The Insights are Endless

Every site visit brings with it the opportunity to learn some insight into the reality of what it means to teach,  what it means to teach the faith, or what it means to serve those tasked with that great mission. 

Each time I have had the privilege to observe parish faith formation sessions,  a catholic high school religion class, or a third grade classroom, I find myself amazed time and again at what I encounter in these moments.

Sometimes I glean just as many insights personally as I do professionally and I can’t believe I am allowed to have this experience as PART of my job.

I have the opportunity to learn about what tasks they are trying to accomplish and what tools teachers need in order to accomplish their tasks but I also see the commitment teachers and catechists have to teaching the young people in front of them.  I’m surprised by the patience and sacrifice they have in the presence of these energetic and lively students. I am in awe of the amazing way they guide and develop the hearts and minds of these young people entrusted to their care.  I am struck by the witness of these men and women and their willingness to light the way for those at an earlier place on the path. 

I am humbled in the presence of these people.  

The visits we’ve had this year--and those we will continue to have--will continue to bring us insights,  professional insights that will help to guide:  the conversation, further insight and the improvement and/or innovation of resources for those we seek to serve.  

These visits may also be insightful, inspiring or generative to us personally.

Either way, the insights are endless.

What is one insight you've gleaned in this year of visits, learning and listening? Share below, so we can learn from one another.

To read John Vitek’s insight from a recent site visit, click here:    http://themindfulheart.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/kindness-heals/

Is UCD the Answer to Every Company Question?

Every company, if it is trying to move forward, innovate, increase efficiency or improve effectiveness, will, at some point, take different routes in search of the achievement of these goals.

Saint Mary's Press is no different.

Anytime a company begins a new venture, whether it's a new process, a new direction or a new initiative, it is usually accompanied by a fresh amount of energy and zeal.

Saint Mary's Press is no different.

In the last 9 months we've begun to incorporate different processes related to user-centered design (UCD), a new method of bringing our customers more concretely into the process of creation and development. In those 9 months, there has been excitement and energy, wonderment, confusion, resistance...all normal things in the sphere of attempting new things and trying to move forward.

And then we have the stage that comes after a few months of incorporating a new process, right? Somewhere along the road come the big questions: How long will this last? When will we move on to the next big idea? Why is UCD talked about so much? Will it really solve all of our company problems?

"Is UCD the Answer to Every Company Question"

No single process-no matter what it is-can solve every company question. However, the processes of UCD are certainly helping us with one question. It is helping us answer the question at the center of all we do, the question about the customer---the fact that we need to know the customer—and not just know the customer, but know the discreet and essential user tasks for which they desire extraordinary solutions. Not only is it helping us know the customer, it is helping us to develop the skills to know the customer at a level we’ve never experienced.

In the 11 years I have been a part of Saint Mary’s Press we've explored a number of different ways to get to know and understand the customer, who they are, what they want. We've looked at different ways of understanding the customer including print surveys, e-mail surveys, focus groups, interviews, research projects, public surveys etc. But no method, no process that we've engaged in seemed to help us unravel the puzzle of understanding the customer in the way it was answered as we’ve combined these tried and true methods with user-centered design and the skills we first learned at Texas Tech’s CertifiedUser Experience Professional Program.

“One of the best professional development courses I've taken. I've never left a class feeling so competent to immediately apply what I learned with such a clear path and concrete set of tools.” – Heather

“I've been a web developer for almost 15 years, and during that time I've taken quite a few courses. None were as valuable in helping me to create better websites than the CUEP program. We learned not only how to identify problems that users were encountering with our existing websites, but also how to incorporate user experience testing into our design process. This saves valuable time, helps to avoid the frustration having to overhaul problems that could have been prevented, and ultimately produces a much more successful website. Thank you so much!”– Niall

From others outside of Saint Mary’s Press that have taken the course:

“The course was very engaging! We hit the ground running and since we actually practiced what we talked about, I feel like I can apply it immediately in the workplace.” – KaNisa

“This is a very good hands-on course for practical usability testing that can save a company time and money in design and development.” –Jared

“I highly recommend this course, it will change the way you look at product development forever.” –Ryan

I offer these quotes to illustrate the possibilities present in learning these skills and processes.

Internally, the skills and methods we learned in Texas and have continued to learn about user-centered design have given us the piece to a puzzle that had been missing. In my 11 years here, I had never experienced the same clarity with regard to listening to customers, understanding them, interpreting their needs or even including them, that I experience with UCD. It is this reality that I find so exciting and seek to share with others on a daily basis.

At the center of our mission is the willingness to serve the poor, to serve the young and to serve those who serve the young. To the extent that our customer remains at the center of all we do, we will need a way to stay connected to the customer. To the extent that user-centered design and any other process helps us to stay connected to our customer and to the reality of those we serve, it will continue to live within our walls.

So, we will continue to utilize the skills and invite the wisdom that user-centered processes propose. We will continue to use these methods and others we’ve learned and allow them to influence what we do, because they  help us to know how to 1) listen 2) understand 3) interpret 4) engage in dialogue and 5) include those who remain at the center of our mission.

We do it for those who work with the young people and we do it for the kids.


Note: quotes taken from the CUEP website at http://www.uxcertification.com/testimonials.htm

The 3 Yard Challenge and the LIC Textbooks

You still have 10 more creative days to 3 Yard Challenge Day (i.e.  December 14) 

Our Living in Christ series is built on a pedagogy that says that deeper learning and understanding comes as students are engaged in the learning process, as they enter into the learning through carrying out different types of activities or projects based around what they are trying to learn. Learning by doing helps them commit the learning to memory in a different way.

The idea of this exercise is that by engaging in the exercize we commit the reality of incremental innovation to our memory in a different way; we move from thinking and talking about 3 yards to actually creating a representation of incremental innovation that can serve as a future and constant reminders to us going forward.

3 Yards

Think about what you could hang up in your area  that would help to convey the concept of 3 yards.  On a football field this is done with spray paint and grass.  But it can be as simple as three little candy bars on a piece of paper or three bold lines in a rectangle as pictured above, something than can remind you or me, that we move forward step by step.  

Don't overthink the exercise, it really is just that simple.....find one way to convey 3 yards or 3 steps in a progression.  Do this exersize by yourself or with a team member or two.  

Come up with your approach to conveying "3 yards" by December 14. (For off site employees, just submit a photo of your "3 yards" to hsutton@smp.org and your model will be part of the challenge.)

A visiting guest will determine the top 3 winners. The winner of the top model of conveying "3 yards" will receive a gift card to the local restaurant of their choice.



Just for fun--A little holiday video of St Nick in the Big Apple.....this is a short video showing LIVE coverage from the Macy's day parade. It's quite amazing to see in person if you ever get the chance. Right before the video started, everyone was chanting "SANTA, SANTA, SANTA."  You'd think he was a rock star. 

"A Bad Website is like a Grumpy Salesperson."

Jakob Nielsen says in his quote (featured on the site last week) which is also the title of this post that "A Bad Website is like a Grumpy Salesperson".  

Interesting.

We would all probably agree that the actual words of the quote probably speak more to the type of experience we DO NOT want people to have when they interact with anything Saint Mary's Press. So, you may wonder why the quote is on the site and why I went so far as to write a whole post on it? 

Sharing a couple positive interactions with colleagues may help to illustrate how I came to understand the truth of this quote. 

As you know the 24/7 customer service phone travels with a few different people. One day, many weeks ago, I e-mailed Joanie (our customer care manager) asking if she could take the 24/7 customer service phone for me one weekend when I had to attend a class. She was under no obligation to take it and I could have understood her not wanting to take it--she's already on call on lot. But-

She e-mailed back, “I’d be delighted to.”

Not long after that, I had another experience where I asked Rosa a question. 

She also replied, “I’d be delighted to…”.  

Wow!  What an unexpected response. My interactions with Joanie and Rosa have always been good, but this particular response surprised me (especially in the midst of attending to other e-mails that day). The response was surprising and unexpected.  And nice. Both times, the response made me stop and think, "Really?".

Although I knew our customer care team uses this phrase on the phone with customers I wondered if maybe this was a new part of the brand experience they were adding to e-mail.  Their response made the interaction seem even easier.

Not long after these two experiences, I ran across the quote about the grumpy salesperson and immediately thought, "If bad websites are like grumpy salespeople, then good websites must be like Joanie and Rosa --delighted to help people.  

I considered again my response to that interaction, the surprise and unexpectedness, the sense of "ease" just because they were delighted to help me.  Upon reflection, I realized that this experience of surprise at their delight in assisting me- is similar to that feeling of surprise when a website is really easy to use or intuitive...it's like the system itself is saying, "I'm delighted to help you".  So I turned Jakob Nielsen's quote around:

"A Good Website is like a Salesperson Who is Delighted to Help you" 

So I wondered further, "Are all of our websites like a salesperson who is delighted to help people? 

"What if all of our websites and products, processes and services conveyed through their ease of use that they were delighted to help people?  How would the site or book or service look? How different would the customer's satisfaction level be?

It's something to think about…

*Note: my thanks to Joanie and Rosa for giving me permission to share these accounts.

3 Yards: The Power of Incremental Innovation

In a recent post,  Paul Casper talked about iteration and what that looks like.  He said:

"To get 10 yards in 4 downs, you only need to average 2.5. Sustain the drive for the long haul. Small incremental changes add up to big changes. Continual improvement is essential."

This idea of incremental innovation, of moving 2.5 or 3 yards at a time is quite interesting and it is a piece from our class in Texas that initially challenged me-in a good way. It challenged me because I was sitting in class thinking, "If I know there are 20 things wrong with this product,why wouldn't I want to change them all?"

Often times, we equate success with the big end goal, in terms of getting a touchdown, or hitting a home run.  We want our product to be a huge win right out of the gate, even if the product is being released as revision. Who doesn't? The concept of moving only three yards is a challenging one because we want to fix everything. All or nothing right? We want to fix it so its working perfectly.

Remember the phrase from Voltaire that John shared --when was it--a year ago?

Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

What is hard to fathom sometimes is that we don't have to change 20 things --or everything that could be changed--on a product to make that product more usable for our customers.  Sometimes, it's a matter of making what we would consider "small" incremental changes- that can make the most difference --and have the most far reaching effect on a customer's experience of a website or a book or a service. Three yards, three yards......

What does "3 yards" look like? The specific "3 yards" we move each time is going to be dependant on who our customers are and what they are trying to do, i.e. what the key tasks are that our customers are trying to complete and what's keeping them from quickly and easily completing those tasks. Do we know what those tasks are?  (If not, some discovery work might be in order.)

Example 1: In a book where navigation is a key task and yet seems to be posing a challenge for young kids, it might mean adding colored tabs to the side of the book or coloring the index section a different color to make it possible for them to see "IMMEDIATELY" where they need to go.

Example 2: On a website that customers go to specifically to find certain types of information--strengthening the search functionality or the way the content is tagged on the site could significantly increase a customer's satisfaction of a website experience.

When we are clear on what tasks our customers are trying to complete, we can then choose which pieces to fix based on that task.

Three yards is a challenge, but it's a challenge I would issue to all of us.  What does 3 yards mean for this project we are working on? What can we fix NOW to make this a better experience for our customers--to make it more usable NOW? This is one of the things I always appreciated about Paul Casper. For those of us working regularly with the online learning environment, he was like that driver who would re-align us when our conversation would start veering us off the 3 yard road toward fixing the 20 things.  He would say, "We know we can't fix everything right now, what is the next 3 yards? Let's get to the next 3 yards."

What do you think is the best/most creative/most effective way to illustrate or convey 3 yards?

Take the "3 yard" Challenge

Come up with your approach to conveying "3 yards" by December 1. (For off site employees, just submit a photo of your "3 yards" to hsutton@smp.org and your model will be part of the challenge.)

A visiting guest will determine the top 3 winners. The winner of the top model of conveying "3 yards" will receive a gift card to the local restaurant of their choice.

The Difference Between Market Research and Usability Research

Have you ever had that experience where you go someplace thinking you know something, only to come back realizing you were kind of clueless?  Well, I had that experience when I (and two colleagues) went to Texas in February to attend the Certified User Experience Professional Class .

The professor starting by saying, "Let's begin talking about usability by talking about what it's not."  Even though I thought I had a good hunch of what it was, my mind went completely blank.  I listened as Niall (one of my new favorite people called coders whose responsibilities pretty much eluded me before this course--and, let's be honest, often still does) rattled off about 7 different things that usability wasn't (while I started checking my binder cover to make sure I was even in the right room). It was during that first discussion when I learned  one of the many world changing pieces of wisdom I was going to come to delight in--

 Usability research is not the same as market research.  

1. Traditional marketing research methods often gleans some information ABOUT the customer and often comes through what the customer tells us.
2. Usability research, on the other hand is aimed at uncovering how something is USED, the behavior and motivations of the customer and gleans this by looking at a holistic view of the customers experience (so not just what the customer tells us, but also by watching what they do).  It's almost like a "360 view" of the customers experience.

As we've begun doing site visits, we're learning about the different tasks that are part of the teachers and students process of using our materials. This research is aimed at usability---trying to understand how they are trying to use our resources.

The research project John talked about in our meeting this morning was about market research where we are asking the customer about different types of information such as what product they use, a particular decision they made ---BUT HERE's THE KEY---not necessarily about how they are trying to use a resource. 

While we could have asked that question, here is where we would need to determine, based on what we are trying to learn, what methods do we need to look at employing---market research methods or usability methods?

So, now, as project teams or any team begins to talk about learning from the customer, our starting point can be a little different based on what we've learned.  We can ask, "Are we trying to learn information ABOUT the customer or insight into BEHAVIOR and what the customer is trying to accomplish?".  Both usability research methods and traditional marketing methods are valid and give us ways to discover great information.

The key is understanding what kind of information we are after. 


For more information, check out this link for a fabulous contrast between market research and usability research: 
 http://ripul.blogspot.com/2008/06/market-research-vs-usability-testing.html

Do-Discover-Iterate: Wisdom and Insight from Professor Paul Casper

The idea for this post began almost 2 months ago as Paul Casper was preparing to begin his new vocation as a teacher. As someone who has enjoyed collaborating with him and learning from him as we've navigated the usability and user-centered design front,  I asked him, "What are your parting words to us Paul on usability?" 

Read Paul's 5 pieces of wisdom and insight here: http://pcasper.com/2011/10/21/do-discover-iterate/

The Site Visit Scheduling Saga

Over the last month, requests for site visit scheduling hit an all-time high.  (For those of you that are newer, site visits are one of the methods of customer discovery we began using this year to understand what our customers are trying to accomplish and what we need to create to help them meet those objectives. When we visit a customer in their own environment, we refer to this as a site visit.)

In addition to the requests for site visits, came also the need for project teams to stay up to date on which customers were being called when and what visits were actually confirmed.  It became clear really fast that we needed a tool.
 
So Connie, Linda, Sara and I got together and started with the standard UCD (User Centered Design) question:

What are our (internal) customers trying to do? OR

 What are the specific tasks they need to complete?

KEY TASKS team members needed to be able to complete: 

1. Check to see if there are any visits coming up
2. Check to see who else was going on a particular site visit and if there was availability
3. Check to see the focus of the site visits
4. Check the status of communication with sites being contacted for visits
5. Check to see how recently a particular site was contacted or visited in relation to any project
6. Sales Team also needed to be able to see what communication was happening with sites in their territory

 

KEY REQUIREMENTS the tool must meet to ensure team members can carry out their tasks:

1.    It needed to be easily accessed by EVERYONE on project teams

2.    It needed to be easily updated by ANY project team member

3.    It needed to be easily sorted however the user wishes to see the data (by project, data, site name, diocese)

4.    Must be able to see the Diocese that each site belongs to 

Now, with the above tasks and requirements we created the first iteration of the SITE VISIT SCHEDULER TOOL (an internal spreadsheet) where project teams and employees can go to see what is happening with site visits.

Keep in mind, in user-centered design, we DO—DISCOVER—ITERATE.  So, we created the tool, we’ll discover how it works and we’ll move on to the next iteration.

So, try those tasks (from above) & check the status of those visits!

(Check your e-mail for the tool link.)

Let's Be Honest: What's the ROI on UCD?

In whatever we do,  there a moments when we ask some really critical questions

So I thought I would pose one to us…..

What is the ROI of User-Centered Design?  

ROI is a good question to look at not just corporately, which John, Steve and the managers lead us in doing, but also how our individual work intersects with the user and how that can affect the much bigger picture of what we do.

I came across this video from Human Factors International that provides great food for thought, no matter what project you may be working on or what function's lense you may be viewing this through.  While the language they use is specific to software, this concept of ROI applies to software, hardware, print books, digital books, etc...so keep that in mind as you review.

p.s. At the end of the video, they tell you how you can get a free poster of what you just saw created on the screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O94kYyzqvTc

Surprised By Discovery

One of my favorite books of all time is C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy. I read it for a paper in college but its storyline has stayed with me. I think the part of the story that has stayed with me is that Lewis--as the title suggests --was surprised by the joy.

Surprise is one of those emotions that always reminds me that I am human, that life is a mystery, and that no matter how much I try to understand something or might think I have a handle on it, there is always something more to discover and to understand.

I've just recently (as of 8 months ago) become a regular practitioner of user-centered design principles. I've probably used these principles now in the development of about 15 projects, but I am still surprised by discovery. I'm still surprised by the insight I glean through some of these simple processes; insights, which, are often those moments of "Why didn't we think of that?" or "Yikes! That seems like it would be common sense!"

But these moments have also reinforced for me the value of observing or shadowing customers, the importance of taking the time to sit with them as they walk through specific tasks so that I understand the process they are going through and the information they need in order to carry out each task.

Case Study: Giving Customers Access to the Online Learning Environment
I was sitting in my colleague, Candy's office one day in June as she and I continued our work connected with the creation of an administration site for our customer care & sales teams. This new site would be the interface that our teams would use to control customer access to our online learning environment.

Those of us working on the project had asked a number of the "users" about the tasks they would have to complete with the system we were creating for them. Now, we wanted to OBSERVE these customers in the process of trying to carry out those tasks.  Our purpose, at this stage, was to identify any additional tasks that might be involved or other specific requirements that might be needed in the design of the system that hadn’t yet been identified.

So, I asked Candy to walk me through an actual order with one of her customers and we talked about what she was doing, what information she was using, and what else she was expecting to see.

What stunned me is that immediately it became apparent that, in order to carry out the tasks she would be completing in the system, the interface would need to accommodate two additional pieces of information, two pieces of information that hadn't yet been discovered in the previous 5 people we had walked through processes with. It turned out she needed further identifying information of the book based on how her customers ordered-because her customers were a little bit different than other customers we served.

The first piece of information we were missing was some sort of "E" designation for each particular product so that (when she printed the document and matched it with the invoice) it would clearly show her customers that they were in fact purchasing an electronic version.

Item Number 1141       became       Item Number E1141

The second piece of information needed was the ISBN because her customers purchase by this number instead of the shorter item number as is the case with many of our customers.

I was so elated by this discovery I said to her, "Isn't this amazing" with excitement comparable to a kid on Christmas morning. Because she knows me, she smiled and responded, "Yeah, Heather, that's----great".

The extraordinary lesson in this example was realizing AGAIN that having a customer explain a path and observing them walking the path often yields different results.

I remember a few months ago I was chatting with a friend who plans the music at our church. She was explaining that she thought she had worked out all the music for the mass (who would lead particular songs, what instruments would play etc.) until, in rehearsal, when she actually tried to forge a path through it--she realized there were still pieces she needed to address. I kid you not--she even used those words "forging a path through it.....”.

What surprised me about that conversation was that she and I have never spoken about the work I am currently doing. I have never used that terminology around her, but out of the blue, she used that language. All I could think was---unbelievable ----this applies to music as well.

But, the truth is, this type of experience--of recalling steps one way and then seeing the steps differently while carrying out the same process--happens everywhere, everyday.  A great corporate example that I came across recently is from the company Argos. Argos sells "general merchandise for the home throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland"  (http://www.argos.com/).

Listen as the design manager shares what they discovered when they enter into the discovery process with their customers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1VChFbIBs

Words Matter

One cold, snowy day in February--in Texas (seriously, it wasn’t funny), Niall, Sara and I were sitting around a table (during our Certified User Experience class) trying to come up with a script for one of our usability tests. We were going back and forth around which words to use and finally I just asked our professor Brian, "Are we obsessing over the wrong thing here......wrestling over which particular words to use?" (I guess I was worried that maybe we were over thinking the exercise.)


His response surprised me. He said, "You have to do that....words matter."


WOW! In that one phrase, Brian affirmed a profound truth I have always known, but sometimes shrink back from expressing. Words are powerful because they have the capacity to convey a reality and to point us toward a particular truth or meaning. The better the word choice, the more clear the meaning or understanding of the reality could be.

This is why during site visits and customer interviews, when we ask our customers questions and they say a little, we sometimes ask them to "say more". Sometimes, their use of additional words or different words helps us to better understand --or DISCOVER with greater clarity-- the truth of their reality.

This is why as we worked on the Online Learning Environment (featured in the last post), we watched and listened (through usability testing) to how our customers were interpreting the environment they were in front of and how they were understanding the meaning of the words.
As we observed them, we tried to DISCOVER what words would prompt them to go to a certain place or asked them to tell us what words they were expecting to see to indicate they had arrived at the right location.

So we had to determine, do we use the word "assessment" or do we use the word "test". Do we write the words "vocab builder" on the button, or do we put the words "play game" on the button. In this case, what started out as “assessments” became “tests”. What started out as a button with the words “vocab builder” became a button (shown below) that said “play game” (and vocab builder served a more descriptive purpose).

Does it mean that we spend hours and days on choosing just the perfect word? No; to reiterate what we talked about at one of our last company meetings, we need to hold in tension the triple constraints of time, cost and quality. But what it does mean is that we pay attention during the discovery phase and the evaluation phase & we do our best to choose the words or images or icons etc.  that best represent the truth of the reality--and then try it. We'll learn soon enough if we are understood, or if we understand the customers’ reality--and we keep moving forward. The moral of the story is---Words matter.


______________________
**To ponder this further

(either individually or with your team)

 consider the question:

How does the above reality transfer into my own work or the work of our team?

DISCOVERY-- a Deeper Defining of our Audience

So last week we talked about "User-Centered Design". Another word often connected to User-Centered Design is this one: usability.

Usability is defined as "the degree to which something - software, hardware or anything else - is easy to use and a good fit for the people who use it." (upassoc.org; above emphasis added)

I like this definition because it encompasses what is intrinsic to something that is usable, that it’s "a good fit for the people who use it."

How can we know if something is a good fit?

If you were a tailor, creating a suit to fit a customer, how would you ensure that what you created for the customer would fit not only the person himself, but also his expectations? The occasion? What he would be using the suit for?

You would begin by asking for information about the customer right? What's the occasion he's going to be attending? Where is he going to wear the suit? What is his style? You would also begin by taking his measurements, right? And then creating that suit to what you measured.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/

By discovering all of this information, you are narrowing in on what you have to create to "fit" this customer, but also increasing the possibility that what you create for him will make him happy and satisfied (and a returning customer, you hope!) You are also saving fabric that you might have used if you had guessed the man's size, accidently made it too small, and then had to recreate it.

Or maybe, instead of asking him up front what occasion the suit was for, you created the suit in a couple different types of fabric just to make sure. In this case, you would have spent extra time, energy and resources trying to "pinpoint" what might be right instead of spending extra time up front on "measuring" and ensuring that you identified all the "fit points".

I want to show you a BEFORE and AFTER scenario to illustrate how Discovery (or going deeper in defining who our audience is and what they need to do) can lead to a different product (than what we may create without this process) and often, one better suited or that "fits better"--to the needs of the customer.

The first version of the teachers' website was fashioned from ideas, brainstorming sessions, and wouldn't it be cool conversations.

 BEFORE taking the Customers' measurements

The IT staff spent hours and days and months fashioning these features into an interface that we'd hoped would WOW our customers. And then we asked some of our customers to try it. And boy did we learn. We brought teachers in and watched as they struggled through the different pages and tried to remember where to go next.

We saw how it wasn't clear where to go to find what they were looking for. We saw confusion about what features were called. We learned that even though we gave them control over student accounts, for them, this scenario wasn't the best way of solving the common student "I forgot my password" problem. We learned a lot. And then we made changes

The second version of the teachers' website could be called simple. But honestly, its functionality far surpasses anything we've offered teachers before, it’s organized in a way that teachers are used to, it refers to buttons and pages using language that is familiar to teachers and ultimately, it allows the teacher to complete their identified tasks quickly and efficiently.

AFTER taking the Customers' measurements

We arrived at version two through discovery—through taking measurements--listening to, watching and observing: what tasks the customers were trying to complete.

Tasks/Requirements

• Check the student book for the page number they need to assign for reading-this required that they have access to the student text/site from the teacher site
• Look at the unit test/customize for different classes. this required that the test be available in formats that were customizable
• Access teaching Manual from home to check on activity-this required that the Teacher Guide also be available online so that the teacher could access this even if their print book was at school

The above tasks & requirements, along with others identified, formed the skeleton and the base structure for what became the second teachers’ site. This base gave IT clear direction on what the teacher was trying to do. IT and design could then concentrate their time, energy and resources on coding/developing/designing those pieces necessary for teachers to successfully complete the above tasks.

That's how the discovery process (taking the customer measurements and defining more deeply our customer's tasks) helps to pinpoint the product specifications that allow a product to go from an "okay fit" for the customer to a "great fit and a great experience".


To see the BEFORE and AFTER example of the teacher site-in a larger format:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/66111958/Before-and-After-the-Discovery-Process

What IS "User-Centered Design?

Before we delve deeper into different aspects of User-Centered Design, let’s step back a moment and talk about what these words mean.

The Usability Professional Association defines User-Centered Design as “an approach to design that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes focus on users through the planning, design and development of a product."

For me, it's easier to understand this concept by comparing it to another concept we've employed (but maybe not referred to it as such), which is user-driven design.

What’s the distinction between user-centered design and user-driven design?

In user-driven design, the user is actually in the driver’s seat and could be telling us any number of things including:  what they want, how they want it, what they need, what they are trying to do, what they want at the moment, what they think they need, what they would "wish" to have.

In user-centered design, we as professionals are driving, but what guides us on our trip is understanding the fundamental and foundational needs of the user, i.e. where they want to end up, what they need to do along the way (their tasks) and what they need in order to make the trip (their requirements). And then we use our experience, expertise and understanding of the roads to get them there.

 To use examples we may have encountered in our work here at Saint Mary’s Press:  

REAL EXAMPLE #1: Let's say a customer calls us and says, "Do you have an app for the IPAD for this high school textbook?"

In user-centered design, we would respond to the customer, "Tell me, what are you trying to do?” The customer may respond with, “I want to be able to read this text on the IPAD.”  “AHH!  No problem,” we say, “The digital text is already set up to work on the IPAD so you have everything you need.”

In the user-driven design scenario, we may have gone ahead and created the app---even though technically  it wouldn’t have changed their experience of being able to read the book. If fact, what we would have created, they wouldn't have used because it wasn't necessary for what they told us they were actually trying to do.

What's striking to me about this example is that being user-centered actually allows us to serve customers more thoroughly because we are seeking to understand the root task they are trying to accomplish. By approaching it this way, it also allows us to spend our resources on creating those products/services that get at the core of what our customers are trying to do and how go about using something.

We always, always, always want to be gathering insight from the users of our products, our customers.  It is always valuable!  But we need to know how to interpret what we are hearing and how to arrive at the most fundamental level of “what are they trying to do?”

REAL EXAMPLE #2: When we revised The Catholic Youth Bible, we had to choose between creating the Bible with brown or black type on the inside. So we asked some different classes of students/teachers to view a fifteen page sample of the Bible in each of the colors and to let us know which one they would want to read. The response we received was "BROWN!”  We released the Bible with brown type and we heard from users "This brown type is really hard to read". Yikes!

Looking back, I think the team working on the project did due diligence in terms of trying to include the customer in the process as best we could based on what we knew at the time. Today, we might have approached it differently. We may not have let the user’s choice determine or drive the decision, but we might have instead utilized other usability tools, such as eye-tracking software that could help us to observe the users actually reading in both of these color types and thereby get at how the color was affecting the users’ ability to read the words as well as their overall satisfaction of the reading experience.

These are great examples of the difference between user-driven design and user-centered design and why we always want to “ground” our design of a product in what the user—our customer—is trying to do.

To learn more on these topics:

 Another article on User-Centered vs. User-Driven

Eye-tracking, Scrolling and Attention

Where to get affordable eye-tracking software

The Savviness of Singapore: What They Understand About Customer Experience

During my years in the marketing department, we watched and listened to scores of companies around what they did in relation to "brand". We looked at companies that did branding well to be aware of and understand better what was at the foundation of a powerful brand and a powerful customer experience.

One of the companies we looked at was Singapore Airlines. Singapore Airlines, we learned, did "flying" in a different way. It wasn't as if they had found some special path to the far east and back.  The paths their planes took were similar to those taken by every other airline flying into and out of the same countries.

The particular path they have chosen to take as a company is not about where they go, but about how they get there and how they get the people on that path with them--their passengers-- to their final destination.  

But it's not just the Airlines, it may be--as David McQuillen suggests below-- the whole country. For those of you who remember the name David McQuillen (from the last post), listen, as David, Head of Group Customer Experience at OCDC Bank, talks about what he has discovered in Singapore and what he sees in the country's future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1F-QxhGGBE

What strikes you about this? 

David McQuillen on Customer Experience Immersion

One of the most memorable and unequivocally, one of the most convincing talks I've ever heard around the importance of understanding your customer's experience--i.e. what they are trying to do and what kind of experience they want to have--was from a man by the name of David McQuillen. David is the former head of the Customer Experience Group at Credit Suisse Bank, and he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 Catalog Conference that I attended in Chicago.

His talk was amazing. But's it's power laid not in the volume or power of his speaking but in the truth and tranformative power of the story--he told a story about his experience being in the customers shoes and what changed for him as a result of having that experience. He wasn't speaking abstractly, or in theory, but about reality.

He told a story about one way that his company (at that time Credit Suisse) tried to understand their customers who faced disabilities, in this case, customers who were in wheelchairs. As a member of his team, he also, took a turn and spent the entire day working from a wheelchair.

(So, in this case, they didn't just observe their customers, but they took it a step further and immersed themselves in the actual experience of the customer.)

In this 1 minute 50 second clip (of the finale of the same story told at another conference), David shares what he came to understand from that day of --not just observing, but --being immersed in the experience of his customer.

p.s. for some reason, this video may take a couple minutes to load......

you may want to check your e-mail until it loads.... :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsVB8YjrxvY&NR=1

 "Emotions are exceptionally powerful in convincing people

why an experience needs to be a good one."--David McQuillen

 

"What are you trying to do?"

Ben Nagel....many of you remember working with him.  I've heard his name mentioned so many times since he moved on.

For those of you who didn't know him, Ben was great to work with. He had an incredibly positive and infectious spirit and had a genuine graciousness in his work with others that I deeply appreciated. Not only was he analytical but he had a great passion for people, for understanding them and for supporting them.

I came to appreciate Ben in new ways in 2005 when we first began working with one of my favorite acronyms- RFM. RFM is a strategy we learned at that time for segmenting our customers based, basically, on their behavior--how Recently they ordered, how Frequently they ordered, and how much (or the Monetary value of what) they were spending. It was a way to direct our marketing efforts more effectively.

As we were learning this strategy and weeding our way through new ways (well, new for me) of viewing this type of customer behavior through pivot tables, I began to hear Ben asking me the same question. I would go to him asking for some data to be pulled a certain way and he would often come back with, "OK, Heather, what are you trying to do?"

After I got over being perplexed or frustrated that he would often answer my question with a question (because I have NEVER done that), I realized that he wasn't just interested in what I was saying I needed, but he was interested in discovering what I was trying to do, what the actual task was I was trying to carry out.

His question always led to uncovering the reality of what my need was, whether or not I had articulated that need clearly up front.

And so it is with understanding our customers.  Unless we realize what our customers are trying to achieve, what tasks they are trying to carry out, our understanding of them will always be limited to one angle of their experience, what they've shared.

Since we've begun learning about user-centered design, we’re realizing how much more we can do for the customer when we understand what our customers are trying to do (either through interview or observation) and what they require in order to carry out their tasks.  This principle and this process is taking the phrase understanding people to a whole new level. It is taking customer service and more importantly, customer CARE to a whole new level.

And it begins with that small little question from Ben that seemed to always come back to me (like the puck on an air hockey rink that seems to come right back after you send it over to the other side).

The official "What are you trying to do, Heather" Air Hockey Table


The truth and power of this question continues to grow for me and actually has become the starting point for understanding the needs of others that I work with now. I've realized that one element at the heart of product usability and ultimately guides a user-centered design process is making it possible to answer the age-old question: "What are you (or your customers) trying to do?"


Thank you Ben Nagel-