If it does, then it should inspire you to ask your online marketing firm, “What are we doing wrong?”

The best way to answer this is to take a look at it from your customers’ perspective. When they click on a PPC ad there are certain things they are looking for when they hit the landing page. If you don’t meet those expectations, they are likely to bounce.  So then, what are your visitors expecting to see when they reach your landing page?

Continuation. I’m sure your creative is well-written and includes an irresistible offer that convinced the customer to click on your ad instead of your competitor’s. Make sure that this content is given proper real estate on the landing page. I’m talking front and center so that your customers see it quickly when they first arrive. If the offer messaged in the ad text is hard to find or if this promise is broken, they will lose faith in your product, your brand and ultimately bounce. Netquote.com maps over the content from the creative ads directly to the landing page headline. Here is an ad displayed when searching for the keyword: Free auto insurance quote (Click image to enlarge.)

Here is the landing page. There is a direct continuation in message flows seamlessly. (Click image to enlarge.)
 

 Call out the call to action. Seems obvious, right? You’d be surprised by how often the action companies need their customers to take for their campaigns to succeed are hidden, difficult to access, or missing completely from a landing page. Be completely transparent in the next step to the conversion path. This will encourage a feeling of trust and your customers will be more easily moved through the buying cycle.

(Click image to enlarge.) 

Before investing too much more in advertising, be sure to implement landing pages that take these best practices into consideration. A well-constructed landing page will often make a dramatic difference in your success rate.

Whether in the hall or break room, or next to an actual water cooler, the “Water Cooler Effect” has been credited with improving employee productivity, spreading rumors, and producing better research. It is generically used to refer to informal socializing among people who share a physical workspace, and believed to foster the kind of informal connections which build social capital within organizations.

But how do geographically-dispersed organizations meet the challenge of building teams of people who will infrequently (or never) meet face to face in any informal setting? They need to reproduce “the water cooler effect”, but in a virtual environment.  And while there are plenty of tools for “Enterprise Collaboration,” that’s usually been limited to providing access to the materials needed to accomplish specific tasks, and a forum for discussing and developing work product. There are fewer tools aimed at the enterprise which invite non-structured, non-project-based collaboration. And yet this purpose is equally vital to the culture and life of the company.  

It is here that social media, properly embraced, offer a solution.

The Three Waves of Social Media

When the first wave of social media swept through corporate life, it initially spawned an Era of Fear. The ability of employees to openly share their opinions, perspectives and even political views was met largely with uncertainty and a grasp for control: corporations blocking access to Facebook and Twitter, instituting social media Acceptable Use Policies and deploying private discussion boards integrated into intranet portals. These activities were undertaken with the intent of circumscribing employees’ use of social media to a set of behaviors deemed acceptable to corporate legal and HR departments. (Even if this intent was stated, or even conscious, it was palpably based on the reaction, “This activity is a threat to the company, we must control or channel it.”) Barring a plan to house your employees in company-owned barracks buried, along with your work complex, far enough underground to block out any wireless signal, attempting to create a cordon sanitaire is destined for failure.

The second wave has been only slightly more encouraging: a loosening of acceptable use policies to encourage users to act responsibly for the sake of the company on which they depend for a living, and a willingness to engage fully with public social media channels to listen more closely, and respond, to the voice of the customer. This has been met with stepped up monitoring of employees’ online activities, the creation of privately “owned” social media networks (such as Yammer) and the full embrace of Facebook and Twitter – as PR and advertising outlets. This Era of Co-option features an acceptance of social media as an inescapable fact, with continuing resistance at the corporate levels of HR and Legal; they want assurances, through proscriptive policies or punitive follow-through, that the medium will behave to their liking.

A third wave is beginning to swell, one mediated by a formalized contract between company and employee: companies agree to step out of the way of social media, and encourage its open use without subjecting employees’ activities and contributions to filters, brand policing or punitive measures. Employees intertwine their personal and professional social circles, develop more primary relationships with their colleagues and with customers, and create and contribute to a community with shared purposes. The company can partake of, and benefit from this community, but cannot own it. This is a bona fide Era of Community, featuring mutually-determined goals and interests, bilateral respect for individual differences, and an open acceptance of grass-roots innovation.

This is a structurally looser, but much more realistic compact between parties: people will socialize, outside and in between the confines of a corporate structure. A company which chooses to enable and support that – not just tacitly approve and turn a blind eye towards it, but actively encourage it - enjoys the benefits of a tighter social cohesion among far flung teams, as well as a reputation for being in tune with contemporary expectations of the role of technology in daily life.

Next time your organization is looking for ways to improve collaboration among remote teams, consider these strategies (in addition to flexible document sharing and virtual workspaces, VOIP and video chat):

• To help teams form connections that go deeper than a set of project goals, actively promote  social network participation across the organization, with a focus on non-work-specific groups.
• As geographically-dispersed teams will often have to find time to collaborate in real-time, encourage teams to develop flexible work schedules – even to the point of eliminating formal “working hours” and instead allowing teams to negotiate among themselves the most appropriate times for group meetings to occur. You should offer these teams only two constraints: make choices collaboratvely, and maximize each individual’s most productive times (recognizing that each person’s will be different.)
• Actively encourage employees to listen to what the wider world is saying about the organization, and empower them to respond directly, and personally. At first glance, this may seem to create a logistical and compliance nightmare; until you accept the fact that your employees are doing it anyway, just in places and ways you can’t see. 
• The more customers your business has, the more essential it is to help each and every employee find ways to be customer-facing. Doing so confers four advantages: your company inherently becomes more responsive to your customers; your reputation for being more human and personable than the typical corporation grows; your ability to focus obsessively on your customers scales more readily; and your employees get a deeper and more personal sense of ownership and responsibility. 

The benefits of openly embracing social media within an organization are not always obvious through the  time-worn lens of corporate policy. The larger the organization, the greater the degree to which centralized control will need to be sacrificed to enjoy the fruits of this new openness. But delaying this transition longer will only concede further advantage to those organizations that are already busy adjusting to the change, and fine tuning their approach.

But what are the experience design considerations for a service that isn’t optional; that is, a service that when not optimal puts people’s lives at risk. Emergencies fall into this category and lead to fascinating service design challenges associated with aligning the emergency service experiences among various service providers and their customers. In her latest article for UX Matters, Gaining Control Over Chaos, MISI XD Account Director Laura Keller explores the unique challenges of designing effective emergency services – from identifying the range of emergency scenarios right through strategizing how to improve services going forward.

It’s a powerful article that raises intriguing questions, such as who ”owns” your experience of an emergency? Laura describes the proactive leadership role PSE&G took in helping residents prepare for and respond to Hurricane Irene. Should we as customers of regional power companies expect them to assume such a leadership role or do we believe that responsibility resides elsewhere? Should PSE&G’s emergency service be considered a model for other power companies? If so, what implications does that expectation have for emergency service providers who must coordinate with the power companies in an emergency? What joint planning and coordination should they be doing?

Just as with individuals, emergencies bring out the best and worst in organizations. As Laura makes clear in her article, effective emergency service design requires the best of service design professionals.

The Metaphor: Companion Planting

Outside of my MISI work, I spend part of my time working in a Philadelphia City Harvest community garden. I employ a gardening method called companion planting.

Companion planting cultivates reciprocal relationships between diverse yet interconnected entities. For instance, nutrient rich soil provides the foundation for healthy growth. Specific vegetables are paired and planted with complementary herbs, flowers or beneficial weeds that work with one another to manage pests, enrich flavor, attract helpful insects and enable resilience. My role as the gardener is to provide the resources for mutually beneficial interactions to unfold over time. The effect is a self-sustaining ecosystem where all integral parts, both human and non-human, participate in its making, flourishing and evolution.

Even though companion planting requires a certain amount of work upfront, the results are manifold. A higher yield of quality vegetables contains the right amount of nutrients and flavor, unmatched by monoculture production. Beneficial vegetation and insects abound. And the positive results travel beyond the garden. People are properly fed with nutritious food. A city corner is beautified. Neighbors work together to maintain the city block. The neighborhood is proud. A proactive community-based movement continues to grow in Philadelphia and beyond.

People’s lives are made a bit better.

Human Approach: Think In Ecosystems

Solutions that don’t encompass or work in concert with others across [the many] aspects of our lives significantly reduce their ability to succeed. – Nathan Shedroff, Author of Design is the Problem and Making Meaning

Urban community gardening and companion planting in particular is part field study for the experience design work I perform at MISI–specifically as it relates to employee engagement, or how employees emotionally engage with their work culture. Companion planting within the context of urban community gardening has taught me the effectiveness of thinking in systems.

Often times as designers, we speak of metaphorical ecosystems when designing employee engagement models, but we tend to focus on assumptions of employee needs and isolated factors like unsuccessful IT tools, failing carrots and sticks programs and declining efficiency and productivity. Isolated factors such as these are artifacts of a troubled community, not the roots of an engagement problem.  And assumptions can lead to counterproductive solutions.

We can address real systemic cultural change by co-creating an employee engagement model from an ecosystems perspective.

 

The following, scalable approach can be employed to unearth points for intervention within a human network:

• Map out the components of a system and related subsystems (employee roles, teams, office and meeting spaces, tools, management processes, work flow, reporting and organizational structures).
• Uncover the intangible pieces, including across-level employee abilities, emotions, perceptions, expectations, personalities, affect, values and needs to derive meaning from work.
• Survey the system’s interconnections and relationships (modes of collaboration, communication, exchange, mentorship and interaction among employees and organizational components).
• Examine the communicated purpose (internal value proposition, messaging, vision or goals) of an organization.
• Observe employee behavior to determine the real drive of the system.
• Compare/contrast the communicated purpose (through messaging and marketing materials) of the system with authentic employee behavior.
• Dissect and analyze contradictions, inconsistencies, alignment issues and successes across strata.
• Pinpoint external factors that impact internal activities.
• Remove ‘they’ from your vocabulary.

Before I continue, I’d like to address the final point: remove ‘they’ from your vocabulary. Employees include all levels of individuals who are employed by an organization, regardless of experience, title, salary or rank. To utilize an ecosystems perspective is to include oneself in the picture. The word ‘they’ unintentionally shows separation between leadership and ‘they’. Each one of us is an interconnected node within a system. How do all of us impact the experience of employees within a work culture?

In order to ensure that employee engagement models avoid quick fixes, uncover the scope of an engagement challenge by evaluating the organization’s ecosystem and then design for its multiplicity through co-creation processes.

Equilibrium: Align Purpose and Behavior Around Meaning

Companion planting works. Interrelated parts are animated by mutually beneficial relationships and a shared drive. The bees pollinate flowers. Geraniums repel harmful insects from vegetables so they can thrive. The list continues. The ecosystem succeeds or fails based on the behavior of its interrelated parts and their connection to the collective drive. If a part of the equation is off, the system is out of balance and cannot function properly.

How does this translate to a human ecosystem? Humans have emotions and are motivated by meaning. The behavior within a human (or employee) system is prompted by meaning-based motivations. An organization that considers these realities will increase employee engagement.

Think about the following:

• When an organizational network does not have a clearly stated purpose (value proposition or vision), it has no reason for being. The people in the network do not have a focused, drive forward.
• If an organizational network has a stated purpose, but that purpose does not reflect the behaviors and natural abilities of its employees, then the network is out of sync. The people in the system are less engaged because they do not derive authentic meaning from their work. In this circumstance, individual employees are not motivated to behave in a way that benefits the whole.

To design using an ecosystems-based lens is to design for what it means to be human. An organization’s purpose should animate the natural abilities, emotions, values and passions of employees–driving behavior. The positive results are endless. Engaged employees derive inherent meaning from their work and culture. Individuals trust and believe in a mutually beneficial community. The employee experience is inspired and self-sustaining, i.e. meaningful.

Collaboration: Design for Companion-Based Relationships

An ecosystem that does not collaborate is not an ecosystem. Collaboration is key to a healthy environment. An organization’s purpose is one step in helping to incite collaborative behaviors among employees. Why? That’s what a shared purpose means: engaged employees are personally motivated to work together to achieve collective success.

However, the purpose of an organization and employee intentions often collide with the limitations of an organization. Limitations could be management processes, tools and workspaces that do not reflect the renewed purpose of the organization. When these components are misaligned, collaboration is seen as a cumbersome method of working. People do not collaborate. The purpose is null and void.

If an organization has a meaningful purpose and its systems, tools and processes reflect that purpose, then employees will trust and believe in the promise and value of collaboration. Collaborative behaviors cannot be forced through tools. They need to be supported across the organization, modeled by leadership and practiced throughout the entire community. Collaboration occurs when all channels are aligned.

How can we sync up a human ecosystem? Perform ecosystems-based research in your organization and with your employees to reveal what a collaborative environment looks like to your specific organization. Develop a collaboration strategy and a multi-faceted plan to implement that strategy. From employee engagement projects, MISI has identified several high-level tenets of a collaborative ecosystem.

They are:

• Enable communities of passion.
• See leaders and managers as service providers.
• Develop and speak a shared language.
• Build a culture of trust.
• Open access to pertinent information.
• Support a learning environment.
• Create time and guidelines for idea exchange.
• Provide opportunities for multi-level, informal and face-to-face interactions.
• Implement and maintain high quality collaboration tools & systems.
• Offer consistent feedback and recognition.

The next step: design the architecture needed to support these tenets. Implement the architecture in meaningful ways across the organization so that employees trust and see the value of collaboration as an inherent work method.

 Why Should Organizations Design for the Ecology of Human Networks?

Human ecosystems are dynamic, resilient and evolving as well as mutually beneficial and participatory. They are human. Organizations, who consider what it means to be human and who balance employee needs with profits, are organizations who are investing in their own sustained success. Co-created (with employees) engagement models from an ecosystems perspective facilitate healthy, productive, companion-based behavior. Employees derive meaning from their work and are fully engaged.

The effects of an ecosystems approach continue. Organizations can: create businesses where employees are intimately invested in an organization’s success (and vice versa); enable environments where collaboration, mentorship and community-centered interactions thrive; foster a trust-based work culture that leads to creativity and innovation; increase employee loyalty and long-term organizational intelligence through authentic relationship-building; make people’s lives a bit better in and outside of work.

These are not new ideas. Nature has been successfully organizing itself in a similar manner for over 3.8 billion years. We have a lot to learn.

Normally when I write a customer experience (CX) related blog post it is about something that went very wrong. After all, I’m just like most people. Something goes right I tell my husband and a couple of friends. Something goes wrong, tell the world! This time, I want to talk about the impact even a small great experience can have on brand loyalty – and how it can lead to changing hearts, minds and behaviors.

Believe it or not, despite all the multi-touchpoint experience design I do, I am 100% an in-store shopper… or I used to be.  The ability to see and touch the actual products I am going to spend my money on is very important to me, as is the money I can save on shipping. (Hey, that extra $10 can lead to an even nicer pair of shoes!).  All of that changed, of course, with the arrival of my daughter a few months ago.  What used to be long afternoons of wandering the mall for a great bargain have turned into wondering the halls of the web for…oh, say the cheapest deal on baby formula.  Sigh…

All during my pregnancy people were telling me to get ready for the world of online shopping.  I insisted that while I might break down for formula and diapers, NEVER would I be “one of those moms” who does all of her personal shopping online.  That said, towards the end, hitting the mall was not so much of an option. Resignedly, I opened up the Mac and went online.  And I hated it – with one exception… Diapers.com.  

What first got me was, of course, the free shipping… SWEET!  Then, I started to realize that they had a great selection and an easy to use website with a very quick and logical shopping cart flow (imagine that – they even got the shopping cart right)…  

But I digress.  Where I am headed with this story is that over these last few months I’ve come to realize that Diapers.com isn’t great just because of the online experience or even the live service and support experience, but because of the very human experience they provide. Here’s an example.

A recent order was, of course, a case of powdered formula. Unfortunately, one of the tins had the seal lifted, so I was a little nervous about not just using that tin, but the whole case.  I sent a note to Diapers expecting them to give me a return / exchange, but that this would probably take a week or so to process.  Not so – the response email was within 15 minutes and while short in sentences, very personal.  Not just an offer to replace the tin, but “we will get the entire case reshipped, toss the old one…” and all of this wrapped in understanding – “I can only imagine how upsetting that must have been with a new baby at your side”… And this is not an isolated instance.  I have had several very impressive exchanges like this with them. Bravo Diapers.com.

Now admittedly I’m an experience designer, so of course I want to share my big takeaways from my experience. Anecdotal and personal as they are, combined with what I have learned researching and designing others’ experiences, there are some significant “truths” here I’d like to reinforce for all you marketers out there trying to figure out how to turn new customers into loyal ones.

1) Make yours a truly human interaction – Anybody can provide standard, generic, “your business is important to us” service or support. It makes all the difference in the world when a product website or a company employee recognizes that I am a human being and would like to be treated as one, not just another customer.  This distinction – “I can only imagine how upsetting that must have been…” – makes all the difference. It makes an emotional and memorable connection and begins to create the relationship and affinity that ensures I come back for more. Remember that online doesn’t mean inhuman – it is an opportunity to be even more human. Here’s how…

2)  Use what you know and remember me – I share info with you so you can better serve me. So go ahead – show my recent purchases when I login, tie your recommendations to related items I have purchased, and be smart about it. If I just bought a little black dress from you, I might need shoes, but the odds are pretty good that I don’t need another little black dress. For example, what Diapers.com does so well is make it easy to reorder what I would logically reorder – e.g. food and diapers. And it doesn’t waste my time highlighting an order I am not likely to reorder – e.g. a specific toy I just purchased.   

3)  Make it crazy-easy to do business with you – Design your experience not from the perspective of what you can do and support, but from the perspective of what I need to accomplish and how / when / where.  Designing with me in mind leads me to trust you in a variety of contexts, not just the one I am most familiar with. Most important, keep it simple. Think about your favorite brick and mortar stores: more than likely they make it really easy to find what you’re looking for, to get help if you need it, to stumble upon other stuff you like and to check out when you’re ready. Too often shopping online is characterized by too many irrelevant choices, lousy search results, forced associations and no readily available help.

4)  Do not underestimate the impact of the little things on an overall experience – Before the formula incident, I was a fan of Diapers.com, but now I am a true loyalist. The thing that nabbed me wasn’t how fast or cheap their service is, but literally that little line in the email about knowing how upset or frustrated I might be as a new mother. Just that little bit of empathy, that human touch is all it took to win me over. Fix the problem without that touch and I’m thinking you did what was expected. Include it and you alter how I think about you.

What is probably most amazing about this whole experience with Diapers.com is that now instead of comparing online experiences to live ones I do the opposite. I am comparing live experiences to my recent online ones.  My behaviors have changed as well. I only go to stores when I have to. I shop online not because it is cheaper, but because I am finding it can actually be more human. Now that is a statement to ponder!

In my 10 years in the field of IT at a large state university, I saw firsthand how the institution struggled to keep up with and meet students’ demands while maintaining the university’s core principles and commitment to quality. Many systems and applications were conceived, completed and deployed to meet these demands, but often with minimal involvement from students. Speaking from my personal experience as both a student and staff member, I can say that the results of many of these projects missed the mark, were overly complicated, or did not address the primary needs of the students. From an experience design perspective, they simply failed to start at the beginning – Who is the audience? What do they want? How do we help them get there?

There are many reasons why universities take this IT-centric approach, including limited time, budgets, and staff resources, or decentralized units that operate independent of a larger vision. Often informed by a computer science perspective, IT departments create their own online systems to digitize their paper processes, without considering the larger experience, context, or process in which their system is used by the student. This inevitably creates more systems and functionality, which adds to the complexity of the technical environment as well as the experience of the students, faculty and staff who serve those students.

In my experience the result of this approach was that students had to use one system to register for classes, another to check grades, a third to view transcripts, a fourth to navigate degree requirements, a fifth to make payments, a sixth to check on scholarships, and so on. In cases like this, students are left frustrated, struggling to find their way through myriad online systems, functions, and services.

Drawing on XD Principles could Improve the Education Experience

So how can the principles of experience design improve this? It is a common belief that the education “industry” in general is moving to a more business-centric model, rather than knowledge-centric. This “new” business-centric model for education reflects the realities and economics of growth in the 21^st century, and more and more universities are adopting it. In a time of rapid change and destabilization, consistent and continued growth is a common way of addressing new problems via expansion of resources. There is a prime opportunity during this growth period for experience design to partner with and inform the higher education industry.

One principle of XD is particularly relevant and potentially powerful for the education community: Co-creation. Since the primary audience is students and students are constantly experimenting with new technologies, even inventing solutions in their dorm rooms, make them part of the solution. Co-creation among students and the people building the systems and services the students use would…

a)      Allow universities  to leverage the expertise and resourcefulness of their audience

b)      Engage students in solving real world system design and implementation issues

c)       Incorporate valuable feedback about what students need and want at little additional cost

d)      Create buy-in and advocacy among the student population for the solution

With innovations like Pearson’s free, cloud-based learning management system, Openclass, now available, the time is right for a new approach to educational institution IT. Using a platform like this to focus on addressing the students’ core needs would allow the limited resources available at universities to be directed appropriately, with the end result being a satisfied customer whose needs are met and whose experience is vastly improved. Bottom line, having IT organizations at educational institutions apply sound experience design principles like co-creation to their solution development process is just good business. Class dismissed.

MISI XD AD and strategist Lisa Woodley leads a workshop at a Life Sciences Commercial IT Summit. The topic: how to prepare internal teams for the changes to come and create internal advocates when a company implements new technology solutions. Based on her experience helping companies understand and manage cultural change, Lisa writes a white paper. The topic: The Dawn of the Era of iT - how new trends in information technology are forcing IT organizations to be more customer-centric, with their “customer” being the employees they serve.

I travel to Moscow to present a keynote at UX Russia 2011. My topic is Beyond the Interface to the Interaction. I organize the presentation around three of MISI XD’s 10 Immutable Truths of XD. One of the truths I focus on is #6: XD Acknowledges that Employees are People Too. Among the points I make in my presentation is that companies have come to recognize that employees are customer experience professionals’ secret weapon. They experience the customer’s issues, they generate real world improvement ideas, and they build the links between the company and the customer experience.

Customer Experience (CX) - the idea of designing the end to end, multiple touchpoint, multi-modal experience as a whole as opposed to a series of discrete interactions – has been maturing as a discipline for many years. More companies are appreciating the power of CX to differentiate their products, services and/or brands in the marketplace and to create loyalty. Titles like Chief Experience Officer or SVP of Customer Experience are becoming more common. And new CX maturity models – measures of how committed an organization is to a strategy of customer-centricity – are being introduced into the marketplace by a variety of practitioners. What has not gotten as much play as we believe it should, is the role each employee plays in contributing to the desired outcome of a great, loyalty-inspiring customer experience. As Jerilyn writes in her white paper, “If you or your colleagues don’t buy into the value of your product, your brand and the customer experience you are seeking to create, you won’t be able to live that promise when working with your customers.”

No surprise then that Employee Experience has been a major theme at MISI XD in recent months, and will continue to be as the results of our work with our current clients develop into additional insights to the power of individual employees to make or break the customer experience.

Event #1: July/August Issue of Interactions Magazine Arrives

 The cover story by Professor Liam Bannon is Reimagining HCI: toward a more human-centered perspective. I was immediately smitten by the title because this has been a theme I have been preaching to my team and anyone else patient enough to indulge me over the last 5 years. It’s not enough to involve “users” in the design and development of interfaces to technological tools. There is no such being as a “user.”  We are people who use technology. We use technology in the context of trying to accomplish something. In order to design effective interactions (not merely usable interfaces to devices), designers must design with an understanding of the broader context of use and of the person using the tool.

Bannon’s article gives this seemingly self-evident yet often ignored perspective much needed context of its own. He outlines the history of the discipline of designing human-computer interactions. (The article is a must read for anyone interested in developments in the field of HCI over the last 30+ years.) When Professor Bannon gets to the present he observes, “This perspective of ‘human-centered design’ as a paradigm shift takes the term ‘human-centered’ to mean more than simply ‘considering the user’ in technology development. Rather it places our understanding of people, their concerns and their activities at the forefront in the design of new technology.”

He goes on to point out that understanding people reaches far beyond our use of any particular technological device to include matters of ethics and shared values. Today, he argues, human-centered design means understanding what it means to be human. Great stuff.

Event #2: The Resignation of Steve Jobs

He had been on medical leave since January, yet when he formally announced his resignation as CEO, Apple stock fell over 5%. This despite the fact that he will remain the company’s chairman. Regardless of what you think of Steve Jobs – and opinions range widely – there is no denying that Apple was reborn on his watch, climbing from #287 on the S&P 500 10 years ago to battling Exxon for the #1 spot as the world’s most valuable company. Listening to one of several retrospectives I was struck by a comment made by a Walt Mossberg, personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal that for me summed up Jobs’ transformative impact on the world of personal computing. Mossberg noted, “He makes products for the actual users of the products.”

In a SF Chronicle article about Apple alums who have started companies of their own, Matt MacInnis, the founder of the digital textbook platform Inkling noted, “We all tend to come at things from a software- or hardware-for-a-person worldview, because that’s how Apple operates so intensely at all levels.” By “we all” he’s referring to people who founded companies with names like Electronic Arts, Salesforce.com, Android, LinkedIn…enough said.

Event #3: A Project about Employees’ Attitudes and Behaviors gets C-Level Attention

Finally, this last Friday account director Lisa Woodley wrote an email congratulating her project team for the results of their work to help transform the attitudes and behaviors of the employees of one of our marquee clients. Our experience design challenge in this case had nothing to do with the technological tools these employees have been provided. There was no reconciliation of business requirements with functional specifications to perform, no usability issue to address. The problem was that people had lost touch with the intrinsic value of their jobs, and the resulting attitudes and behaviors were affecting individual and company performance. Our team’s challenge was to help them rediscover the thread between the tasks they perform every day and the very genuine corporate mission to make the world a better place. She quoted our client sponsor as saying, “Everything is really resonating, and people are passionate about what they are saying. The work completed so far is having an impact that exceeds my expectations, and my expectations were pretty high.”

Always great to have a happy client. But what really struck me was what came next: “The outcomes of our success,” Lisa wrote, “include being invited to present our work at a meeting in October for all the CIOs of all the businesses under the [company] umbrella.” Our work focusing on employee engagement and how it enables better collaboration is going to be a topic of discussion at a meeting of senior technologists whose typical charter is to “leverage” technology in order to reduce costs (read: cut jobs) and increase efficiency (read: do more with less). And this CIO presentation will happen just a few weeks after Lisa co-leads an in-conference workshop on the importance of preparing employees for tool and platform changes at CBI’s Life Sciences Commercial IT Summit on Mobile and Cloud Initiatives; a 3.5 hour workshop about people at a conference for IT professionals.

Taken together these three events represent a powerful theme. Bannon, a professor and the director of a design center at a university, champions a more human-centric design approach largely to an audience of people who are academics, theoreticians and design practitioners. Steve Jobs is a champion of people as users of consumer electronics, commonly called customers. Lisa’s team championed the cause of people as employees. Practitioners, customers and employees – a trifecta of human-centricity. These are just three examples of what I see as a growing and welcome trend in the world of experience design as it applies to the design of technological solutions: the rise of the humanists. There’s hope for the planet after all.

Having conducted international research audits, interviews and field research with physicians over the past few years, I’ve noticed 5 commonalities of the physicians’ experience that seem to transcend physical and cultural boundaries. Understanding and appreciating these common themes can provide those desiring to do business with physicians with a foundation for further cultivating their knowledge of physicians and for developing a successful relationship with them.

1. Physicians seem to have a perpetual time deficit – while the reasons may differ – in the US a physician may be spending significant time finding a medication that is on his/her patient’s insurance formulary while a Spanish physician may be spending that time understanding local regulations – a common thread across regions is that physicians are being tasked with increasing responsibilities, more patients and yet there are still only 24 hours in the day. Physicians need tools and resources that help them work quickly and efficiently.
2. Medical school is not business school; practice management can be a struggle – for physicians who are intimately involved with the operations of their facility, practice management is a critical responsibility for which many feel unprepared. This is as true in parts of Europe and Asia as it is in the US. Physicians need advice, tools and resources to help them manage this aspect of their careers.
3. Physicians everywhere are worried about bureaucracy and legal troubles – malpractice and following regulations are concerns for all physicians. They constantly need to be on top of regulations, protocols and best practices so as to avoid legal or administrative issues. In an ever-changing medical and healthcare environment this can be a challenge. Physicians often feel very vulnerable with regard to these issues and value advice from trusted peers and experts.
4. Patient adherence remains a top concern – the challenge to get patients to adhere to treatment regimens is universal. Whether it is because the patient feels he or she knows better than the physician, or the patient has a misperception about treatment, or that simple absentmindedness leads to non-compliance, adherence is a major challenge and physicians take it very seriously. There is a multitude of patient education and compliance-related resources available. Physicians want efficient ways to point their patients toward the most effective information and tools.
5. Physicians are people too, and want to feel respected as physicians – physicians get the most satisfaction from their work when they are working with their patients, taking the time to understand their needs, and seeing them succeed through improved health and wellbeing – not when being marketed to or working out from under a pile of paperwork. Physicians have expressed that when they do not feel their patients appreciate their expertise, their time is undervalued, or when they are distracted by interruptions or burdened with administrative tasks, they do not feel respected and do not find their profession satisfying.  

The above form a preliminary understanding of the physician experience across the globe, but keep in mind there are also notable differences between physician experiences in different countries, shaped by local healthcare structure and medical regulation, culture, and the availability of technologies. Even within a single country there can be distinct nuances depending on the type of physician, the working environment such as hospital vs. private practice, and the region. For example physicians in the more rural regions of Italy have expressed feeling isolated as part of their jobs due to limited direct exposure to their peers, a distinct aspect of the rural Italian physician experience that shapes their dependence on online methods of peer communication. So what should companies be thinking about when developing new research initiatives involving physicians so as to ensure new research provides targeted insight and real value? Three things come immediately to mind.

 a)     Optimize what you know – use research dollars and time first to validate and then to probe further: Take advantage of findings like those outlined above and use new research as an opportunity to validate relevant findings in the context of your company’s specific challenge(s) in order to build on what is known. 

b)     Identify what you don’t know – fill in the knowledge gaps:  For example, some companies  have a deep understanding of physician online behaviors (which sites they go to, for which types of information, for how long, etc.) but may not have an equally robust understanding of what  motivates those behaviors, i.e. the “why” behind the physicians’ search for  online information. Many companies lack a thorough understanding of unmet physician needs, the physician’s physical environment, and the impact of influencers such as nurses and other office and hospital staff on physicians’ decisions. The key is to identify unanswered questions and prioritize the areas that will help ensure the success of the physician-vendor interaction.  

c)      Align and make research actionable – research with the company’s and the physician’s businesses in mind:  When forming key questions, think about what will be done with the answers to help better serve the physician. Start by mapping the company’s business goals to the known needs of the physician. With that alignment in place, clearly articulate the desired outcome of the research. Is the goal to identify a new business opportunity? To affirm or rebut existing concepts so changes can be made before proceeding? Thinking about the desired outcome helps ensure that research findings lead directly to specific actions that advance the company’s business goals and align with the physicians’ goals.

Effectively planned and executed physician research that leverages what is already known and focuses on the evolving challenges these professionals face benefits both the company and the physician. Keeping these tips in mind when conducting research drives toward a rich, holistic understanding of the physicians’ experience  and better positions the company to play a meaningful role in that experience.

The attendance validates that the virtual buzz about service design carries over to the analog world.  User experience professionals wondering, “What is this new shiny object?” My presentation only scratched the surface of the potential impact the service design field can have on typical experience design work. I’m eager to continue the conversation with a focus on these aspects:

• What are effective service design methods and approaches?
• What does it really mean to “do” service design?
• Who should own service design?
• Given SD is still predominantly an academic endeavor, who is most equipped to be “practicing” it?
• How can practitioners effectively evangelize SD in organizations?
• SD is still aspirational for many, so when it’s time to put those methods into practice, how can you prevent it from failing before it begins?

These are among the topics I’ll be exploring in upcoming months, so please follow and contribute to the conversations:

• http://www.twitter.com/ServiceDesignLK
• UXMatters
• http://www.linkedin.com/pub/laura-keller/3/728/b6a
• http://www.servicexd.com/wordpress/