A Pattern for User-Centric Organizational Change

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By Kimberly Dunwoody

Published: October 6, 2014

“During internal UX design presentations, many UX designers find themselves faced with well-meaning stakeholders who believe that their needs are highly representative of the needs of users, or customers.”

During internal UX design presentations, many UX designers find themselves faced with well-meaning stakeholders who believe that their needs are highly representative of the needs of users, or customers. For example, in recent months, stakeholders have told designers on my team:

• “I prefer using a house icon instead of the word Home in the navigation, and I am sure that our users would feel the same way.”
• “I used to be in the same field as our users five years ago, so I am sure that I know what they want.”
• “If this is too difficult, we’ll just put more information in the training manual. That is what our users would expect.”

Rather than seeing this type of response to design decisions as an obstacle, I encourage my team to see this as an opportunity to help stakeholders understand that they are not representative of users. In all of the cases that I mentioned, my team already had direct user feedback that indicated the stakeholders’ assumptions were in fact incorrect. However, even this type of data may not be enough to change such deeply held beliefs.

On projects, for example, I have seen limited success when using tactics like providing access to usability test–session videos as a means of helping internal stakeholders to understand current user needs. While such an approach is helpful in building stakeholder understanding of specific user needs relating to a particular project, this type of learning is not necessarily portable across an entire organization.

After closely observing this organizational dance for several years, I conducted some research on how to help non-UX employees to develop a deeper understanding of user needs. The research that resulted from my curiosity about this issue eventually evolved into my doctoral research topic.

During that research, a pattern emerged that revealed a gap in UX professionals’ typical list of truisms. While “Know your users, because they are not you” is already on that list, we should add “Know your internal stakeholders, because they are not you” to the list. UX professionals are notrepresentative of the average employee in an organization.

The Listen, Learn, Act Framework

“I have been working with my team to develop the Listen, Learn, Act framework into a UX pattern for customer-centric organizational change.”

Employing this new point of view, I began to research a more systemic way of communicating current user needs to stakeholders—that is, non-UX employees. I created an initial, three-step framework—Listen, Learn, Act—to support more systematic user connectedness. During my research, I found that many non-UX employees feel frustrated when

• they want to listen, but do not have access to voice-of-the-customer (VOC) data
• they want to learn about, but do not have a clear sense of their firm’s customer-centric vision
• they want to act, but first need to engage in training so they can learn how to apply customer-centric behaviors in their daily work 

Conversely, UX professionals—who are often more directly connected to user needs—become frustrated when internal stakeholders cannot understand how a design fulfills known user needs and, thus, their rationale for design decisions.

More recently, I have been working with my team to develop the Listen, Learn, Act framework into a UX pattern for customer-centric organizational change.  Communicating this framework using the familiar construct of a UX pattern has helped the designers on my team to tackle the problem of the stakeholder-user disconnect as a design problem instead of an issue relating to organizational politics. By applying this type of design thinking, we have reconceived our typical UX artifacts for the purpose of communicating with an internal audience and bridging the stakeholder-user gap.

Listening

“We start by listening and applying qualitative analysis practices to UX artifacts….”

In applying this pattern for customer-centric organizational behavior change, we start by listening and applying qualitative analysis practices to UX artifacts such as

• Usability Reports
• Ethnography Studies
• Usage Metrics

During our analysis, we apply qualitative thematic coding across various customer-feedback listening posts.

Learning

“During learning, we take our coded themes and translate them into a customer journey map.”

Once we have a strong coding pattern in place, we can move on to the next phase in our pattern for customer-centric organizational behavior change, whose goal is to discover insights and learn from our data.

During learning, we take our coded themes and translate them into acustomer journey map. During this mapping process, we first create a simplified story about the customer’s journey when using our product. We then leverage this storytelling framework by inserting our coding from the listening phase so we can generate a data-driven storyboard. To increase the perceived validity of our journey map, we very carefully map our insights back to specific data sources. This approach has the added benefit of showing when it’s possible to triangulate a customer need across multiple listening posts.

Our goal during this learning phase is to create a journey map that both

• conveys what our data shows is most important to customers
• is comprehensible by a typical internal stakeholder in under ten minutes

The process of achieving this ten-minutes goal usually involves some pretty ruthless editing to ensure very succinct communication.

With this journey map in hand, our next step during the learning phase is to communicate the map broadly across the organization. By presenting this conceptual framework to our stakeholders, we build a common understanding of user needs—long before we present any design concepts. Because we have taken the additional step of tracking our data sources, stakeholders who remain skeptical can go back to the original data to review our analysis.

Acting

“We map our design rationale directly back to specific elements of the journey map.”

Having achieved an enhanced level of organizational understanding, we can then move on to the next stage of our pattern for customer-centric organizational behavior change and act.

During this stage, our primary action is to communicate a design solution and provide its accompanying design rationale. What makes this different from the way others might leverage journey maps is that we map our design rationale directly back to specific elements of the journey map. By delivering design documents that cross-reference our journey maps, we fully realize our pattern for customer-centric organizational behavior change. This approach lets us

• build a common understanding of customer needs through easy-to-understand customer-insights education—using our journey map
• deliver our design rationale within the framework of this common understanding of customer needs

By tying our design decisions back to the journey map—our common organizational knowledge base—we make our decisions less mysterious to our stakeholders. This can reduce the friction that is often associated with the socialization of a design.

Prior to the introduction of this pattern for customer-centric organizational behavior change, UX designers had tried to accomplish too much during a single design presentation meeting. They attempted to get stakeholders up to speed on user needs, while at the same time defending their design solutions. During those meetings, many stakeholders had seemed overwhelmed by the amount of information the designers were communicating to them, causing them to fall into the familiar pattern of assuming they were representative of the user.

Although this may seem counterintuitive, we actually gained greater efficiency by having two meetings instead of one. Separating user-needs education—our journey map presentation—from the communication of our design rationale—our design presentation—helped our stakeholders to more effectively digest the information.

Becoming Customer Centric

“To become customer centric, an organization must derive its goals from VOC data.”

To become customer centric, an organization must

• derive its goals from VOC data—listen
• communicate these goals broadly throughout the organization—learn
• help employees to achieve these goals—act

By using this pattern for customer-centric organizational behavior change, UX professionals can position themselves as customer-centric change agents and create broader-based organizational support for their design solutions.

- See more at: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/10/a-pattern-for-user-centric-organizational-change.php#sthash.e3Ykzsny.dpuf

September 22nd, 2014

The Answers to Your 18 Biggest Content Marketing Questions

Here at Contently, we geek out harder on content marketing than a Batman nut at ComicCon. For us, the only thing better than content marketing is talking about content marketing. In that spirit, earlier this month we asked our Twitter followers if they had any pressing questions, and they responded in droves. Here are our answers, with some added context, examples, and love.

1. WHAT IS “NATIVE” AND WHAT IS “OWNED”? WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

2. WHY WOULD WE CREATE OWNED CONTENT RATHER THAN BUY SPONSORED CONTENT?

These two questions are so similar that it makes sense to answer them together.

Let’s start with the basic definitions. Shane Snow, CCO of Contently, covered the definitions in our “State of Content Marketing 2014” report:

It’s hard to say which one (native or owned) is better in an absolute sense; they simply serve different purposes, and in an ideal world, they work in concert. In an article earlier this month, Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter detailed how brands should use native advertising to build an audience that they own:

One could make (and many have made) the case that brands communicating directly with their own audience is bad news for publishers who depend on being the audience gatekeepers. I don’t buy that.

For one, building an audience is hard. And more importantly, even a brand with their own audience will want to reach other audiences with their message. Whether they use sponsored stories, paid distribution, or social advertising to get there is dependent on the circumstances—but the need to reach additional eyeballs efficiently and effectively is constant.

Case in point: Here at Contently, we have a huge audience for our industry pub, The Content Strategist. And yet we still pay through the nose to place sponsored content on publisher sites like Adweek. Why would we do that when we could put it in front of our own audience for free? Simple: Adweek readers are people we want to reach.

Shane also tackled this question in an article for Ad Age, noting that having direct access to an audience is every brand’s goal, but it takes time, patience, and editorial leadership to make that happen. In the meantime, sponsored content is a way to align a brand with an already recognized and trusted platform.

3. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A LONG-TERM CONTENT STRATEGY VS. A CAMPAIGN-BY-CAMPAIGN APPROACH?

As we noted last month, the cliché is true: Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need time to develop an effective editorial strategy through trial and error and to build trust with readers. That’s why some agencies and custom-content studios run by publishers are requiring brands to commit to a content push of at least four months, if not a year or longer. In an ideal world, they’d be signing on for 5-plus-year commitments.

4. WHO SHOULD WE BE TARGETING, I.E., WHO SHOULD OUR AUDIENCE BE?

Determining your target audience is content strategy 101. Who wants your service or product? Who shares similar values? What do they want but aren’t getting enough of? These are easy questions to ask, but difficult questions to answer—and those answers are different for each and every business. If you don’t have someone on your team who has built an audience before, you likely need to find the right help.

5. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT DEVELOPING A BRAND VOICE?

This is a crucial aspect of brand publishing, and it was one of the main topics Shane covered in the first-ever Contently e-book, “The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging and Content Strategy.” Though three years old, the advice still holds strong.

Witty, smart, sarcastic, optimistic, skeptical— whatever the tone, be consistent. Early on, figure out what your brand’s message is and how you want to say it. Choose a tone or angle, and then consistently apply it to your content. If you want to be instructional and serious, stick with that. As Shane writes in “Beginner’s Guide,” it’s not so much what you say—it’s how you say it.

6. HOW MUCH CONTENT SHOULD I BE CREATING?

The short answer: a lot. A brand needs to pump out quality content in order to establish trust in their readership. The perfect mix is different for each brand, but when starting out, look at key engagement metrics (like engaged time, average finish time, shares, and return visits) to see which pieces of content are compelling your audience to come back. Then, double down on what works while constantly testing and iterating new approaches. That’s the approach the brand newsroom of the future will take.

7. HOW DOES A BRAND SET UP A NEWSROOM?

Brand newsrooms are all the rage right now. When TCS sat down with content strategist Neil Chase, he had some key advice for setting up a brand newsroom internally:

The brand newsroom must embrace and follow the company’s culture, but it also needs the ability to change that culture. To make a closed company more open. To make a company that’s nervous about publicity more comfortable with it. To help a company that operates in a regulatory environment able to do more than it thought possible before. To try new things, use new technology and break bad old habits. More here.

Brands have the opportunity to reimagine the traditional newsroom structure to best serve their needs. This means establishing specific responsibilities for each department. And as Shane explains in the talk below, most every decision should be driven by data and the quest for an exponentially increasing return on investment:

And for a visual guide to brand newsrooms, check out our interactive e-book, “The CMO’s Guide to Building a Brand Newsroom.”

8. WHAT’S A GOOD STRATEGY FOR GETTING MORE PEOPLE TO FIND YOUR CONTENT IN THE FIRST PLACE?

One of the most important principles for building an audience is the “superconnector.” This is a person or platform that has an established audience you can borrow. If there are people in your brand’s network with whom you can connect, do it.

But how? You need to offer unique and valuable content. Produce content that their audience is interested in and then give it away. This way you make the superconnector happy, and you get exposed to a broader audience. Offering value leads to trust, and the audience will be more likely to follow you to your own platform.

It’s a similar idea to finding influencers. Connecting to 500 people through one person is much more efficient than trying to reach people individually. In addition, don’t be afraid to pay to jumpstart your traffic. Creating good content is only effective if people read it. Here’s the TCS breakdown of the top distribution platforms.

For more, check out Shane’s webinar, “Superconnecting Massive Audiences,” below:

9. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF OUTSOURCING CONTENT CREATION?

Don’t think outsourcing, think in-sourcing, as jargony as that sounds. (Forgive us.) Bringing in freelancers adds a fresh twist to a brand’s voice. For instance, General Mills brought in outside writers, photographers, and infographic experts to write and design their successful recipe site, Tablespoon. While the perspectives of freelance brand journalists are often at odds with traditional marketers, that’s actually a good thing, breathing fresh life into a content campaign. Their ability to connect with audiences and tell a great story in unorthodox ways can be invaluable.

10. IS IT REALLY WORTH THE INVESTMENT TO HIRE TRAINED JOURNALISTS FOR BRANDED CONTENT OVER CHEAPER WRITERS AND COPYWRITERS?

Definitely. With the saturation of Internet content, brands are not only competing with one another for attention, but also with established media powerhouses. Brands need the talent to compete, and that makes writers who are talented, experienced, and passionate about a brand’s mission invaluable. There is truth to the warning “You get what you pay for,” and when it comes to content, quality is king. Click here for more.

11. WHAT IS A GOOD STRATEGY FOR GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE YOUR CONTENT WHEN THEY MAINLY GO TO YOUR SITE TO BUY STUFF?

Depends on what you’re selling, but a smart strategy is to integrate editorial with the products themselves. You want a balance of boosting the appeal of your product with providing value through your content. The story cannot only be about the product. Contently uses the “Content Funnel” as a framework for creating content for varying levels of engagement.

The first step is to attract your audience by offering them stories that speak to their values and are either timely, seasonal, or evergreen—meaning always relevant. The second level of the funnel is for stories about the company and the customer. This gets a bit more personal and moves the audience closer to the product. The third tier is the stories concerning your product. The people who make it to this level of the funnel are the ones who will become patrons of your brand.

A few brands doing an awesome job of weaving amazing content into their commerce platforms are Mr. Porter, Birchbox, and Apple.

Groupon is one more great example of combining content and commerce. It made stories an integral part of each deal, and rode unprecedented conversion rates all the way to an IPO. People could connect with the company on multiple levels and kept coming back for more.

12. WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DEFINE YOUR CONTENT?

The best content is mission-driven: For us, that mission is building a better media world. That’s why we cover the media and marketing world here on The Content Strategist, give freelancers the tools and knowledge they need to succeed on The Freelancer, and fund independent investigative journalism over at Contently.org. If you want a definition, start with a question: What’s my mission?

13. WHAT METRICS CAN HELP YOU IMPROVE YOUR WRITING AND PERFORMANCE?

14. HOW DOES A BRAND CALCULATE THEIR ROI? NOT JUST A FORMULA BUT THE PROCESS AND TOOLS?

Most metrics focus on developing the brand, not the creator. The natural progression in smart content strategy is Stories > Engagement > Relationships > ROI. Each level of the brand newsroom should focus on one or more of those pieces. For creative people, the story metrics are the most important. For editors, engagement and relationships should take priority.

Story metrics that matter most: engaged time, finish percentage, and return engagement. These three metrics lead to relationships, which then directly translate to ROI when the conversion pathway is tracked correctly. For more, check out our “4 Keys to Calculating ROI for Content Marketers” (process) and our e-book, “The New World of Content Measurement” (tools).

15. WHICH SOCIAL PLATFORM SHOULD I USE TO BUILD A FOLLOWING OF WEALTHY INVESTORS USING LONGFORM CONTENT?

As we detailed in our “Banking on Content” e-book, LinkedIn is a finance content marketer’s best friend. LinkedIn has the audience you want, and their targeting capabilities are unmatched. If you’re publishing directly on LinkedIn, they have great engagement metrics built into the platform, and they also recently rolled out a redesign of their longform pages. If you can build an audience on LinkedIn, you can attract a following that will transfer over to your owned media platform.

For more finance content marketing tips, check out our “State of Finance Content Marketing” e-book.

16. AS FAR AS FORMATTING AND PLACEMENT ARE CONCERNED, WHAT IS THE SWEET SPOT FOR LINKING TO EXTERNAL RESOURCES IN ARTICLES?

If you’re giving a load of resources, do so at the end of the story, not as a distraction midway through. If links to external resources are important for context, definitely include them in-text (like in this piece). If you’re not concerned about content engagement, then split test it the same way you’d split test a landing page.

Also, whenever you reference a brand name in your article—yours or otherwise —always link it within the text. This can amp up your SEO ranking.

17. WHAT IS “THOUGHT LEADERSHIP” AND IS THERE VALUE TO BEING CONSIDERED A THOUGHT LEADER?

A brand that is a thought leader assumes expertise in a field. People rely on them as a resource. Thought leadership is the number one goal Contently clients list. Really, thought leadership is about branding. If your brand is intelligent, that’s exactly how you want to self-style. If your brand sells Doritos-shell tacos, who cares about thought leadership? You might care about entertaining teens and twenty-somethings.

And yes, thought leadership has become a buzz phrase, but it’s here to stay. Here are some tips to make it work for you.

18. WHAT TRENDS WILL BE IMPACTING CONTENT CREATION IN THE NEAR FUTURE?

What if Coca-Cola took you inside of a can or Corona could actually find you your beach? Immersive virtual reality is going to hit marketers by surprise. Strapping on goggles and transporting instantly to a virtual hangout will be a huge opportunity for bigger and better storytelling.

The main answer is that we’ll see more players: media companies, media agencies, creative agencies, PR firms, small shops—everyone’s selling content right now. We’ll also see an explosion in multimedia and branded web series, leveraging YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and other emerging platforms and talent to reach millennials.

There will also be a greater merging between digital and social media, and traditional media. HP’s recent commercial featuring a montage of Vines is a great example. Finally, a select few brands will finally figure out how to structure their organizations like a media company.

THERE YOU HAVE IT.

Thank you to everyone who submitted your questions. As always, when others pop up, feel free to reach out @Contently.

Why Banks Need to Revamp their User Experience

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ARTICLE NO. 1209 SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

byRich Berkman

The most interesting things happening in financial services are not happening in financial services. Thanks to a slew of new and older digital apps and websites, such as Apple Pay, Venmo, Square, Mint, and PayPal, kids can borrow money from their parents via text message or sign for a pizza delivery (including tip) on their phones. Families can use analytic tools to drill down through their own financial data to see where their money goes and how to cut spending. These tools have made every aspect of financial management—including transfers, payments—incredibly intuitive and easy.

Unfortunately, the financial services sector got left behind when the digital revolution hit. Now they need to catch up.

Since automatic teller machines were first rolled out in the 1960s, followed by internet banking in the 1990s and mobile banking in the late 2000s, consumers have come to expect 24-hour access to their checking or savings accounts no matter where they are. Certainly, these inventions have helped meet this demand but they were mainly created to process transactions, often omitting a focus on the customer experience. Still, the most useful and powerful cross-channel, digital tools rolled out in recent years were not introduced by banks, but by tech companies that understood how to use the Internet, data analytics, and mobile technologies to solve consumers’ day-to-day problems.

Where Do Banks Stand in the Digital World?

Right now, banks are among the least popular consumer businesses. They aren’t in a position to provide significant interest on savings accounts, and they’ve become increasingly reliant on fees to keep consumer banking profitable. In the meantime, they haven’t done enough to improve or enhance the banking experience. The customer hasn’t come first in the eyes of financial institutions for a very long time, partly because retail banking is often the least profitable part of a financial services firm, and partly because the industry is reluctant to let go of legacy business practices or face the challenge of modernizing. With banks and credit card companies seeking to leverage third party services like Apple Pay, they may be looking to change this, but it’s too early to gauge whether customers will respond.

Account holders can’t access very much of their own data (in many cases they can only see the most recent year’s statements online) and are limited to viewing account balances, rather than sorting raw data to see, for example, how much money was spent on groceries over 63 days’ time. Also, the fees for the most basic of services are widely considered excessive. (By one account, the average monthly fee is between $12.50 and $14.63, and overdraft fees are typically upwards of $30.) It’s no surprise that startups from Silicon Valley and around the world are lustfully eyeing the space—known as fintech—under the belief that they can provide better financial services with lower fees than the big banks that dominate the sector today.

The key challenge for financial institutions is to figure out how to use a cross-channel approach that includes mobile to reshape the customer experience by embedding the experience into the customers’ life with budgeting, paying, planning, etc. This is especially key as a whopping 91 percent of mobile users keep their phones or tablets within reach 100 percent of the time and over 400 million users rely on mobile banking worldwide. Financial services firms need to connect with their customers wherever they are—often on the go. Banks could roll out, for example, budgeting apps or websites that would send periodic status updates so consumers could see how close they are to meeting their financial goals. Or, if they fail to meet their goals, they could receive spending summaries detailing which transactions threw them off course.

Unique Opportunities to Approaching New Technologies

Unfortunately, banks also have a complex problem: Many of their practices and much of their data is heavily regulated. In recent years, most efforts to change have been focused on complying with federal regulations rather than on improving services or streamlining basic operations. Financial institutions that are serious about evolving across multiple channels in the shortest possible time must develop them separately from back-end systems as much possible.

Mobile is an incredibly important first step in a purely digital transformation, but organizations need to think outside of channels to really put the customer first. Financial institutions have a plethora of customer data that other industries don’t necessarily have access to, which, by using analytics, could give them insight into user behaviors and preferences that has previously been unavailable. This insight from analytics could help banks transform the customer experience with personalization.

Data analytics has allowed a wide range of industries to offer unprecedented levels of customizationtweet this

Often, design is considered a creative process. While still rooted in user research, it’s becoming more and more a data-driven process that uses analytics and customer insight to ultimately create better hyper-personalized user experiences. In the traditional banking world, the roadblock is that most of the data isn’t shared across the organization or can’t be used for certain reasons. If banks could leverage this data across the institution and use analytics to harness valuable insights, they could improve the effectiveness of their channels while enhancing the overall customer engagement and experience across them. Traditional financial services institutions need to realize this new role of data in their user experience design while also becoming more flexible, nimble organizations to keep up with fintech.

Rethinking the User Experience

Optimizing customer experience requires a holistic understanding of the user and a willingness to change. In some ways, this is where banks fall short. They already have more than enough information about their customers, they just need to figure out where the data is and how to use it effectively, which is easier said than done but also a necessity. The roll out of new mobile apps and other cross-channel experiences will exponentially increase data generation as more people use their phones, watches and more to interact with insurers, retailers, airlines, mortgage brokers, and so on. The better banks understand their customers—and can build models based on rich user research, analytics and evolved “personas”—the better they’ll be able to improve services to meet today and future customer demands.

Banks don’t have to open offices in Silicon Valley and hire an expensive army of developers in order to make this happen. They do have to draw up a strategy, though; and more importantly, they need to listen to their customers, who will determine the look and feel of the user experience. A recent IBM survey of C-suite officers found that customers only come second to the C-suite in terms of how much influence they have over the strategic direction of a company. Data analytics has allowed a wide range of industries—from entertainment to healthcare—to offer unprecedented levels of customization for customers. Banking will not be left untouched.

In some ways, changing the user experience requires a cultural shift within the organization, too. Most divisions within a bank work independent of one another—even though they may have many of the same customers—and they seldom share data. One account holder could have three or four different relationships with the same bank. That’s obviously redundant. It’s up to businesses to tightly integrate operations behind the scenes so that every interaction with a customer is thoughtful and meaningful.

Conclusion

Certainly, a redesign of the user experience in the banking sector isn’t something that can ever be completely finished. It’s an ongoing process focused on user centricity. If it’s done right, customers drive the changes, which are backed up by data analytics and incorporated into a corporate strategy. Banks that have a detailed and accurate understanding of their customers can provide the best possible service for each and every individual—the segment of one. Banks that don’t, could find their businesses getting eaten alive by the disruptions of startups.

Image of miniature people on coinscourtesy Shutterstock.