Come and Celebrate Adaptive Path’s Seventh Anniversary Party
Join us on Friday, March 21 to celebrate Adaptive Path’s Seventh Anniversary Party with beer, wine, pinball, and — of course — the Taco Truck. This year we’re moving the party to 111 Minna, San Francisco. All are welcome but you’ll need to RSVP or email party[at]adaptivepath.[com] for a wrist tag if you want to drink and eat those delicious tacos on our dime.
Party’s from 6:00-11:00 PM and the taco truck opens at 7 PM sharp. Hope to see you at 111 Minna.
Register for MX San Francisco & Win a Trip on Virgin America
In honor of MX San Francisco presenter Julie Peters, one lucky winner will receive their choice of either one round-trip ticket to wherever Virgin America flies or a spa/massage package at the Mark Hopkins. Register between now and 11:59 PM on Friday, March 14 to enter to win. MX San Francisco — April 20-22 — brings together thought leaders from the experience design industry to share how to get great experiences out into the world.
Secil Watson Tells Jesse James Garrett About Experience Design at Wells Fargo
Jesse James Garrett recently spoke with Secil Watson, senior vice president of internet channel strategy at Wells Fargo Bank, and one of the speakers MX San Francisco about bring experience design to Wells Fargo.
Below is an excerpt, or you can read (edited for clarity) or listen the full interview. Don’t forget to register for MX San Francisco — April 20-22 — and catch our special early bird pricing. If you register between today and March 31, you’ll get a free iPod shuffle.
JJG: Did you find, as you started to take on this challenge, resistance within the organization to taking this experience-focused view to the design of the website?
SW: The resistance came more from not being familiar with the terms and with the methodologies than it was because Wells preferred the other way of doing things.
I think that the Internet was still a new channel. As it had evolved, it had evolved organically and reflected the business organizational divisions of the bank. So our old homepage had tabs on it that said, “Personal Banking,” “Personal Finance,” “Investing,” “Small Business,” and “Commercial Services.” You would maybe think that investing is actually part of personal finance; it is, of course, but in our case we had different groups organizationally that were managing the banking business versus the investing business, so they each wanted their own tab. This was purely because of the division of labor required to maintain their pages, update their websites, and have control over their domain.
It was not necessarily intended to be an experience for the customer. But when you actually show the teams that from a customer’s perspective, investing and personal finance fall within the same realm, it does make sense to them. But in order to prove the point, we had to do a lot of user research, which was a discipline that was pretty new for the bank at the time. We had to teach product managers the principles of user research, the differences between qualitative research versus quantitative research, and how we could use both of them together to make a fact-based decision that would be more customer-centric.
The biggest hesitation we see in product managers, typically, is the time horizon for our decision. A lot of the time, we’re trying to make decisions that are viable from business and technical perspectives, don’t cost an arm and a leg, and are easy to maintain. That means they have both short- and long-term benefits to the company and that they have a positive business case. But they’re also sound from a consumer’s perspective, a customer’s perspective that they actually are usable for the customer and also, hopefully, good experiences for the customers. To get those three things done, you can’t be in an environment where one point of view is making a trade off that will make the other one worse. So we’re in an optimization mindset, and in that optimization mindset, you had to do some give and take.
Product management typically wants to maximize the business value of the project, which translates to as cheaply as possible, as quickly as possible, and getting as much upside from the project as possible. What we were trying to inject into that culture was a look at the longer-term customer impact, from a broader perspective, and how to optimize for the customer’s interest as well as the business interest…
Read the rest of Jesse James Garrett’s interview of Secil Watson and register for MX San Francisco.
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