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User experience blog
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Do designs respond to customer needs or push changes in behaviour?
I was reading an article the other day that talked about how Ikea were changing the way their book shelves are designed in a pre-emptive stance or maybe in reaction to the growing trend of e-books and the premise that books aren’t or wont be what people want to store in books shelves any more.
As an author it does make me sad to think that the good old printed book might not be in homes any more but aside from that it made me wonder whether Ikea, or designers in general, are pushing the change to happen or if they really are responding to the immediate needs of their customers and target audience.
The age old chicken or egg cycle. I think it is great for designers and brands to try and pre-empt and encourage change in user behaviours but I would utter a word of caution - make sure you really know your customers. Working with many of our clients we have found over the years that they often think they know what their customers need and are really keen to push their product offerings and customer experiences to the next level, but often they are looking at the wrong areas - so do your research, and be careful which direction you go…
Mobile survey results! Is the 55+ market satisfied?
The results are in! Kicked off in my last post ‘What about the 55+ mobile phone market?‘ my survey on mobile phones with a particular focus on people over 55 years old is complete! Some of which are refreshingly quite contrary to stereotypical views of the ‘older generation’. Please keep in mind that this survey was distributed over the internet, so mainly reached people who are fairly technologically savvy but there was a reasonably good spread of respondents over different age groups, which allows for a comparison between ages.
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What types of phone do people use?
One key question asked what type of phones people use, which was quite telling for this age group (see results on the right). Handsets were split into 4 groups: candybar style (traditional feature phones), flip phone style (e.g. Motorola Razr), touchscreen smartphone style (e.g. iphone), or blackberry.
It’s perhaps not surprising that a higher percentage of people in the younger end of the scale use a smartphone or blackberry, but a considerable number of the older age ranges use smartphones as well. Interestingly a relatively high percentage of the group between 65-69 still own flip phones. Flip phones were all the rage in 2004 to 2006 but went out of fashion for the majority with the rise of the iPhone and Android phones. It can be safely assumed that those users with the flip phones have had their phone for a number of years.
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Which features do people use on their phones?
Another key insight shows the features that people use on their phones. Unsurprisingly, smartphone users use the most features and almost all smartphone users use their phone to access the internet and email. However, the majority of people in the survey don’t have smartphones and there is a direct correlation here as they also don’t use as many features. This user segment, besides making calls and writing and receiving text messages, almost exclusively uses their phone as an address book, to take the occasional photo and uses their mobile to set alarms. Other functions like calendar/diary functions or listening to music are hardly used by any of these users.
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What problems do people have using their phones?
A number of questions dealt with problems encountered when using a mobile phone. The research shows that those users with health issues affecting movement of hands or fingers (e.g. arthritis) have no clear preference for any particular type of phone despite the fact that the interaction with the buttons on a feature phone is very different from a touchscreen. These users also use their phone just as frequently as any other users.
Respondents were also asked to describe what they found most difficult when using their phone. The type of issue most frequently described was around complexity of using features, confusing menus, complicated flows, and too many unnecessary features. Interestingly this applies to all phone types equally. Another issue cited quite frequently was a problem operating small controls. Interestingly all of the users complaining of this were smartphone or blackberry users. No users complained about small buttons on their feature phone. Equally frequent as small control complaints were issues relating to small font sizes, small screen sizes and poor visibility in sunlight. These issues again happened across all phone types.
These results really challenge the common perception that touchscreen smartphones have made operating a mobile phone easier by providing a more direct interaction style, the removal of complicated menu structures and providing a bigger screen with more customisation options. It seems that touchscreen phones have not really addressed these issues at least for the age groups in question here.
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Make no assumptions about ‘older’ users
Finally there were a number of comments made in the questionnaire similar to the responses to the previous blog post saying that it shouldn’t be assumed that just being over a certain age means that people don’t adopt new technology. Admittedly, starting at 55 is very young for any research of ‘older’ people and across all respondents no matter what age, it is clear from the data that people are very diverse and so I must conclude that segmenting people by age alone is not useful. People’s behaviour with regards to mobile phones depends on many factors, for example their experience with similar technology. Perhaps it’s time to dispel some rather patronising misconceptions about older people simply wanting mobile phones with a few big buttons to make the occasional call, or at least admit that the ‘older user’ group is not the right way to sort users and requirements.
In order to get a better understanding of the specific customer experience with regards to smartphone interactions, I am now conducting a series of individual interview and usability testing sessions with people over 55 years of age. I am still looking for a few more participants for my sessions. If you are over 55, live in the London area, ideally own a smartphone, and would like to participate in my study, please call 020 7423 6320 and ask for Kerstin!
Multichannel this & multichannel that
Terms like multichannel marketing and multichannel business strategy have been cropping up a lot in articles, industry news, board meetings, brainstorm sessions, presentations, workshops … you name it. This prefix has been going around for a while now and has become a must have strategy for most businesses.
What’s interesting though is actually seeing it being put into good use. Having recently completed a few multichannel e-commerce projects for high street brands, I realised that there’s much room for improvement in making multichannel shopping a better experience. We know that a lot of businesses have multichannel offerings (e.g. website, high street store, call centre, catalogue, magazine) and a lot of consumers are multichannel shoppers. For example a persona we created for a client (based on real user research) called Sally. She has a tendency to read an email on her mobile devise that sparks a desire to buy something, she then browses through a selection of products online on multiple websites, checks out the products in a store, compares store prices with online prices, then goes home and purchases the product(s) online and waits for it to be delivered.
It all sounds pretty straightforward, but what can a business do to improve this process to create a truly seamless multichannel experience?
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Remember the whole customer life-cycle:
The first step is to really understand how your brand interacts throughout the entire customer life-cycle. Understanding consumers’ buying behaviour via different research methodologies (e.g. ethnographic studies, interviews, diary studies) can provide rich insights into the details for the design that will make a big difference. In short, putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and listening to what they have to say (in a structured way) and watching what they do is a great way to glean insights into how to develop a multichannel experience and get it right.
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Design each interaction properly:
There are several structured processes and tools from multidisciplinary fields (…pun not intended) that can be used to improve multichannel customer experiences. Starting with the concept of designing for multiple touchpoints taken from the field of service design is a good plan.
As consumers usually come in contact with a brand from different points (or channels in relation to this article), which you can pin down with good user research, it is important to identify and focus on each interaction to ensure that the customer experience is designed for its purpose every time. Following that, the challenge is to ensure a seamless transition from one touchpoint to another and a consistent brand representation throughout. More about the topic of service design can be found in this brilliant book This is Service Design Thinking.
The most important aspect however is that different businesses have different priorities, so always adapt and apply these concepts so they fit with the business strategy and target market. I’m sure there are more ways out there that have been successfully implemented to make this work, it’ll be interesting to know what you think in the comments below!
By the way, if you are involved in the retail sector or are interested to learn which brands have created the best multichannel customer experiences and how to do the same, then join up for our newsletter on our homepage or follow us on twitter to make sure you get your hands on our Retail Multichannel Report first!
Picture from New York Times Fashion&Style: Next step for fashion label - Cyberboutiques
What’s different about customer experience in financial services?
When we talk about customer or user experience in the financial services arena, what do we actually mean? The understanding of banks and banking is not a straightforward concept, and there are different types of banks out there which serve different purposes for different audiences.
To pick apart some of the layers of customer experience that the financial services sector contains (and in some cases really needs to work on), here are a few key tips from our experience in retail banking and investment banking clients highlighting major areas to keep in mind when designing or re-designing customer experience in these 2 distinct sub-categories.
Retail Banking
The challenges for most retail banks are attracting new customers and retaining current clients. Not unlike most businesses, customer experience can support a retail bank with both of these aspects and if implemented correctly can be used to differentiate a brand in the marketplace. It could be said that customer service is re-gaining its power for the high-street banks, as it was back in the day when your bank manager knew you and your family. It is important to add at this point that customer service doesn’t mean just face to face and it doesn’t put all of the customer experience effort into the branch. It needs to be truly multichannel and developed as a whole for the brand.
Creating a great multichannel customer experience has its challenges for the retail banks, here are 5 key areas to think about when researching, building and managing this process:
- Testing and Research requires recruitment and persona creation of a wide variety of customers to cover the spectrum and needs to map out the entire life-cycle of clients to really understand their motivations, needs and desires.
- Accommodate for the lowest common denominator. This means using a language and creating a level of usability that applies to a wide audience.
- Seamless interactions across in-branch, call centre and digital interfaces. This requires a mixture of staff training, digital design, and striking a careful balance between automation and personal communication. We would recommend at this point that customers should be able to choose their communication and interaction methods that they are most comfortable with.
- Flawless usability is necessary as consumers don’t have patience with services such as banking. This may seem like a difficult and obvious goal but what we want to highlight is that usability can be difficult to design for large audience types. In some cases segmentation could be a vital step to help reduce the scope of design and to ensure the experience is correct for the most appropriate target audience.
- Consistent brand experience through all touch points including websites, mobile apps, print ads, TV ads, customer service advisors, any form of communication. The issue for retail banks with regards to this aspect is one of ownership over the customer experience as most of these outlets are managed across different departments.
Investment banking
Investment banks have an entirely different outlook and set of challenges. They offer more specialised and sophisticated services as they serve a different purpose and target a different audience from high street banks. User experience in investment banking is often about speed, accuracy and efficiency, it is about getting your day job done, and covers both user and customer experience, so the audience type is usually specific, experienced and knowledgeable about the tasks to be done, systems and language.
For user experience in investment banking, we have found 4 specific areas to keep in mind when managing the research and design process:
- Do as they do. Always relate your work to the business objectives, a great experience in investment banking is about speed, timing and optimisation of information flows so always relate the user experience to these objectives. For example personas should just present the basic needs and priorities of the users and not include any further, more personal information that is usually presented for customer experience design.
- Retain the banking jargon. There is a lot of jargon in investment banking. Whereas we would recommend to avoid jargon in other sectors, it’s important to use the terms of the bankers. Thus, translating the language into simple terms doesn’t make sense when designing for domain experts in investment banking.
- Use the tools of the bankers – spreadsheets, use cases and business flows are their tools so use them when documenting user experience. Complement these with more visual aspects in workshops as time and efficiency is key in banking and most people find it easier to take in information this way. This also takes the abstract element out of a business flow or spreadsheet so the value of user experience as being different from business analysis becomes clear.
- Make it a collaborative process with only the right people getting involved in the decision-making and be careful with the people you invite for workshops or other types of research. This is definitely a rule that goes beyond banking, however, when the financial markets are open time is money and you just can’t consume their time. When the famous Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street’ says “I can give you 10 minutes” it’s not so far from reality.
These are just a few things that we have picked up over the years of working with different organisations in the financial services sector. Do you agree, have you found different issues? Please leave your comments below!
Image shows a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled smartphone, predicted to be the next big thing for automated payments and something retail banks will need to get on board with.
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