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!

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.

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.

In 2004, in a Scientific American article titled The Tyranny of Choice,  Barry Shwartz  posited a counterintuitive argument about the effects of having too many choices (e.g. do we need 38 different kinds of milk?).  He questioned why “people are increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem.”

I count myself among those who struggle with choice.  I am virtually paralyzed when handed the phone book sized menu at The Cheesecake Factory.  The only place I find an easy time eating out is at a wedding (i.e. Meat, Chicken or Fish works great). 

This idea of the tyranny of choice got me thinking about a similar phenomenon that occurs with rapid innovation and change.  The speed at which new products, interfaces and services are introduced is generally something to admire and celebrate as “Good”.  But it is as daunting as it is impressive, and there’s not always a positive experience for the customers or employees faced with all this change.

True Story: A company wanted to extend their website service into the mobility space with a new app.  Without betraying too much detail, the application was to be accessed only when a four-legged loved one gets lost.  As I read the RFP, the human impact questions of such an app started flowing: e.g. What do people do differently when they are in a state of panic?  What could be unique to a design that might help them remain calm/focused and successful in their search?  At the very least, how can we make sure that we don’t make an already difficult situation worse? Small as this project was, I really wanted to win it, as it was a great opportunity to research a rare, context-specific behavior, and one of those ‘feel good’ projects that could really help people in difficult times.   

Of course, the senior execs at this company wanted it on their iPhones yesterday and as cheaply as they could get it, so typical deadline and cost pressures were at play as well.  The good news was that my primary client knows and values the need for experience design research.  The bad news was that the competition (the incumbent agency) offered to build and fully deploy production versions of this mobile application on both Blackberry and iPhone for half the price of just our research alone.  How does one make a case for research when it’s twice the price of the actual product? 

Things are changing.  Super fast.  Rapid innovative leaps in mobile technology, ever-easier tools for building applications, cloud-based applications that consolidate and streamline development… all of these advances pose interesting challenges for the Experience Design community.  When it’s cheaper to build an application, launch it and ‘fail forward’ in a live environment than it is to do the upfront research to validate the wants and needs of your audience, your competition is developers, not agencies or large systems implementation shops.  It’s two 20-something college guys who work remotely, making money hand over fist pumping out $20K applications while we can run up that tab with a modest Discovery session.

Welcome to the New World

How do those of us who believe that design is a human-centric undertaking that benefits profoundly from research compete when innovation is in hyper-drive and the cost of failing quickly is perceived to be so much lower than the risk of moving too slowly?  The answer is we can’t compete with a “just build it” mentality. But we can change our perspective to fit the times. Here are three ideas for ‘guerilla’ tactics that can help ensure that the target audience gets a say in the experience/tools they will inherit. Note that the efficacy of each one is highly dependent upon your particular situation.  

1 – Beta research populations – Providing a new application or service to a broad audience increasingly seems to have become a contest to see who can deploy the fastest.  Well, one way to address the need for speed is to suggest a pilot program.  As opposed to putting out to everyone live, see if it’s possible to reach out to a small but diverse subset of your audience.  This is a great way to really see what people are doing with a live application, which can often satisfy the speed-to-market forces at play.   You MAY be able to do this.

2 – Managing the change – Just because you can’t have input into a design doesn’t mean you can’t help improve the impact that design has on people.  With cloud-based apps, ERPs and mobile apps, it’s likely you simply won’t have the chance to change an interface.   When the interface can’t change, focus on the people who must.  Sure, the preference is not to have people forced to ‘fit’ the technology. Nevertheless, sometimes that’s just the way it is. We have many examples of how we – experience designers working beyond the interface – helped bridge the gaps that can frustrate people and affect adoption.  You SHOULD be able to do this.

3 – Know your history – Always know what research has been done and leverage it. Don’t assume you are a pioneer in any research effort.  Certain clients, even entire industries have done their own version of research similar to what you might propose.  And there’s often general behavioral/psychological/sociological research related to the specific channel/ system/ device you’re charged with optimizing.  A little detective work can often uncover patterns and models that can help inform design.  You can ALWAYS do this.

Human evolution is increasingly outpaced by technological evolution.  Though our ability to adapt to new interactive paradigms  is impressive (e.g. even Grandma can pinch and swipe now), the pace of change has implications beyond the interface itself. As experience designers our job is to think beyond the interface to the larger context of the interaction; beyond the pinch or swipe to the human emotions and behaviors the interface is designed to serve. We can only do so if we insist on finding ways to engage humans in our design processes.

POSTSCRIPT:  It is worth noting the winning vendor for the lost pet mobile application did not successfully deploy the application, and costs were much higher than originally scoped.

Every organization has some small percentage of complainers: those stalwart curmudgeons who don’t like anything. But what is it that gives that complainer enough power to transform them into a saboteur? To answer that, you have to look at things from your employees’ perspective.

• What is your internal brand?
• Do your employees feel that they have a voice?
• When new initiatives are rolled out to them, do you view them as stakeholders from the start?
• Have you taken their needs into consideration?
• Are you thinking as hard about your employee experience as you are about your customer experience?

If the answer is no to any of these questions, then you may be providing an environment that fosters the leap from complainer to saboteur. This is not easy to ‘undo’; once you have saboteurs, employee adoption of your initiatives becomes an uphill battle. Change management becomes damage control.

So how do you keep the saboteurs from spreading in your organization? The simple answer: empower your employees and make them a part of the decisions that affect them.

Take the introduction of a new collaboration tool, for example. If you wait to talk to your employees about a new collaboration tool until it’s already built and you’re training them to use it, rumors will already have gone around about what’s coming. The typical complainers will complain (because that’s what they do), and because your employees know nothing about the tool, those complainers may gain in volume (and traction) and become saboteurs. By the time you get to training, you will be spending your time trying to dispel rumors, and the true value of the tool (for the employees as well as the business) will get buried in half-truths and innuendo before it’s even released.

If, however, you have an employee-centric view from the start, you’ll have a different outcome. Employees who are involved from the start, and who have a voice in the solution (or at the very least an understanding of why something is happening) will already know the facts. Ideally, they will have participated in some of the decision making process, so they will feel a certain sense of ownership. Your complainers will still complain, but they won’t have the impact they might otherwise have.

So, how do you empower your employees during a period of change and keep your complainers from becoming saboteurs?

In addition to following the Six Principles of Employee-driven Change Management  there are a few things you can do to specifically address the risk of sabotage.

• Get your key people involved early. Before you embark on any new initiatives, tools, technologies, anything that might change the way anyone works, thinks, or behaves, learn who the influencers are (hint: they are often not people in managerial positions). Get them involved early and often. Solicit their feedback and keep them informed. Well-informed influencers are your best ambassadors to change.

• Remember the 3 Cs: Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Learn what fears employees might have around this change. Understand what questions they will have. Saboteurs thrive on fear and ignorance. Communication is the best weapon. You need to be prepared to address and dispel fear before it manifests.

• Transparency and honesty are key. Even in situations where there is a genuine reason to be fearful (layoffs for example), default to an open posture. Let employees know what this change is, why it is coming, how it may affect them, and what role it will play in the greater strategic business objectives

• Finally, take a hard look at your internal branding and your employee experience outside of the realm of change. Do your employees feel empowered? Does their experience map to your brand promise? Is your workplace an open environment, or do you have a thriving rumor mill? How many truly unhappy employees to do you have? Each unhappy employee has the potential to become a saboteur in an environment of secrecy and rumor.

Breaking down the silos, opening a dialogue, and informing and empowering your employees will change the conversation. You will no longer be looking for ways to address “sabotage.” You will be looking for ways to engage your advocates. Keeping the conversation focused on the positives will inevitably lead to success in the end — not just for the change initiative, but for all aspects of your employee experience.

I volunteered not just because I love shoes and social media, but because I figured I’d learn a thing or two about the burgeoning world of influenced viral marketing. And boy did I learn some things. I decided to write a brief white paper on my experience, Turning the Tables on SM Viral Marketing.  Below I’ve summarized the lessons I learned during my brief time as a product influencer about the do’s and don’ts of running a viral marketing strategy. 

1) Equip your influencers with an understanding of your goals and some tips for how they can help you achieve them. 

While my contact at this High-End Department Store did a great job of getting me excited about my free pair of shoes, she didn’t do too much when it came to making sure I understood her goals for this activity and what I could do to help her.  For some key things she could have done to help my posts be as “influencial” as possible, see the white paper.

2) Make sure your influencers have enough to say about your product and are prepared tweet about it multiple times a day.

Now, I love shoes and have a gift to gab… but even I ran out of steam after a few days. Having some daily suggestions from my contact would have helped me keep the tweets fresh and interesting. It would have also kept me a lot more engaged in the program.  These suggestions could have come in the form of scenarios to work through with the shoes as well as topics I should cover.  And for “filler” tweets, she might have provided links to some good third party reviews of the shoes or other interesting shoe-relevant websites.  There’s more detail on this tip in the white paper.

3) If you enlist your customers to blog for you, be prepared to be just as involved in this activity as they are… and be sure to live up to any commitments you make to them.

In my case, the High-End Department Store contact went dark once the recruitment process was complete.  As a result, when challenges arose – such as shoes not arriving, “hot spots”  not knowing who we were, and general confusion about what we were doing – we had no choice but to tweet and blog about it in hopes that maybe our contact was listening. (As I note in point 4 below, we  later found out she was not.) So what would I have done differently?  My ideas are outlined in the white paper.

 4) Listen to what your influencers are saying (and show your support)… letting them see your level of engagement will only raise up theirs.

This is, of course, a tough one.  There is a fine line between supporting and influencing your influencers – one you don’t want to cross.  That said, no one likes to hear crickets when they are putting themselves out there…especially if it is in front of those who know them in their non-influencer life.  Find creative ways to reward good posts and address issues and challenges they may be expressing in their posts. See my whitepaper for more information on the opportunity lost by my support person’s lack of engagement.

 5) Have a plan.  Social Media may seem all fun and games… but it isn’t. 

It may feel like a casual and spur of the moment channel, but it is ANYTHING but if you are a marketer looking to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and the host of other consumer-focused social media channels to reach your customers.  It is just as calculated, structured, and thought-through as the commercials you shoot, the ads you design, and the marketing events you plan.  After all, if I read about a cute pair of Sam Edelman ballet flats and a Girl’s Night Out Shoe Event on my friend’s blog and I go to the store and NOONE knows about the party, the shoes, or anything else… there is a huge break in your marketing strategy.  For an outline of key plan components, see my white paper.

Your objectives will ultimately drive the types of research you choose to conduct – interviews, focus groups, natural observation, journals, card sorting and so on. But when the budget is tight and every piece of a project is under the financial microscope, you can use some of the following guerilla research tactics to gain an actionable level of audience understanding.

1.     Research Before Your Research

Arm Yourself with Knowledge and Hypotheses Prior to Research

Take the time before a study to learn as much as you can about work done on related topics and audiences.  Study relevant prior research done by your compay or others, review data you are already collecting from touch points such as your website, read industry white papers, and examine your main competitors. Use your research to form some solid hypotheses. By testing pre-determined hypotheses, you can learn more about the topic of interest with a smaller number of people.

Good For: Testing with small numbers of people; studies with a highly targeted focus

Not Good For: More exploratory, comprehensive insight-gathering studies; projects with minimal lead time before research

2.     Friends & Family Recruiting

Talking to Anyone is Better than Talking to No One

If the budget can’t afford a recruiting agency, if the client doesn’t have the bandwidth to recruit internally, or if there isn’t enough time in scope for you to undertake formal recruiting, you can always reach out to friends and family. While it may seem very informal, remember that your friends and family are people who use products and services just like anyone else. Friends and family often feel special that they are invited to help on one of your projects, and it gives them a chance to see what you’re working on. 

Good For: Studies related to products/services with general audiences; projects and budgets that do not allow for professional recruiting services

Not Good For: Studies related to products/services with a very narrow audience group; studies involving privacy-sensitive information (ex. needing participants with a certain medical condition); projects where participant “bail-outs” would compromise the entire initiative

3.      Social Media for Broad Audience Outreach

Gaining Baseline Understandings through Your Social Networks

When you don’t have the time or budget for up-front, broad baseline research, social media can be a great tool. Both the researchers and client representatives can pose a question to people in their social networks. People are surprisingly willing to answer quick poll questions and the answers to these questions can help inform decisions in the design process.

For a recent non-profit client, MISI Company was tasked with redesigning their website based on best practices and then validating the design afterwards. In order to make sure that we were on the right path, our research team tapped into their social networks and asked a very simple question that ended up informing several key design decisions – “What three things do you need to know before donating money or time to a non-profit organization?”

Good For: Projects that only have time/budget for testing before or after design – not both; gaining audience insights in preparation for stakeholder discussions or in addition to more formal research

Not Good For: Research studies that are investigating more behavioral aspects of audiences; questions that require long answers or a back-and-forth discourse; studies that aim to understand motivations and thought-processes more so than final actions

4.     Research from a Remote Location

Reaching Global or Long-Distance Audiences from Your Home Office

In many situations, remote testing could be a significant cost-saver. Depending on the type of research study that is being performed, there are a variety of technologies today that allow researchers to hold a valuable conversation with audiences all over the world. For instance, many studies could be performed using a survey tool, a conference line, an online screen-sharing service or a combination of all of the above.

In a recent employee-based global research initiative, MISI Company reached over 150 employees in 8 countries, all from local offices. Through the use of various online tools (such as an audio conferencing/recording service and an online survey tool), our research team was able to gather accurate insights, conduct a confident analysis of a large diverse population, and create actionable goals based on the insights of that analysis. Depending on the goals of the study and how it is being conducted, your international or geographically widespread research still could be highly effective without the costs and time involved in travel and lodging for your research team.

Good For: Studies with participants in multiple, distant locations; projects with very short research timelines and/or budgets that do not allow for travel and lodging

Not Good For: Research that involves complicated tasks; studies with audiences who are not tech-savvy; studies in which body language can be an important observation

5.     Slimmed Data Analysis

The Debate Between Accurate vs. Precise

When analyzing the outputs of a study, researchers can spend months slicing data one million ways, finding and explaining the random outliers, or running numbers to create a pile of statistics in order to provide clients with the most precise data analysis possible. A quicker alternative is to deliver accurate findings that achieve the goals of the research but are not as precise and detailed. For instance, after being active in all aspects of the study, a researcher can often make a statement such as “Most people liked the size of the product, while very few liked the color.” Along with this statement, researchers may look for specific supporting data; however this approach of presenting accurate but more generalized findings as opposed to highly detailed, precise findings could save significant time in the post-research phase and still achieve all of the goals of your study.

Good For: Stakeholders who are interested solely in accurate actionable insights and recommendations

Not Good For: Stakeholders who expect participant statistics and precise findings; findings that will act as baselines for future studies

It is important that when you are planning your research initiative, you consider the impact of any cost-saving measure and ensure that it does not interfere with the effectiveness or accuracy of your research. For instance, some of these guerilla research tactics may not be ideal for large, mission-critical initiatives that will have significant bottom line impact. But when you are working on a more modest project and know that you need evidence to support your decisions, ask your experience design partner about the applicability of these approaches. They have the experience to help you decide which guerilla research tactics will work best for your project so that you don’t have to break the bank.

The most satisfying and memorable interactions are often the simplest. Life is complicated enough, and…surprise…most people don’t want to spend any more time interacting with your company’s call center, sales team, application or website than they absolutely need to. So why are so many interactions between companies and their target audiences so complex? Often complexity is the result of trying to design interactions for everyone, which inevitably leads to interactions designed for no one.

One of the culprits in this drive to satisfy everyone is the edge case. Also referred to as the “Corner case”, the “Outlier” or the “Exception,” these are interaction scenarios that are not typically part of the main set of use cases for a given experience. These scenarios rarely happen, yet unwary design teams can be drawn into spending a disproportionate amount of time and effort addressing them. The solutions typically result in layering complexity on what should have been a simple, streamlined process.

When dealing with edge cases, the stakes can be high. They range from driving up the cost of product/process/system/service design, to the creation of poor employee or customer experiences that jeopardize the achievement of your business goals. The following tips can help businesses and experience designers get the edge on edge cases.

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1) First Get the Facts:
Research actual usage to understand actual impact

Arm yourself with evidence. Gather available information and/or data to validate that the particular scenario needs to be addressed. Understand the problem from the audience’s perspective and confirm that addressing the scenario as outlined truly is the best way to meet the audience’s need.

If you don’t have evidence you require to make an informed design decision, go get it. Most likely the people insisting the case needs to be addressed have a business case to justify the cost and effort. Ask to see that information. If there is no such business case, insist on doing at least a modicum of quick, primary research with the target audience to make sure the solution has value.

Audience insights are becoming easier and easier to obtain through surveys, remote user testing, field studies, customer reviews, etc. Companies are even using Facebook and Twitter to pose questions and get quick insights for decision making. Of course, the real expertise is in the interpretation of the insights into meaningful stories that will impact business decision-making. If you reach out to a solid representative mix of your target audience, you will start to surface relevant insights to the best way to meet their needs as well as the goals of your business.

Armed with evidence, you can make an informed design decision.

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Overly complex and convoluted interactions typically reflect organizations and/or processes that are by design overly complex and convoluted. It never hurts to turn the analytical lens on the business and work out the complexity. I’m often surprised how open companies are to a little reflection on their own processes. You can approach the subject by saying something like, “You are asking us to design the experience within the context of the overly complex way in which you currently do business. I’m suggesting we take this opportunity to look into the redesign of the service/process to see if there are ways we can address the root of the problem.”

A good example is Sprint’s recent overhaul of their phone service options. Research into their target audience revealed that they could reduce the number of plan offers to just three (3) and meet the needs of the vast majority of their potential customers. Rather than continuing to add more services in a shot-gun attempt to satisfy a wider base of customers, they re-thought their entire strategy and streamlined their offerings.  They lowered the effort required for a potential customer to choose to do business with them AND they simplified the job of supporting their service options. Win win.

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3) Create and Use Relevant Personas:
Use data to link audience priorities to business priorities

If your organization hasn’t created personas that truly reflect your audience segments, create them and use them. Personas provide a constant reminder of who you are designing for and what their priorities are. Many organizations we work with already have personas in some form, but they typically aren’t complete and are rarely being used effectively.

Detail of Persona segmentation data

Effective personas include quantifiable segmentation data on the current customers represented by each persona. To help manage edge cases, add an additional layer that displays what your organization’s desired percent audience make up is for each persona. This information helps identify those edge cases that affect highly valued audience segments and, therefore, might be worth addressing.

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Final Thoughts:

Not every edge case is evil. Sometimes they are the thoughtful details we strive to have in place to make an exceptional experience. Sometimes, when a recognizable pattern starts to appear, they can lead to the creation of innovative new audience segmentations, services, or product offerings. If that’s the case, then run with it!

I worked with a client in the financial services industry who had a situation where 5-10% of a particular customer segment was bringing in 85-90% of the revenue for a particular niche.  In this scenario, what might have been perceived as the edge cases with regard to the flagship product offering were actually the foundation for the creating of a new audience segment that required a separate experience all together. Rather then going down the path of  a “one-size-fits-all” retrofitted experience, we took those edge cases and used them to inform a custom tailored experience, with its own online tools, its own call center reps, all without jeopardizing the primary brand experience.

A well-designed experience needs to be diligently tended and defended. A design can be well implemented originally, but can be denigrated over time by the retrofitting of ad-hoc business requirements based on edge cases that draw people’s attention from the business’s and its target audience’s main goals. Be on the lookout and be ever vigilant to your design. Your audience will applaud your efforts. Your competitors will wish they thought of it first.

So why not apply this same principle when designing your employee experience? After all, employees are essentially your organization’s internal customers. Often companies will focus their internal efforts on improving performance on processes and new tools/technologies, but that misses a big part of the picture.  Process improvements and new tools won’t have their desired impact on your bottom line if your employees don’t embrace them. Simply announcing such changes won’t ensure your employees are aligned with your business goals; and it certainly won’t turn them into advocates.

Design your employee experiences to make an emotional connection, and you change everything. When designed to delight your employees, new processes become something they follow because they want to, not because they have to. New tools become those things they’ve been asking and waiting for to help them do a better job.

To put this in context, consider something like the current push towards enhanced collaboration.  Say you have a corporate mandate to increase collaboration among your globally dispersed business unit.  And let’s assume you’ve done the research to confirm that a collaboration tool is the answer to your business need.  Custom or off-the-shelf, you’ve built it, and with launch a few months away it’s time to think about providing some basic training.  That’s a good start, but will likely not be enough if you want your employees to truly adopt it into their daily working life.

You may be thinking, “Understood, but they don’t have to like it. They just have to use it.”  That may be true, but the question is not will they use it; you can always make them use it.  The real questions are will they use it in the way you intended, and will that use achieve your business goals as you intended? Will employee resistance or fear regarding the use of a new tool create more productivity issues than the tool was intended to solve?

If employees don’t embrace your collaboration tool and truly view it as something that makes them better at what they do, they will only use it as required (if that much), and it becomes useless to the organization.

So how do you make that emotional connection?

1. Understand your employees beyond their job function.
You need to understand how your employees feel about collaboration. Not about collaboration tools but actual collaboration with others.  Is it something that comes naturally to them, or do they tend to work alone or in silos. What motivates them? If they are not collaborative, why? Do they have fears around collaboration? Are there misperceptions regarding what it means?

You also need to understand their pain points. Get at what frustrates them on a daily basis.  Showing them how a certain tool can help them overcome these frustrations will make them feel the tool was developed with them in mind.

While you are getting at what frustrates them, find out what makes them happy about their job. What is working? What inspires them? What gets them out of bed in the morning? This reveals their perception of success and value and also helps you understand the things that are working for them now.

One of the biggest pitfalls of launching a new tool is changing something that the employee thinks already works. While the tool might provide a better way to do something, there will be a learning curve or a change in behavior that is required.  Just as customers react strongly to changes in experiences they are accustomed to, employees tend to be especially resistant to this kind of change. You need to make them understand why this new way is better for them in the long run.

2. Build realistic personas that capture not only their function but also their wants, needs, and fears.
As part of the exercise of getting to know your employees, document core personas that can be used for a variety of purposes going forward, including communication and change management. Continuing with our example of collaboration, include the more emotional aspects like attitude toward collaboration and change, or views of success. One employee type might be something like: “research scientist, biologicals, collaboration resistant”. This tells you that messaging, training, and roll out need to speak not just to what they do and how they do it, but also to how collaboration (beyond the tool) will enable the success that they (and the organization) value. That success might be something like the ability to develop more innovative products faster.

3. Develop an overarching promise for the change and create value propositions that map to the employee types identified in your persona exercise.
What do you hope to achieve with this collaborative tool? What will each employee type stand to gain from use of it?  Tell them.  Make sure to denote more than just the positive messages. If there are particular messages to be avoided, (such as telling administrative assistants that it will increase their productivity when they already feel they are overwhelmed with work), make sure they are noted and communicated out to anyone (including supervisors) who might be charged with delivering communications about the tool to the employees.

4. Develop real-world scenarios to show the tool in action.
Use the value propositions and employee personas to develop real-world scenarios of how the tool can be used, and what value will be gained from using it. Long before the tool launches, you need to garner excitement and receptiveness to the tool. When employees see someone just like them using a system or tool to overcome the same frustrations they have, it provides powerful evidence the tool was developed with them in mind

5. Develop an employee-centered communications plan and align all communications points to the promise and value propositions.
Don’t base things like frequency and timing of messages on the roll-out schedule of your development team; base them on the information needs of your audience. Tailor the visual design, messaging and channel to what will resonate with your audience. Whereas posters might work for some employees, others might prefer to get regular email updates straight from the top. They may even have trusted sources, such as their direct supervisors from whom they want information directly. Identify these trusted sources and give them key messaging points that they can communicate to people who may come to them for answers.  Put the timing of these trusted resource messages into your communications plan.

By understanding your employees on an emotional level and finding ways to connect your strategies, initiatives, and plans to their own success, you can overcome many of the barriers that often cause the employee experience to fall short. Done right, even your most fearful or skeptical employees may become internal advocates for the change to which your organization aspires.

Prototyping is an excellent technique that enables your development team to get valuable audience feedback and address issues pertaining to functional priorities and usability before they become costly downstream problems. Prototyping provides the additional benefit of allowing the team to share its vision and begin building a fan base among your audience members. These fans can become powerful allies in driving adoption of the completed tool.

Despite its benefits, prototyping and early stage audience testing can be perceived as slowing down the development process and creating unnecessary front-end costs. We believe that when done correctly, prototyping’s benefits far outweigh its costs. Here are a few things we’ve learned along the way to help ensure the process is efficient and effective.

1.     Determine the intent of your prototype before you build it

Determine who you are building the prototype for and what you hope to accomplish. Then make sure the prototype serves the intended audience and purpose. The last thing you want is for your audience to be confused because it is either too detailed or not detailed enough. Here are some basic guidelines for prototyping for your three primary audiences:

• Business (Project Sponsor) – Make sure the prototype can answer the big question: How does this experience map to the overall business objectives?
• Target Audience – Make sure it demonstrates how people will actually interact with the completed tool to perform specific, highly relevant tasks or functions.
• Technical (Developer) – make sure it can demonstrate how the tool will function with enough detail that the developer can use the prototype as a supplement to the functional specification documentation, e.g. when clicking on a link do we open a new window or an overlay?

2.     Build the prototype with functionality that is realistic and relevant

To paraphrase Dirty Harry, a design team has to know its limitations. Are you designing for a particular development platform that imposes specific constraints on your interaction design (e.g. SharePoint)? Is there an aggressive timeline for launch that will constrain how much custom development can be completed and adequately tested in the time allotted?  Designers need to work with the development team to ensure that the prototype is aligned with the overall project timeline and represents a feasible design.  

Also, if your prototype is being designed for the people who will be using the final product, it is important that you take the time to learn what is needed from their perspective. No matter where you are in the design process, anything you show to your target audience needs to demonstrate that you understand their needs and that the tool will be relevant and useful. (See tip #4 below.)

3.     Try to keep your prototype “black and white”

Remember that early prototypes are intended to demonstrate functionality and utility, not branding and other visual design elements. So don’t over design your prototype. Colors, imagery, and even real content often get in the way of the high-level intent of the prototype. For example, if you’re trying to validate that a particular interaction design is usable (end-users) and feasible (developers), you don’t want feedback that focuses on a particular color choice or that points out a block of copy is out of date.

If the intent of the prototype dictates the use visual design elements and/or actual content, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• If you need to visually distinguish areas of page or functional modules, try to get by with grayscale variations rather than actual colors. Click here for a sample grayscale prototype screen. 
• Only include content that is helpful in terms of understanding how the tool works (e.g. core navigational elements and terms, contextual help text, etc.)

4.     Have an audience advocate(s) contribute to the prototype design

Remember that prototyping is an excellent way to engage the people who will be using the tool in its development. Engaging them serves two goals: 1) It ensures that the end product is relevant to their needs and desires; 2) It begins the process of creating a fan base among your target audience; these fans can later be leveraged as evangelists for the end product because, as co-designers, they have a vested interest in its success. Having at least one advocate of your target audience participate in your prototype design contributes to both of these goals. One technique to consider is holding a collaborative design workshop with audience representatives.

5.     Keep it simple and think iterative

Unless you are creating the prototype as an end deliverable for the development team (functional specification), it should be seen as part of an iterative approach to design.  Whether you are creating the prototype for requirement review meetings or for audience testing, don’t attempt to get everything perfect on the first go-around. It’s easy to get carried away with your prototype and find yourself spending days, even weeks, making it look and function exactly as you envision (e.g. perfectly timed sliding effect for an expandable page component). But keep in mind that the purpose of the prototype is to test ideas and concepts. The feedback you receive will inevitably lead to changes in the design. Keeping your prototype as simple as possible while making sure it serves its purpose will help you keep your design process on schedule and on budget while providing opportunities to tweak it along the way as you receive feedback.