Monday, January 28, 2013
Online leaders of the pack: Lessons from Amazon, Nordstrom and Walmart
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Few can rival the experience and e-commerce “chops” of Fiona Dias, who offered her perspective on “Lessons from the Leaders of the Pack” at Retail’s BIG Show. Currently Chief Strategy Officer with ShopRunner, Dias has been involved in and observing our industry’s evolution from senior leadership vantage points ranging from her current gig to GSI Commerce and Circuit City. The hallmarks of e-commerce pack leaders? Dias boiled down pack leader strategies to just four: leadership, perseverance, product and customer experience.
Leadership matters. “Excellent leadership in animals is not that different from excellent leadership in humans,” Dias observed, describing how a mother elephant uses all of her experience to lead, protect and feed her family everyday (to the tune of 300 to 500 lbs of vegetation per elephant!). Outstanding e-commerce leaders whom Dias pointed to include Jeff Bezos and Jamie Nordstrom – the former a founder, the latter a fourth generation family member whose name is on the company door. Contrast that with Walmart, who until recently “struggled mightily” with a “revolving door” of e-commerce leaders who “have come and gone.”
In Dias’ own experience, the head of e-commerce must not only be a top-notch digital leader, he or she must report to the CEO – who in turn has to push alignment throughout the organization “or that digital leader is doomed to fail.” The CEO also has to align the rest of the executive team around common goals. Finally, a holistic talent plan is key, incorporating a mix of internal and external hires, job rotations, plus incentives to reward and retain that talent.
Play the long game. Put another way, “plan and execute for the long term, not just the short term” (think about Jane Goodall’s 53-year, multi-generational study of chimpanzees). Dias observed that “every retail category is under threat from Amazon – or it will be.” Amazon’s distribution centers are getting closer to customers, improving the delivery time. The company’s services business includes “the electrical grid for cloud computing”, powering companies ranging from Samsung and Netflix to NASA. Companies need to ask themselves:
- How they will win over customers and beat competitors over the next three to five years?
- Do they consider omnichannel “the future” of the company (not just a project)?
- Is an effective investment process in place to ensure adequate resources are allocated to the multi-year plan. Ultimately, Dias underscored, “Are you adequately resourced to win in the long term?”
Product, product, product. As opposed to the old adage of “location, location, location”, retailers must first and foremost focus now on product (with mobile and the web, “Your customer may never make it to your store.”). “The reason you stand out among a sea of competitors is product,” Dias observed. In Amazon’s case, their vast product assortment dwarfs what other retailers offer. In the case of Nordstrom, it’s quality over quantity with beautiful, curated product. Whichever path they choose, companies need to develop a differentiated product strategy – “otherwise, you will struggle.” The keys:
- A clearly articulated product strategy that works in an omnichannel world (for example, on the Nordstrom site, you won’t hear the in-store piano that works so well in the store –“it’s the product that will stand out… [and] I don’t feel like I’m buying a widget.”).
- Products that your customers truly desire (“Merchandising is a lost art for many retailers,” Dias mused.)
- Careful analysis of competitive barriers to the product strategy.
Customer experience = Win or die. Amazon tops the list of online retailers with the highest customer satisfaction – and keeps getting better at it. Dias pointed to a number of loyalty features that keep customers coming back again and again: AmazonPrime, the Kindle, 1-click buying, and the “Subscribe and Save” program. Retailers who want get the customer experience right need to:
- Map every step of their customer’s experience – think about how Bezos and his team are “laser focused on the customer experience.”
- Put into place customer feedback loops on how they’re doing.
- Decide who in the organization is accountable for acting on customer feedback and remove shopping friction within and across channels.
Stanislavski and the Reluctant Stakeholder
ARTICLE NO. 938 JANUARY 15, 2013
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I I often reach a point in large project where I wonder why nobody sat the decision makers down at the beginning of the process and really questioned their ability to make empathetic decisions.
By this stage, selective user evidence has been disregarded, mostly because the client cannot relate to the outcomes or the sample of users. Thesestakeholders have assumed that the advice a team of experts can offer is irrelevant when compared to their own, singular perspective, and the design team is left rolling their eyes and tutting at the basic mistakes being forced through.
This lack of empathy, for both the users and the design team, can create a merely good enough solution where there was potential for a great one—or worse, can kill a project. So before work on a solution withinformation architects, interaction designers, and content strategists begins—before the iterative user testing phases are planned and the technical solution is discussed—why not try a series of preparatory exercises with your stakeholders?
Enter Stanislavski
There are, or course, many exercises you can use to train a non-empathetic mind, but I’m going to refer back to my major in theatre studies and my old copy of An Actor Prepares. Written by Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director who focused heavily on the concept ofemotional memory, the book was a very influential guide for actors in the 1930s.
Stanislavski felt that actors could only offer a great performance if they really understood the inner emotional life of the characters they were trying to represent. He developed something known as “The System” to help actors get to this point of evolved empathetic insight. I am far from the first UX practitioner to discuss the connection between The System and what we do, and I doubt I’ll be the last.
For example, Traci Lepore has written a number of articles on how Stanislavskian methods can be used to build personas and guide the creative process. Mike Gualtieri recommends using An Actor Prepares in a number of his research papers as well.
I believe Stanislavski’s exercises are also great for demonstrating the value of empathetic understanding to stakeholders, as well as improving our own creative methods.
The Importance of Imagination
Stanislavski often spoke to his actors about the difference between fantasy and imagination. Fantasy, he argued, is about inventing things that will never exist, and imagination is about creating things that can. When his actors tried to decipher the emotional lives of their characters—much like we do when thinking about the experience of our users—they needed to use imagination to answer the when, where, why, and how in a particular scenario.
Luckily, we can create more reliable stories for our personas from data and research, but imagination can still play an important role in developing empathy for users from the outset.
There’s a particular technique he used to make the imagination more constructive called “The Magic If.” Simply put, use “if” to change the circumstance of the when, where, why, and how of a scenario.
Sample exercise:
Start with an example persona and scenario: a young entrepreneur who is accessing a banking site at 7am from her laptop at home before leaving for a client meeting. She wants to check if an invoice has been settled.
Change the “where” by asking, “What if she’s on a bus, accessing the site from a mobile device and reception isn’t very good?” She might still have to navigate through an interstitial advertisement and end up struggling to find the transaction because searching by date isn’t intuitively designed for mobile?
Change the “why” by asking, “What if she needs to print her statement or send it as a PDF to a future investor?” How easy would it be to do that? You can continue along these lines until you have fleshed out as many scenarios as needed, constantly asking, “but what if?”
By taking reluctant stakeholders through this exercise, they will begin to understand the complexity of the task at hand and, hopefully, be less inclined to request changes without thinking them through first.
Stimulate Emotional Memory
Stanislavski encouraged his actors to draw from memories in their own lives when playing out a scene. It wasn’t enough for them to run through a series of actions without relating to how their character would feel in the midst of them. Some of the emotions he gave as examples were hope, doubt, apprehension, panic, and delight. He expected his actors to exhibit these emotions on stage to the level of sincerity they did when experiencing them for real in their past.
Sample exercise:
The best way to achieve a similar response with stakeholders is not to turn this into a therapy session, but to ask them for examples of digital or service experiences they feel something for. Encouraging them to talk about experiences that have inspired positive and negative—as well as mild and dramatic—emotive responses allows them to relive those reactions.
It’s valuable to invite as diverse a group of stakeholders as you can manage into the feedback session, as there is additional value in exposing the reluctant client to a range of opinions in order to illustrate how variedcustomer perspectives can be.
Break the Experience Down
Something that many clients are consistently shocked by is how task-focused users can be. If a customer arrives at a site to find or do something specific, they are unlikely to be distracted by something unrelated, like a banner promoting a wholly disconnected experience from their task at-hand. To make this clearer we can break a customer’s journey down for stakeholders, using Stanislavski’s units and super objectives exercises.
He created these techniques to help actors to stay close to the characters main (super) objective throughout the performance, while getting them to focus on one unit or mini-objective at a time. The character might have one main objective (getting someone to fall in love with them), but they have to accomplish a number of smaller ones along the way to achieve it (finding out who their rivals are).
Sample exercise:
Determine the main user objective of an experience, such as buying a pair of shoes. What would the units need to be to get the user there? In an online shopping situation, browsing from the homepage would be one unit, so the navigation needs to clearly show how to search for shoes. If a search field is used, the next unit is getting from a page of search results to the right pair of shoes, perhaps with the use of effective filters or a clean layout of results. Do the units distract from the main objective? Do they help the user get to their main objective? Can you get the client to empathize with the customer who is clearly focused on a main objective?
Create "The Unbroken Line"
Stanislavski reminded his actors that the characters they portrayed would have had an unbroken line of events that happed to them before the story began and many events that would continue to happen after it ends—unless the character is killed off! It’s our job to understand this unbroken line of events when wecreate user stories—something not fully considered by clients when they have their own sales objectives in mind.
Sample exercise:
Ask your clients to choose a brand they have been using for a number of years that they feel particularly attached to. It could be a car, a clothing label, or even a type of mustard. Ask them these kinds of questions:
- Why did you choose the brand?
- When was the first time you used it?
- Who else do you know who likes this brand?
- Have you discussed it with them or anyone else?
- Were you influenced by what they had to say?
- Have you ever investigated other brands?
- If so, why are you sticking with this one?
- What advertisements or other media do you remember that promoted this brand?
- What do you think about their customer service?
- What do you think of their stores?
What this aims to flesh out is the fact that customers often have emotional connections to brands or experiences based on a number of events outside the control of the client. Unless your clients have adopted a service design methodology, they may have never analyzed this kind of data, making it difficult for them to empathize with their customers as people who exist in a real world.
Return to Evidence
The techniques mentioned above are examples of how Stanislavskian methods can support our UX processes by instilling empathy for the user in the stakeholder at the beginning of a project. They are collaborative exercises with the potential to stimulate thought, and shouldn’t be confused with solid academic analysis or put in place of well-constructed user input sessions.
To date, I have seen that nothing as effective as sharing strong user data with stakeholders when trying to convince them to take one direction or another. A deeper empathetic understanding of user issues often only emerges in full when clients actually watch a session with a real customer giving real opinions. Without sufficient client preparation all that wonderful insight might never materialize or receive the appreciation it deserves.
By opening their minds to the breadth of potential user scenarios from the outset, clients are far more likely to be open to research. With this in mind, fight for more research, choose your research partners carefully, and bring your clients along for the ride.
Image of cheery stakeholder courtesy Shutterstock
User Experience, Incorporated
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In business today, “user experience” (or UX) has come to represent all of the qualities of a product or service that make it relevant or meaningful to an end-user -- everything from its look and feel design to how it responds when users interact with it, to the way it fits into people’s daily lives. You even people talking about UX as the way in which a consumer connects to a business -- all the touch-points from marketing to product development to distribution channels.
It’s the “new black,” to borrow from a fashion phrase—as well as a reference to its influence on profitability.
The value of UX as a corporate asset is no longer in question. Just look at the $1 billion price tag paid by Facebook for Instagram, whose primary asset is not technology, but the best photo sharing UX in the business (and some of the best UX talent as well). Look at the recent Apple vs. Samsung judgment: 93% of the damages were related to design patents that define the iOS user experience. The growing appreciation of the value of UX is not restricted to consumer-facing tech companies, like Google with their new focus on unified design or Microsoft Windows 8 with its sleek new “Metro” design language. At frog, we hear the same things from executives in financial services, healthcare, and infrastructure. Companies like GE and Bloomberg are recruiting leading designers to build UX capabilities at a corporate level. We even hear it from our clients in the international market, such as regional telecommunications companies, who see a “unified user experience strategy” like Apple’s as a sign of status.
The recognition of UX’s importance seems to be slowly sinking into corporate culture the way "brand" did a decade ago. Today, it is not uncommon to hear an executive talk about managing a $30 billion brand. But that was a foreign idea not so long ago. As brand thinking has been institutionalized, management has figured out ways to assign value to this "asset." So, if you are an enlightened executive in the post-Steve Jobs era, how do you grow and manage this emerging corporate asset? Some companies believe that outsourcing to design firms is becoming less attractive as the value of UX as a core business asset increases. frog and our peers in the design consulting world have become more adept in recent years at helping companies build this capacity internally. But even as big business looks to bring UX and design talent in-house, few companies are willing to embed designers on every product development team (and, frankly, there is not enough talent to go around even if they wanted to). So in-house UX groups generally focus on a few high-impact product releases a year, leaving much of the business – and most of your offering – untouched. So what is management to do? How can large organizations deploy this capability on an enterprise scale?
Scalable Strategies for Managing UX
To close this gap, leading businesses like Google are exploring scalable strategies that make UX relevant to engineers and MBAs across their organizations. Here is a quick look at some of the different strategies that they are deploying:
1. Lean UX: In many cases, the best way to embed UX thinking in your product development teams isnot to focus on design as a specific competency. Instead, inspired by the startup market, many businesses are experimenting with lean, agile product development processes, which benefit from customer insights, participatory design, and prototyping. UX methods can be a crucial ingredient in catalyzing this “lean” approach by forcing teams to identify specific user needs in the market and requiring that they take early prototypes out to customers for feedback. This process has been incubated successfully at SAP, where teams have compressed the product development process into three months for some new releases. Done this way, UX is practical and efficient, dispelling preconceptions about the slow pace of design.
2. UX in R&D: There has been a startling change in the technology environment with a rich new array of tools (HTML5; do-it-yourself software/hardware kits like Arduino; and affordable 3-D printers) that allow teams to much more rapidly experiment with new product and service concepts at the UX, and not just the engineering, layer. It is exactly this sort of UX R&D that is letting companies attract and retain critical crossover talent, i.e. engineers who work in code but think in “experience.” This form of experimentation is a Trojan Horse for getting product development teams to capture requirements in working UX prototypes instead of documenting them in endless Powerpoint decks and PRD’s. It also provides the executive leadership with a steady stream of “demos” to show off at CES.
3. Baby-Step UX: By now, your organization has probably dipped its toe into the app market with mixed success. While the app marketplace has not necessarily been a great contributor to the bottom line for many businesses, it has created an easy environment for organizations to strengthen their UX muscles. Companies like Bloomberg, whose core user interface is hobbled by their terminal infrastructure, have released successful iOS apps that meaningfully shifted perceptions in the broader market. Bloomberg’s core customers are aging; a new generation of iPad-era traders are joining Wall Street with significantly different expectations for a user experience that’s well beyond their current terminal offering. While Bloomberg’s iPhone app may not be a serious driver for its business, it certainly has changed expectations for what is possible within the organization. (The recent hire of Lisa Strausfeld, a former partner at the revered design firm Pentagram, as Bloomberg’s global head of data visualization is another strong sign of the company’s renewed interest in design.)
4. Six Sigma UX: Successful UX is often about doing less not more. This can be hard won in today’s engineering culture in which middle management is generally rewarded on product features and releases – more not less. While brand leaders have typically tried to shape organizations from afar – through broad based-messaging and high level guidelines – UX has the potential to reach much deeper into the product development process. But great UX requires some teeth – the ability to delay or kill product releases if they are not aligned with the corporate UX strategy. Many organizations, like Google, are waking up to the need to integrate UX and design criteria into tollgates and other standard product management processes (parallel to, say, Six Sigma) to ensure that products stay on track.
5. Customer-Driven UX: Sales teams generally believe that they know what customers want, yet they are usually terrible at asking that precise question. UX requires the space and time to support a more open and continuous dialogue with key customers – supported by prototypes and other design artifacts. While this dialogue can often build trust and increase loyalty, it can be hard to convince sales teams, particularly when you are an outside consultant. Corporate design leaders have not typically grown up with that sort of power. They are more diplomats than enforcers. Typically they need a strong partner in the exec suite to open the doors to key customers and engage them in the sort of participatory design process that leads to great UX.
It is easy to see that there are a few common ingredients across these different strategies, such as executive commitment, access to customers, new technical prototyping skills, and small, interdisciplinary teams. All of these ingredients are critical not only to UX, but also to developing the sort of bottom-up, risk-taking culture that is central to succeeding in the 21st century market. These skills are standard in the startup market where UX is increasingly appreciated as a key to success and value creation. The startup market is creating a new breed of business executives, like Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, who are impatient with requirements-driven waterfall product development processes. They think “UX-first”. The big challenge now is to drive these same skills into the more traditional, top-down management culture at big companies. The companies that get it right will be either be at the forefront of disrupting business or much more likely to thrive in the era of disruption.
This post was originally published by the Harvard Business Review.
As frog's Vice President of Creative, Robert Fabricant leads efforts to expand the impact of design into new markets and industries. An expert in design for social innovation, Robert is lead partner in Project Masiluleke, an initiative that harnesses the power of mobile technology to combat HIV and AIDS in South Africa. He is an adjunct professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Windows on the Web
KAREN MCGRANE on CONTENTGo to article
You have five minutes while waiting for a friend to meet you for lunch, so you find yourself shopping for a new pair of shoes. When your friend arrives, you put the phone away, but leave the web page open to help you remember what you found when you get home.
While you’re at work, you read a restaurant review for a new place you think sounds tasty. Come dinnertime, you grab your phone to pull up the address and location.
One night on your tablet, you’re browsing articles for a report you’re writing at work. Back at your desk the next day, you struggle in vain to remember what you searched for to find those articles. Why can’t you find them again?
Sound familiar? If you’re like most people, it probably does. Research from Google (PDF) shows that 90 percent of people start a task using one device, then pick it up later on another device—most commonly, people start a task on smartphone, and then complete it on the desktop. As you might expect, people regularly do this kind of device switching for the most common activities, like browsing the internet (81 percent) or social networking (72 percent). Certain categories like retail (67 percent), financial services (46 percent), and travel (43 percent) also seem to support this kind of sequential use of different devices.
Dual-screen or multi-screen use of devices gets a lot of attention, but we tend to focus on simultaneous usage—say, using tablets or smartphones while watching TV. Publishers, advertisers, and social networks are all actively trying to figure out how to deliver a good experience to users as they shift their attention between two screens at the same time. Sequential usage is every bit as common, but we rarely acknowledge this behavior or try to optimize for this experience.
When people start a task on one device and then complete it on another, they don’t want different content or less content, tailored for the device. They want the same content, presented so they can find it, navigate it, and read it. They imagine that their devices are different-sized windows on the same content, not entirely different containers.
What should we do to provide a good experience for users who want to complete the same task across more than one device?
Content parity
Let’s make device-switching the final nail in the coffin for the argument that mobile websites should offer a subset of the content on the “real” website. Everyone’s had the frustrating experience of trying to find content they’ve seen on the desktop that isn’t accessible from a phone. But the reverse is also a problem: users who start a task from a smartphone during a bit of free time shouldn’t be cut off from options they’d find back at their desktop.
Consistent navigation labels
When picking up a task on a second device, about half of users say they navigate directly to the website to find the desired information again. Users who are trying to locate the same information across a mobile site (or app) and a desktop site can’t rely on the same visual and spatial cues to help them find what they’re looking for. As much as possible, make it easy for them by keeping navigation categories and hierarchy exactly the same. There aren’t that many cases where we truly need to provide different navigation options on mobile. Most desktop navigation systems have been extensively tested—we know those categories and labels work, so keep them consistent.
Consistent search
About 60 percent of users say they’d use search to continue a task on another device. Businesses wondering whether “mobile SEO” is necessary should keep in mind that user tasks and goals don’t necessarily change based on the device—in fact, it’s often the identical user searching for the exact information that very same day. It’s frustrating to get totally different results from different devices when you know what you’re looking for.
Handy tools
Users have taught themselves tricks to make their transition between devices go more smoothly—about half of users report that they send themselves a link. Sites that don’t offer consistent URLs are guaranteed to frustrate users, sending them off on a quest to figure out where that link lives. Responsive design would solve this problem, but so would tools that explicitly allow users to save their progress when logged in, or email a link to the desktop or mobile version of a page.
Improved analytics
Mobile analytics is still in the dark ages. Tracking users between devices is challenging—or impossible—which means businesses don’t have a clear picture of how this kind of multi-device usage is affecting their sales. While true multi-channel analytics may be a ways off, organizations can’t afford to ignore this behavior. Don’t wait for more data to “prove” that customers are moving between devices to complete a task. Customers are already doing it.
It’s time to stop imagining that smartphones, tablets, and desktops are containers that each hold their own content, optimized for a particular browsing or reading experience. Users don’t think of it that way. Instead, users imagine that each device is its own window onto the web.
About the Author
Karen McGrane
Karen McGrane plays nicely in the content strategy, information architecture, and interaction design sandboxes. She is the author of Content Strategy for Mobile from A Book Apart; Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, a UX consultancy she founded in 2006; and formerly VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish. She’s led projects for dozens of clients, including The New York Times, Condé Nast, and The Atlantic. She also teaches Design Management in the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.
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