I was fortunate enough to be invited to join the Better By Design Study Tour 2018 a couple of months ago. The Better by Design Study Tour is an invite-only, guided learning experience for New Zealand companies to experience the culture of some of the world’s leading customer-centered organizations.

For eight days, Andy Patrick (Chief Operations Officer at Fergus) and I joined a group of more than 30 executives from different New Zealand companies and visited the most customer-centric companies in the United States, more specifically New York and San Francisco.

Apart from meeting incredible people and listening to an interesting array of amazing tales from entrepreneurship and product development, we learned a lot.

It took some good time to organize and synthesize the insights I wanted to share, and I tried really hard to keep it brief. This is the result:

Contently

Host: Shane Snow (CEO)

Contently’s mission is to build a better media world — for creatives who live to tell stories and tell stories to live, for businesses that want better ways to connect with consumers, and for everyday people who rely on stories to understand the world better.

A bit of background:

• Creative writers were starting to switch to a contracting model. The opportunity was to connect companies looking for content with journalists, writers and creatives in general.
• The company started pitching their idea to big media companies, but soon they realised that brands were more interested in this type of content marketing.
• After learning this, they changed their homepage to: Are you a freelance writer? Click here. Are you a business? Click here.
• They discovered a virtuous cycle around stories: Writers want to tell stories and companies want to tell their story.

Key benefits of storytelling:

• Stories are scientifically proven via neuroscience to be effective.
• They fire up connections in your brain to remember things better.
• Stories are a proven and known way to pass down information and to help people to remember and share ideas.
• Good stories make us care.
• Society has been sharing ideas and knowledge like this for centuries.
• Our brain is wired to tell and respond to stories.

The structure of a good story

Stories are very effective to connect people with your brand, the structure of a good story is:

• Relatability: The story needs to be related to something that audience can relate. The brain is in a better mood when it understands the story.
• Novelty: The story needs to cover something new or exciting. This is why most of the movie sequels don’t work as well as the original.
• Tension: Keep the reader engaged by creating tension, it can be a story of power struggle, a person looking for loved one. A good story will establish that gap over-and-over again and the characters will try to close it.
• Fluency: Make it easy to understand and follow. This is why Harry Potter became so successful, as is written for kids, it’s really easy to understand.

The Neuroscience of storytelling

• Oxytocin is a nerve chemical, it is sometimes referred to as the “love hormone,” because levels of oxytocin increase during hugging and orgasm. It may also have benefits as a treatment for a number of conditions, including depression, anxiety, and intestinal problems.
• When a mother gives birth to a child her brain is flooded with oxytocin to help her care for and love her child.
• Oxytocin spikes when someone does something kind for you or hugs you. It also goes up when you read a story that makes you feel related.
• Shane shared an example of two charity ads: The first presented the statistics around the need and appealed for donations while the second was a father telling a story about his child. More people were moved to donate money when they heard the dad’s story, they were also shown to have more oxytocin in their blood.

Storytelling for brands

• Businesses must invest more thought into what they’re doing than just a daily picture on Twitter.
• The roots of empathy are sustained by learning about each others’ experiences and stories as humans.
• Tell stories that connect people with your brand.
• Think about any relationships you have that are deep and meaningful. They are proactively nurtured by time and sharing. With great content you can do this with your brand.
• It is easier to disagree positively, help people and support them when using the power of empathy. This can work also for our staff, our business and our brand.
• If your customers know the story, they can buy in and then relate to the story of the product.

Recommended reading list

• To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
• The 36 Questions That Lead To Love
• The Story Telling Edge (book written by Shane Snow)

Armando’s key takeaways from Contently

• Introduce storytelling to your internal activities as much as possible, when sharing what are your goals for the week, during onboarding of new team members and even when interviewing candidates by asking them to share stories about themselves.
• Measure the health of your company by measuring the relationships inside it, between coworkers, with your clients, even with suppliers and partners.
• Any activity you use in business can benefit from telling stories. You can start a story with ads or a blog post, and link customers to another stories. Just because it is a story, people will care.
• Most of the time, going to the movies it’s a good date because of the equation: Shared story + empathy + oxytocin = The brain is more receptive.
• When telling a story go as deep as possible. For a shoes company, don’t only say what the shoes are made of, but rather talk about the farmers that grow the leather, etc.

IBM iX

Host: Bob Lukasic — Executive Creative Director

IBM iX is a design agency established by IBM offering creative solutions for business strategy & experience design to solve complex business challenges.

From a Design Thinking to Delivery

• At the root of any problem there is an opportunity to understand a range of alternatives, think, articulate them and approach it in a different way.
• When focusing on experience design, the main challenge is taking the insights and outputs of design thinking throughout delivery.
• Businesses are rebuilding their strategies around experience design as the primary focus for competition.
• Investing in CX (customer experience) pays off: Design driven companies outperformed the S&P Index by 219% over 10 years and 48% of design led companies have a defined process around a digital consumer led experience.
• Great experiences depend on a strong foundation of design.
• Being human is the most important part of customer experience.

The Main Principles of Enterprise Design Thinking + Agile + Dev Ops

• Focus on user outcomes.
• Diverse empowered teams.
• Restless reinvention and iteration.
• Introduce a loop of continuous improvement: Observe, reflect, make.

Iterative Delivery

• Enterprise Design Thinking (The What): The way we uncover the insights and come up with a way to answer users’ needs.
• Agile (The How): Delivery approach centred on incremental iterations.
• Dev Ops (The iteration): A set of collaborative practices to deliver rapid, continuous deployments taken from feedback cycles.

About building a successful MVP

• Design your MVP around the core problem for your users.
• Deploy a build-measure-learn process, where you collect and improve your product on a continuous improvement environment.
• The goal is to provide an immediate benefit while minimizing development costs and using data to add user value over time.
• Bob used the famous cupcake analogy: “Start off with a cupcake. You’ll learn the flavours you like, uncover any problems in your kitchen, and in general you’ll fast forward the feedback loop”

User Research Methods

• Story Board: Defining personas, goals and motivations and then clustering them into scenarios.
• Empathy Map: Allows you to step into the shoes of your consumers, understanding what they SAY, THINK, DO and FEEL. You can do this by observing your users and analysing customer feedback. Once the Empathy Map is ready, you (or one of your colleagues) can do a playback of the empathy map. This is very helpful to get engagement and buy in.

Armando’s key takeaways from IBM iX

• When defining an MVP and its subsequent milestones, make clear you communicate the intention and the scope with the team at all times.
• Introduce Design Thinking across the board in your company, this will help team members to focus on the problem to solve and make decisions based on how much value for the customer they are creating.
• Make time in your process to reflect from the things that didn’t go well and learn from them.
• To enable a user-centric process the design leadership must get buy in from the top, you can do this by talking to executives, organising talks or workshops. Cross functional collaboration is key.

Casper

Host: Jeff Chapin — Co-Founder and Chief of Product

Casper is a U.S.-based company that sells sleep products online. They started selling obsessively engineered mattresses online. On April 22, 2014, Casper officially launched, selling $1 million worth of product in the first 28 days.

Some background

• The company is about 5 years old. Started in August and launched in April.
• The experience buying the mattress in the US was terrible: sales associates are commission based, lots of sales pressure, very little info available for the shopper. That’s why Casper’s value proposition and offering resonated well with people.
• They are solving a fundamental problem: Sleep. Alongside nutrition and wellness, sleep is the 3rd pillar of health.
• Their first approach was to disrupt the “Big Mattress” industry
• They had a simple approach: disrupt, single hero product, single channel, simple distribution model and a simple value proposition

Approach to user research

• They are using a Needs Based Segmentation approach to segment users. The needs of a retired 65 year old person’s are not the same of a 22 year old athlete.
• They have a research position on each team, in charge of gathering, analysing and synthesizing insights, both Quantitative and qualitative.
• Product Co-Creation, they put open call for people interested in participating in product development.

Approach to testing

• They do In Store A\B testing, testing different approach to packaging, branding, marketing materials and retail display options.
• Quantitative Design Explorations: Test different type of ads with different products just to see what type of things people are looking for. This is a cheap and easy way to validate an idea.
• Frame Working Your Customer’s Life: You can’t create for your customers unless we have a point of view on their life. They have invested in research to understand their customers, for example understand what are their sleeping rituals. What do people do 1–2 hours before sleeping and 1 hour after waking?
• One of the biggest insights was that to have a good sleep, a person must believe that they CAN have a good sleep. Customers must know how to have a good sleep.
• Keys to engage in a good sleep: Reminders to cue them to sleep, positive cues to fall asleep, no new tasks, feedback and reinforcement, and remove disruptors.

Armando’s key takeaways from Casper

• User testing and research helps you create strong advocates for your product or service.
• Framework your customers life. And have point of view of their life.
• To be able to grow your company needs to decentralise the decision making.
• Your user insights are your biggest treasure, Casper avoids externalising research, and they have one researcher on every team.
• Center all your efforts and initiatives around the mission and the vision, that will help you reinforce the company culture.

You made it to the end! And this was only the first day, I’m working on the notes of the rest of the visits. Many thanks a lot to the master note-taker Neil Blizzard for sharing his notes.

Whether you are a solo UX’er in your company, or you are part of a team, I’m sure you usually spend a lot of time communicating ideas, discussing findings and sharing insights with your team. Sometimes, for the sake of alignment with other teams, we even need to introduce what it is we do to the company. From C-Level people to junior developers and everything in between. Everyone seems to have their own understanding of what “User Experience” means, so agreeing on a common definition from the start is always a good idea.

I have worked with companies where, due to time/financial constraints, engaging with users was not a priority, so if I wanted to reach out to users or validate something, I would have to recruit candidates on my own. On the other hand, I worked with a company where 70% of the staff was in some way a “persona” and we had so much influence in our industry, that engaging users wasn’t a problem.

A couple of days ago I saw this tweet, and it got me thinking. The concept of “UX theatre” came along and I think is quite accurate. Basically, it means claiming to do UX while don’t engaging with users at all. And as I said earlier, I have been in companies where we did just that. And I’m not proud of that fact.

spydergrrl on Twitter

People pepper their presentations and project charters with claims of user-centered design, but don't talk to users, don't mine data for user insights, don't validate assumptions with users, don't test prototypes or even existing apps/ services/sites with users...

We are living in an era where technology is taken for granted. Everyone is creating their own apps, and there are apps for everything. No one expects apps to “just to do the work”. Users expect an experience, they expect digital products that makes their lives better for real, and that’s why user-centered design became all the rage.

But user-centered design is hard and it takes time. Finding time to talk to users (not your time, THEIR time), visiting them, creating prototypes, running workshops, observing them, organizing and documenting findings, sharing findings with your team, mining metrics, you name it. Regardless of the process and the tools, it is always hard. Because users are humans, and humans, unlike servers and programming code, are unpredictable.

But user centered design is hard and it takes time, finding time to talk to users (not your time, THEIR time)…

After reading the responses from the original tweet, I decided to put together some of the lessons I learned. Hopefully I can inspire someone to avoid doing “UX theatre” without losing rhythm.

Here they are:

— Ask Why: This seems really simple, but one of the common misunderstandings around the UX discipline, is that we are supposed to implement solutions created by stakeholders and “make them” user-centered. In my experience, most of the time projects are built around the wrong assumptions or the problem space is not clear. If you don’t ask why and define what is the expected user outcome, the rest of the process will be really complicated and confusing. And you might end up solving the wrong problem.

— Speak Up: As UX practitioners we need to be good at selling what we do, unfortunately, most of the companies are not mature enough to understand the importance of UX on their products and operations. Even though this has improved a lot lately, we still have a long way to go. Talk to stakeholders, explain to them what it is that you do, what your motivations are and why you do what you do. Most of the stakeholders are really interested in two of the things we do: solve problems and generate value, so it shouldn’t be a problem to engage them.

Talk to stakeholders, explain to them what it is that you do, what your motivations are and why you do what you do. Most of the stakeholders are really interested in two of the things we do: solve problems and generate value, so it shouldn’t be a problem to engage them.

— Share your findings: Data is king, especially when it is well presented and it aligns with the business goals. Every time you do user testing, contextual inquiries or workshops, make the habit of writing everything down and share it with the team. The connection between what the team does and user outcomes is really powerful. Try to bring up findings and anecdotes all the time, during stand-ups, meetings, retros, etc. The bottom line is: bring the user to the office as much as you can.

— Tools are tools: We waste so much time discussing which design software is better, which prototyping platform is better, if doing moderated usability testing is worth the time, if analytics tools are too expensive and so on. We need to keep in mind that we use tools to prove our hypothesis, to test task effectiveness and to understand our users. All of the conversations should be around which tool is better for the specific case, and if we can get the insights we are looking for.

— Measure: Right after defining the problem space, define what success looks like, you don’t have to define complex KPI’s. Common indicators such as: task completion time, task success rate, user error rate, user satisfaction, can make a good KPI. Defining KPI’s is not only important to ensure if you are achieving the expected outcome, but also to keep iterating and improving.

— Design is never finished: This one may seem obvious, but digital products are never finished. As UX practitioners we should be very good at compromising what is important and how we can keep improving and delivering the vision without suffering scope creep. Don’t forget to keep everyone informed of why you are compromising. Explaining why production code doesn’t look like the pixel-perfect mockups from the UX team. It should be a conversation around strategy, not a finger-pointing session.

— Be aware of the politics and be empathetic: Most of the software companies are political entities, and as such, there are different interests for different roles; a Product Owner will be focused on the delivery, the Product Manager will be in charge of getting the requirements covered, the CFO will be worried about reducing costs, Salespeople are looking to add new features so they can close more deals, and so on. I have found that it’s really helpful to understand each team member’s motivation and consider it when communicating with them. This is also really helpful also for dealing with developers. Have you tried to get a pixel-perfect screen out of a developer who hates CSS? It’s not fun.

In terms of reducing “UX Theatre”, this is what is working for me so far. If you want to discuss something, please drop me a line. If you are in Auckland, let’s go for coffee. Flat white for me. No sugar.

Taking the theater out of the UX was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was looking to get myself some personal business cards and this was the perfect opportunity to do it.

As a big quotes enthusiast, I decided to simply put together some of my favourites quotes and shared them in the shape of business cards, I used the Cotton Business Cards. This is the result:

If you want one, I usually go to the User Experience Auckland I can if we happen to meet please remind me to give you one.