Guigrrrl on YouTube

I just stumbled on myself on YouTube talking about 'Agility and the Customer Experience'. Check it out.

Cool hunting and Augmented Reality

Cate Trotter from Insider Trends was also presenting at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility conference the other day. Being a big fan of William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’ series I was very excited to meet a real-life ‘cool-hunter’.

Cate’s day job is looking for trends, looking for patterns that exist in subcultures that will come to influence main stream culture. She takes businesses on ‘trend tours’, to show them where the hip and happening starts.  She had a dizzying amount of great examples of cutting edge inovation in the retail sector that drives not just compelling customer experiences but also disruptive experiences. Real creative ways of engaging customers and creating buzz. 

One of the underlying themes that seemed to emerge for me was the subtle shift away from ‘hard sell’ and the focus on the immediate returns, to building brand and relationships in a more meaningful and engaging way. Which in the current economic climate is not only refreshing but a very insightful strategy for long term survival. While most retailers are scrabbling to claim their share of shoppers’ limited wallet with sales, discounts and ‘special-purchase’ cheap and nasty give-aways, to secure short-term income, some creating brand experiences that will encourage loyalty long after the event is over. 

Take Airwalk as a great example: They created and ‘Invisible Pop‐Up Store’ enhanced with augmented reality to create buzz around the very limited edition Goldrun sneaker. So cool! Or Wetseal, who have taken the concept of user-generated content and have created the capability to ‘crowdsource’ outfits.

Big thanks to Cate.

Surprised I’m still surprised

I presented at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility Conference on Agile Experience Design. Specifically I was looking at how retailers can take advantage of AXD to design, develop and deliver compelling, shopper-centric, omni-channel experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

I’ve been doing experience design for a long time. I’ve been doing agile experience design for a sizeable proportion of that time. When I was preparing the presentation I got that pre-presentation feeling, similar to the pre-publication feeling I got when reading the draft manuscript of our Agile Experience Design book. I was worried that I had nothing to say. I’ve been doing this stuff for so long that it has just become second nature to me and feels like common sense.

But no fear! A number of people approached me immediately after the presentation and thanked me for talking about the approach, about how inspirational it was and how it’s really got them thinking about how they can do things differently and most important, make a difference. Perhaps to other experienced practitioners in the same field, what I’m talking about isn’t necessarily all that different but it certainly seems to make a difference to many of the business and IT people that I meet along the way.

I guess that is similar to what James Box and Cennydd Bowles said in their book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’, “The fundamentals of UX design…are easy to learn but difficult to put into practice.” So I guess what I bring to the table is the benefit of my experience and the context of all of my learnings in different situations.

Agile Experience Design - the book

Wow how remiss of me! I have completely failed to blog about my biggest project of last year – the book! In November last year (2011) Marc McNeil and I published Agile Experience Design: A digital designers guide to agile, lean and continuous. To our knowledge it’s the first book to market about the topic of experience design in agile.

How it came about

There has been a lot of banter on the subject for a good number of years on various SIG groups, and lots of great presentations delivered at various conferences and published on the web that have sought to explain how to marry the two. However there was no one go to comprehensive reference point.

I remember when I started with ThoughtWorks (agile custom software experts) as the only UX person in Australia wishing that I could find a definitive guide book on how to do UX in an agile environment. It is a very different way of working but I was keenly aware that someone somewhere must have solved the problem, and that I didn’t need to work it out for myself. The book ended up being the book I wished that I could have read back then.

I joined forces with Marc when I moved back from Australia to the UK and realised we were aligned in our thinking on the subject. We were also still surprised that no one had published a book on the subject and so we set about doing just that.

An non-movable feast

From start to finish we had FIVE months. Prior to signing the contract I talked to Martin Fowler and Jez Humble, both successful authors, about the timescales and the unanimous opinion was that we were mad! Jez said ‘ You need at least 18 months to write the first draft, then you need some decompression time, then you need time to rewrite and edit.’ So we went back to the publisher, in the hope of revising the proposed publication date. However we were faced with a ‘deal or no deal’. Marc and I both laughed and agreed that we might as well die trying as not try at all.

A very non-agile process

In agreeing to the terms we were also asked to commit to the length of the book. At this point all we had written was two paragraphs describing the essence of the book. We had no idea. I flicked through a couple of notable books on my shelf, of the ilk that I thought ours might be, stuck a finger in the air and suggested 100,000 words. When we submitted our first draft, it was 135,000 words long. Naively we had not appreciated that 100,000 words had been cast in stone. We then had a very tough process to cut 35,000 words (over a third of the final book) from the manuscript (and still deliver on time).

Concurrent working

So five months is a doable time-frame, just, if you are a full-time author perhaps. But hey, we both had full-time jobs. This is the job that give us the experience and expertise to be able to write books. We both also have families. So we begged borrowed and stole time and worked bloody hard for five intense months to produce the book. We are grateful to our families in particular who made the bulk of the sacrifices, for allowing us to realise our ambition.

Collaborative and feedback driven

Two aspects that were sacrificed as a result of the timeframe was the ability to collaborate and also solicit feedback from peers and colleagues on the work in progress. We started off with the best of intentions and were able to include some contributions and get some feedback, but not as much as we might have liked. If word count and time had permitted we would have liked to have included more anecdotes and lessons learnt from other practitioners.

Test and learn

This book was only ever intended as a guide, rather than a recipe book. It would be a contradiction in terms to say that there’s a one size fits all approach to agile experience design. Every project will be different because of the budget, timescales and people/process/technology constraints.

However to stay true to the nature of agile experience design I’m keen to hear about people’s experiences and how they have aplied, adopted or adapted some of the concepts and ideas in the book. I promise to share the finding and attribute them to the contributers either on the accompanying website (if I ever get the time to add some content to it) or perhaps even in version 2.0.

poor confidence in insurance shopping

So here i am, hopefully about to buy a new home within the next month and as a stipulation of that purchase I need to organise insurance. My mortgage provider's quote felt very expensive so I decide to get some alternative quotes to compare against.

What an experience!

First I try the two big comparison sites. I manage to get to a list of quotes with one of them but I end up in an eternal loop of fatal errors on the other site and I abandon it all together. With the first site, many of the 'cheapest' quotes are from brands I've never heard of and maybe i'm exposing my shopper mentality here, but when I'm insuring the biggest investment of my life to date, I want someone reputable. So I make a note of a couple of the quotes from the bigger brands to take it to the next level.

Quick and generic is ok for investigation but not purchase
However, i'm not completely confident in the coverage of the quotation system of the comparison site. It's generic and quick, which is good to generate some leads but not enough for me to purchase from. I want to make sure all the extras I need are included and all the extras I don't need are not included.

Rather than repeat the exercise online I decide to call, so that at least I can talk to someone to understand my options.

Price difference between channels
My first big issue is the big price difference between channels.  I understand that online shopping is 'cheaper' because there are no wages to pay for customer service centres etc, but with insurance in particular, it makes me nervous that I have not entered or disclosed the right details or got the right level of cover and there is no way to really. Especially when you are getting completely different prices. I wished the internet would say (for example) total policy cost £200.00 per year plus 15% discount for online purchase is £170.00 per year. Then I have the confidence that I am comparing apples with apples when I look at the online and offline prices.

Single channel only
Then there are the insurers, Axa for example, who won't even let you speak to a customer service person. There is no sales contact number on their website at all! You apply online or go elsewhere. How can I check that all my needs are covered? Well I think I'll take my business elsewhere thanks.

Information we want first
Most insurers are getting better at this but there are a guilty few who still get this badly wrong. They start by asking for all your personal information first (online and offline), rather than the subject of the enquiry, which in my case is home insurance. I feel much more inclined to give my personal information once they have satisfied my need.

Ask only the relevant information
Why ask about details that are obviously related to a contents policy when I am only requesting buildings insurance? I already had to spend 15 minutes in a horrid holding pattern before speaking to someone please don't make this any longer than necessary!

Provide detailed feedback.
'I'm sorry we can't offer you insurance right now. Please try again next year'
??? I'm sorry what? What the heck does that mean? Is your site down? Did I do something wrong on the form? Do you have a problem with my property that no-one else does, if so any chance you could tell me about it before I shell out a fortune for the next 25 years? As for trying again 'next year'...erm no chance!

So i'm no nearer at the moment - happy to take recommendations for UK home insurance suppliers :-)

Remote-facilitated-user-testing in multiple global locations

This is brief story about how Webex became the answer to my complex user-testing problems.

I had an interesting XD situation recently which I thought I’d share in case you end up in a similar position. The client I am working with is based in the UK. Some of the users we wanted to test with are dispersed around the globe. What’s more we have an offshore development team working in India to build our product. So the issue was how to get rapid end-user feedback on the design concepts in development without blowing the entire development budget on travel. It was also essential to us that members of the development team experienced the user-testing first hand so that they could appreciate and learn about the users behaviours, mind-sets and mental models.

I have used a number of remote testing software packages previously such as Loop11 or Usabilla to get feedback on a user-interface in development. However most of these packages offer unfacilitated, or software-facilitated test options. While remote unfacilitated testing is great the downside is that there is no opportunity to explore the users perceptions or ask the probing questions that come as a direct result of observation of their reactions or behaviours. The kind of research that is pivotal in early stage UI development. Certainly none of them were offering the ability to have multiple people in multiple geo-dispersed location logged into a single session simultaneously.

I knew there must be a solution out there somewhere, either that or I’d stumbled across a potential new product idea that could make me wealthy. To my surprise the answer had been under my nose all the time in a product I had only really associated with business communications and hadn’t previously associated with user-testing. Webex! The business communication tool. It allowed me to do everything I needed including:

• Ability to support multiple users in different geo-locations simultaneously in one session
• Ability to stream webcam and audio contribution from multiple or limited participants in the session
• Ability to view the participants screen and interaction with the screens to be tested, while simultaneously viewing a webcam of their facial responses and listening to verbal cues.
• Ability to record both audio and video tracks from the session and access them or share them later.
• Ideally software-as-a-service, rather than client-side thin or thick applications that the user needs to install.

Webex had it all! What’s more it was easy to set up*, control during the session and because I was fortunate enough to have access to an existing corporate Webex account  there were no additional overheads or expensive subscriptions. Perfect!

*The easy to set up part comes with the advice of enquiring with your users in advance of the session about their operating system and internet connectivity. If your users are on a fairly standard OS with ‘decent’ connectivity then there should be no set up required. However, as according to Murphy’s Law, we didn’t check in advance and our first participant was using Linux and had low connectivity and the combination meant we had to abandon that particular session! Doh!

It's a matter of balance

There are lessons to be learnt everyday! One of the big struggles that experience design folks have is ensuring to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the customer. To do this we look at both the business and the customer goals and expose the conflicts early so that we can create a balanced solution. When we don't take time to do this it results in a biased solution that favours either the customer or the business.

It's my mum's birthday in two days. My goal is to send her a birthday card. I have the card all written and I head to the post office on my way to work. I thought they opened at 8am (it's the run up to Christmas after all) but i find that they only open at 9am. But never fear a stamp vending machine is near! The post office has a stamp vending machine at the entrance, so I can buy stamps. Hurrah! I now have a card that is written, addressed and stamped. I look around but alas! There is no post box any where in sight! So the post office accomplished their goal of making money but is the customer happy? No! My goal is incomplete and I've either got to go out of my way to complete my goal and be late for work or else the card will not be delivered on time! Surely a post box at a post office isn't too much to ask?