Our professor of User Experience at Texas Tech, (the same professor that came on-site and trained 8 employees in the Certified User Experience Professional Program last summer) had a great question he would pose to us to help us step back & consider our knowledge base around our customer.
The question would consistently call us back to challenge our own assumptions and help us to gauge our own internal starting point.
The question would consistently call us back to challenge our own assumptions and help us to gauge our own internal starting point.
How do you know what you know?
I might say to him, “I already know what the customer needs,” and he would reply back with, “How do you know what you know?”
I might say to him, “Do we really need to do this Discovery step if we already know this information?” He would volley back, “You need to consider how you know what you know.”
I might argue to someone today, “But the tasks our customers are doing now are the same as as they were 5 years ago.” And someone could argue back, “How do you know that? How do you know what you know about the tasks being the same?"
Perhaps the tasks our customers are carrying out is the same, but do they carry out these tasks in the same way? Is there anything new to the way or frequency or the time allotted to carry out the tasks? What if their needs really are the same as those of previous generations? Super! But how will you know that unless you go out into the field and verify that?
Is the certainty of our knowledge coming from direct contact with customers? Is our certainty of our customers' needs today-coming from the certainty of past success or is it coming from current exposure to our customer’s day to day reality?
This question—How do you know what you know?-- represents well the reason for and a summary of our first year using the methods and tools found in user-centered design, our first year of challenging our assumptions (in this way) about “how do we know what we know about the customer” and then allowing our learning and insights into today’s customer further shape and form the ideas, the process, the design, development, marketing and selling of our products & ultimately, our relationship with our customers.
Evolution and development is not an easy thing. But in the last 10 months, I believe we’ve done a pretty phenomenal job at beginning to refashion our relationship with our customer and with one another.
Together, we are gathering new insights, learning new skills, building new products and hopefully, touching more hearts.
To all those at the press whose muddied hands reflect the sculpting of the last year—these are highlights of what we’ve accomplished together:
I might say to him, “Do we really need to do this Discovery step if we already know this information?” He would volley back, “You need to consider how you know what you know.”
I might argue to someone today, “But the tasks our customers are doing now are the same as as they were 5 years ago.” And someone could argue back, “How do you know that? How do you know what you know about the tasks being the same?"
Perhaps the tasks our customers are carrying out is the same, but do they carry out these tasks in the same way? Is there anything new to the way or frequency or the time allotted to carry out the tasks? What if their needs really are the same as those of previous generations? Super! But how will you know that unless you go out into the field and verify that?
Is the certainty of our knowledge coming from direct contact with customers? Is our certainty of our customers' needs today-coming from the certainty of past success or is it coming from current exposure to our customer’s day to day reality?
This question—How do you know what you know?-- represents well the reason for and a summary of our first year using the methods and tools found in user-centered design, our first year of challenging our assumptions (in this way) about “how do we know what we know about the customer” and then allowing our learning and insights into today’s customer further shape and form the ideas, the process, the design, development, marketing and selling of our products & ultimately, our relationship with our customers.
Evolution and development is not an easy thing. But in the last 10 months, I believe we’ve done a pretty phenomenal job at beginning to refashion our relationship with our customer and with one another.
Together, we are gathering new insights, learning new skills, building new products and hopefully, touching more hearts.
To all those at the press whose muddied hands reflect the sculpting of the last year—these are highlights of what we’ve accomplished together:
- 11 people across various functions in the organization were certified as User Experience Professionals by Texas Tech University, specifically around the realities of usability testing and the 4 steps part of every usability test—Discovery, Evaluation, Analysis, Reporting
- 23 people across the organization were charged with spending at least 10 hours directly observing our customers in their native environment
- 1 Site Visit Coordinator began to assist in all the customer visits
- 260 hours have been spent observing, interviewing and learning from our customers
- Project Teams began using “Discovery” as the starting point for every new product being considered
- 5 projects originally proposed were cancelled as a result of the teams “Discovery phase” insights
- The official Saint Mary’s Press User Experience Blog was begun and dedicated to the continuous learning and sharing of new knowledge and insights
- 1 huge Well-of-Insight began being filled and is now being dipped into by current project teams and is the spring for new product ideas
- 24 people were newly trained in Virtus or Safe Environments Training
- 2 offices at Saint Mary’s Press have been dedicated as our very own Morae Usability Lab, where we can test customer experience of products newly in development or those going through usability revisions
- 10 electronic and print products—including both new products and product revisions have been usability tested using our new Morae lab
- 4 products have been tested with state of the art eye tracking equipment, Eye-Guide (by Grinbath)
- 1st video reports on key customer experience insights (generated from Morae Usability Testing Software) were presented to the Decision to Publish Team and the Saint Mary's Press Board of Directors
May 2012 be a year of continued growth for all of us, in service to and with our customers.
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