Adaptive Path Blog

This summer, we’re kicking off research to further explore the business value of user experience. This work will expand upon ideas first presented in our 2004 report, Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.

We’re looking for your help to validate our ideas. If you have a minute, please complete our Business Value of User Experience survey. The survey should take less than 5 minutes to complete.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=460122410765

As a bonus, by completing the survey you’ll receive a free copy of the Leveraging Business Value report, a $395 value. The information you provide will be kept confidential; with your permission, we may contact you for a follow-up interview based on your responses.

If you can participate, thank you for your time. Questions? Contact me at steve@adaptivepath.com.

A few days ago, Mike Madaio pointed out something the Adaptive Path team just brought up on our internal mailing list: the new Vehix.com television advertisement that actually has an actor saying the lines, “How do we improve the user experience?”

I saw this the other night and you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Not because it was odd to hear those words on national television, but because I could not for the life of me remember ever having heard “user experience” utilized as an explicit selling point in that medium. Leaving aside the overall veracity of the ad (is Vehix.com a superior experience to its competitors?), we are continuing to see variations on this kind of language (”easy to use” being the most common) creep into mainstream marketing of services, sites and products.

It’s nice to see that even traditional marketers have started to understand some of the value of user experience, for both ensuring customer satisfaction and as a differentiating from the competition.

A recent study from the Netherlands found that most electronic products that were returned to the store worked exactly as designed (i.e., they weren’t broken), but they were returned because customers couldn’t figure them out.

The researcher also found “that the average consumer in the U.S. will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working before giving up.”

Found via Basement.org.

In April, when I learned I’d be working in San Francisco as a Summer Associate at Adaptive Path, I did what any MBA student worth his salt would do — a cost-benefit analysis. Undecided between driving or flying from Virginia, where I just completed my first year at Darden, I considered several variables — the cost of gas, how much stuff I might ship cross-country, the number of hotel stays, and so on. In the end, the experience of getting in the car and visiting nine new states was more than worth the extra time, dollars, and wear and tear.

Of course, when it came time to make the decision, I didn’t have to get managerial approval — other than my wife’s consent — to go for the richer experience. But if you’re a user experience professional trying to justify a new project to your manager, you probably don’t have it as easy as I did. You might not even know where to begin.

This summer, I’ll be working with Brandon to reexamine the business value of user experience. This work will follow up on our 2004 report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience,” but most of it will involve new thinking about how user experience professionals can make the case for getting budgets and projects approved. Whether you’re working for a small nonprofit or a Fortune 50 company, we want to create a playbook telling you how to have an effective conversation with your manager and sell the value of your project. There’s a lot of theoretical work in this area, but very little practical step-by-step advice.

Our goal is to share information early and often. This project can only benefit from involving user experience professionals from the beginning. We want to hear your stories, and we want to know about both successes and failures. Stay tuned as we begin our work and share the initial findings.

AIGA’s online business and design journal Gain features a weekly series of discussion summaries drawn from a mailing list. Last week’s discussion was on “Measuring for Managing Design”. I contributed to the mailing list thread, but I must say I found the discussion summary dissatisfying. Here’s what I wrote to the mailing list:

This was exactly the kind of situation that we at Adaptive Path attempted to address in our research on ROI, business value, and design. (Which lead to our report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.”)

Choosing the right things to measure can be tricky. I knew of a colleague whose performance was measured on the number of screens he produced. This of course incentivized exactly the wrong thing — more screens probably means worse design, not better.

In our work, we seek to find out what our clients really care about (in terms of numbers/metrics/value) and then demonstrate how design interventions can affect those numbers. I think this gets at your final question. You find out from the business what matters, and then figure out how your design work can influence what matters.

So, for example, we just completed some work for a financial services firm. Among the things that a financial services firm wants is to get customers to add more accounts. The financial services firm knows the value of those accounts to the business (usually measured in “lifetime customer value,” but also in a more straightforward understanding of “assets held.”) In our redesign of the site, we will be successful if more customers add more accounts than they currently do.

But, and I think this is crucial to this discussion, the value of measurement is often greater before the fact than after. With the financial services client, we came up with 9 types of measurements that design could possibly influence. Through some initial prioritization work, we were able to wheedle that down to 4 key measurements. Those 4 measurements became our focus — decisions about design were directly influenced by how it would affect these 4 key areas. That lead to a coherence in our design that would have been lost if we tried to address all possible measurements.

Another thing to consider is that design-by-measurement is great at optimizing current processes, and squeezing the most out of what you already have. It is not as successful for spurring disruptive innovations.

For me, the issue comes down to “What is good design?”, and I would argue that good design is design that has the desired impact. If designers aren’t willing to step up for such accountability, we will continue to be paper-hat-wearing order takers for other parts of the business.

Brandon isn’t one to toot his own horn, so let me point you to the interviews he’s conducted with design leaders for the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference. The latest interview with the principals of Kairos gets at divining explicit business value, and is remarkable for how these two non-designers explain how they understand the value of design.