

— A lot of rework takes joy out of doing the job, along with constant solutions

  • We are often going through Agile cycles, with different decisions throughout Agile cycle

— Take six sprints, then have made hundreds of decisions

  • If no feedback from end-user hard to go back and make changes
  • Learning something at Sprint 6 is costly, due to compounding impact of poor decisions
    • Often we are delivering MVPs and will say will fix it later while failing to fix underlying problem

— Chaos is the result

—

 

— Boils down that in order for UXers to have seat at table, and executive have to have KPIs to measure against

  • How to bridge gap?

— Communicating business impact?

 

— Advancing design maturity, by speaking language business understands, and taking business goals with UX insights

  • Ops is best situated to do this, and have understanding of insights within the design org and provide quant data where we can

 

— Looking at metrics

  • Executive: Cost, Revenues, Resilience, and Profit
  • Divisional: Cost of new customers, retention of customers, selling products and services
    • Managing brand reputation and kinds of things
    • Breaking impacts
  • Have conversations all too often around ease of use, task success, and comprehension
    • Hard to tie with rest of business communication
    • UX assets are business assets— and we need to talk about them in that way

— Case Study that bring this to life

  • Can be done again

— At Citi, wanted to increase credit card applications by 22%, and wanted to measure impact of website redesign to show data to survey why people weren’t applying after shopping for it

— Realized were lacking combo of behavioral and qual data to figure it out

  • Study helped us realize success rate was lower than 70% and lot of frustration going on
  • Problem came from comparing credit cards side-by-side
    • Presented metrics along with why behind root cause of problem
  • Retested feature improved metrics from customer success to satisfaction

— We could reduce costs to call center by 30%

  • Appreciate challenge with metrics and how to play things back in business

— Got seat at table

  • All companies need to act like software company, and improve quality and increase development velocity— freeing up time to work

 

— So let’s meet Alex, a chief digital officer, and make sure that to hit few goals in terms of differentiation in terms of impact and mission to make sustainable fashion accessible across all channels

  • What Alex can do to hit goals across development lifecycle

 

— How to do this?

  • Quality Score to measure digital experience that combines what customers say and feel and what they do
  • This shows quality of digital experience and discussing quality of score of experience

 

— Alex could figure out 80+ score to hit to reduce waste of product and increase confidence in data in decision making for product

  • Strength of score will go up as tasks are impacted
  • Impact loyalty score below

— Power of user testing and data and metrics and tell a complete story

 

— Measuring experience quality with each stage of product development lifecycle and validating concept before development and experiences customers love and improving strengths and weaknesses

  • Use benchmarking to stay ahead of competition to drive impact and huge differentiation

 

— So, here are our closing thoughts

 

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— To achieve impact, need advancement of design maturity in organization and a partnership with DesignOps and product management leaders

 

— This would be our North Star state and what would be on whiteboards and research and design

  • Talking from active organization

— Deep dive into key organizational goals of the firm, and use AI to peruse things like financial statement

  • Strategic partnership with product owners to reduce rework as much as possible

— What insights look like, and what dashboards to get hands on

 

— Qual, quant and business goals drive innovation and design moving forward to become strategic resource in org

 

 

— Thank you and happy to have questions