Building a UX Culture: Hasith Y @ Colombo UX Con

Editor's Notes

• #3: Virtual grocery while waiting for train QR Code scanner Became second largest ---------------------------- Im sure most of you have already seen this picture, if you haven’t.. This is a great example of application of UX to build a business model. UK retailer chain Tesco launched a virtual grocery in Korea where people can virtually buy grocery items while they wait for train. Consumers can scan the QR codes and place an order where the goods will be delivered to the doorstep. It has become a major success in Korea and Tesco grew up to become the second largest retailer chain in Korea. Building their largest market outside UK. Do you think this will work in Sri Lanka? Or in Europe for example Scandinavia? Not necessarily. Korea has some niche characteristics that made this concept to work. They have longest work hours in the world, wide smart phone adaption and a trusted ecommerce market. My wife for example does not demonstrate any of the above characteristics... She loves going to Sunday fair touch and feel between alternatives, and have a bit of a chit-chat with other frequent buyers. In fact this virtual grocery concept has proved to be unsuccessful in many other markets. Even Tesco tried launching this in UK without much of a success. Today their market share is dropping in UK where as they are continuously successful in Korea. That tells exactly what UX is all about.
• #4: My topic today is about I had been a part Share learning gained What works for your context ---------------------------------------- My topic today is about building a UX culture at your organization. I had been a part of building 99XT UX services for last 3 years. We converted our UI offering to be a successful UX offering to European market. Things I will share are the learning gained after failing for many times. You will be able to use the concepts to build your UX culture and use these practices as the starting point.. But you will have to find the specifics by yourself. Today I will share my experience of being a part of th Today I will share strategies that worked us at 99XT in building our UX service portfolio These are the learning after falling over and over again You might be able to use the concept as an inspiration/starting point But eventually will have to find what really works for your context
• #5: On building a UX culture How we carryout our marketing activities How did we build internal competencies
• #7: Service offering is your first test We started with marketing material First few prototypes didn’t work ------------------------------------- The fist thing you need to understand is that your UX service you are trying to build is a product by itself. We followed the Lean UX approach of creating MVPs for our UX offering. You have a target market, may be that market can be internal teams – but still the concepts are just valid. If you are good in UX, which is all about offering a product with a market fit, you should be able to sell your UX services too. When we started our UX journey we actually took a UX approach where we did build->measure->learn in short iterations with the aim to build the progressive MVPs. When we carried out our initial interviews/surveys with our customers we understood there are 2 main barriers for us to sell UX services to them. One was the UNDESTANDING and second was TRUST. We will look at how we countered these 2 concerns through our marketing material.
• #8: Picture of Educated guess Fierce, dangerous Integrity of the sport Adnan -------------------------- What u see in the picture is women’s freestyle wrestling match at Olympics. I do not know about any of these players, but I can do a educated guess on who has a better chance of winning the game. What is your guess? Research shows statistically the player wearing red has a advantage of 55% winning probability. Probably the reason is color red indicate energy and someone fierce with a fighting energy. Color blue seems a weaker color at least in competitions.
• #10: Trust index Burn in flames ---------------------------- These are 2 logos of Sri Lankan banks. If you don’t know the background of them and if I ask which bank would you choose to invest your money, most of you would select the logo to your right. Primarily due to the trustworthiness infer by the blue color. What do you think the favorite color of most men is? This is why we have selected Blue as our initial flyer colors for UX services, regardless of our corporate colors.
• #11: Started with corporate colors Eventually found out blue --------------------------
• #12: From color psychology Let me take you through a scenario --------------------------
• #13: Imagine you are walking alongside a water stream A kid falling in to the stream Fraction of second to save the kid Float over and Fall down a cliff -------------------------- Imagine you walking near a shallow water stream and seeing a kid falling into water. Near by there is a deep cliff and if you don’t act fast, the kid will float off the cliff and you wouldn’t be able to save her. You know water is not deep and you can save the kid without any danger to your own life. But you have a mobile phone in your pockets which will get water damaged beyond repair. How many of you would sacrifice the $100 phone in order to save the life of the kid? Let’s have a show of hand.
• #14: In front of your eyes, you are the part of ------------------------------ Now if I ask for $100 from you to save 3 kids in Africa through a vaccination program, it would be extremely hard sell here. I won’t ask for a show of hand this time, but that example will tell you how powerful is the story in front of you to influence your actions. In first case things happen right in front of your eyes and you are a part of the context, where as in the second case the story is not powerful as the earlier.
• #15: Never under estimate the power It is very important to get your story right If you only ask for 100$ for vaccination ---------------------------------- If you want to sell anything to anyone please get your compelling story right. Make it impactful and emotionally attached to the client who pays for it.
• #16: Color psychology + compelling story helped to overcome the trust barrier Sandra, Maya -------------------------------- Remember color psychology is important to convey your message. As I mentioned one of the most important barriers for us to break was the trust barrier. So our marketing material were using color psychology effectively to overcome the trust challenge.
• #17: UI vs UX are opposite Hiding designers -------------------- The second challenge we had was our potential customers not understanding the difference between UI and UX. They assumed UX was a variation of UI which is not. In fact UI and UX thinking is quite opposite. UI is designer centric thinking where UX is about user centric thinking. Do you remember the times where UI engineers kept their designs a top secret?
• #18: We were struggling Metaphor: symbol that can help you to understand something else We used the metaphor of human evolution - ----------------------------- This s where we have decided to use metaphors in our marketing material to tell that UX is something totally new and is a totally new era. We used the metaphor of ‘human evolution’ to give the users a feel that UX is not just another thing, bur a giant leap in thinking. Here I have added few more effective uses of metaphors for you to understand how they can be used.
• #19: Painful experience pleasurable -------------------- What do you think about this sold out logo for a conference page? I find it very cold and feeling less. If I visit the site to find this logo, I will get an feeling of being stamped – because the metaphor used here is ‘stamping’. But if you want to convey the same message cheerfully, you can use a different metaphor.
• #20: Add a bit of humor ------------------ Now a days online SaaS products doing down for maintenance is not heard much. But Atlassian products by design required this. They came up with this cool/funny metaphor to say they have disconnected the electricity to servers. It helps the users to understand the complex technical phenomenon of servers going down for maintenance.
• #21: ----------------- Here is another use of metaphor which I found from a conference website. This conference was for non-technical users and with this metaphor they have clearly communicated the reason for requiring login to the website – which is for identity reasons.
• #22: Metaphors are great, but.. -------------------- Although metaphors can be useful in gaining better understanding, using such forever can be disturbing to the users. A good example is how Apple changed the use of metaphor as it’s iOS platform mature. You may remember in early versions the Newsstand looked really like a physical news shelf which they have moved away during the recent releases. Same has happened to the most of the icons and application look and feel of the iOS platform.
• #26: Most important principle many said it is not possible to UX from SL -------------------- As we heard repeatedly during the conference, UX is all about being more closer to the customer. Probably if there is one thing you should remember from the conference, that should be about getting out of the Building to understand your users better. But most of us are involved offshore type of business models, where meeting the customer face-to-face is a super luxury. We are usually many hops away from the real users. For the same reason it is very difficult for us to convince our onsite counterparts that we are capable of carrying out UX tasks on behalf of the end users. We have faced the same issues and I know most of you have similar concerns.
• #27: ------------------- Technology and tools are our saviors in this situation. Previous speakers have also spoken about this and believe me it is extremely simple for you to integrate a took for end user behavior tracking in your application. It is just a couple of minutes task for any developer now a days. Once you have the tool installed it will give you great insights about the usage patterns of the product. These are not opinions but facts which no one can refuse to take. For example this screen shows a heat map analysis of one of our customer products. Originally customer did not want to get engaged with us on UX, but with this simple tool we were able to tell them that their assumptions about the product usage is not correct. For example above screen is for document uploading and not many users realize the main action which is ‘upload’ action, so the conversion rate of document uploads were very low as you can see.
• #28: Adnan ------------------- This was our ice breaker in to that project. After these findings our customer was impressed of our UX services and they wanted us to recommend a new design for the application. Based on lot of observations and progressive MVPs we finally implemented the design in right where users get a less cluttered interface where the primary actions are clearly visible.
• #31: When ever we go onsite We are very pushy Given the task list ----------------- Once you get the ice breaker through, then you need to have courage to push your boundaries. Today we keep on insisting our customers that when ever we go onsite we need to meet few real users and perform end user testing of our products face-to-face. What you see here is one of such instances where we have tested a alpha release of a product with end users. We have given them a list of tasks as you see on screen and asked them to carryout the same. Then we recorded the screen as well as facial expressions which we analyzed later to find out how comfortably users can work through the task list.
• #33: To do all of this, we need to build Most came from UI background We were trying several things, finally succeeded --------------------------------- Just having a compelling story will not help if you cant deliver the promises. For that you need to get your team built up as UX consultants. Out of the many things we do we believe one of the success of our UX competency was our ability to gamify the UX learning.
• #34: Ford in 2010 Gamified dashboard Fuel efficiency Wines and leaves Emotional attachment -------------------------- Gamification is important for you to get the angagement. In 2010 Ford released it’s hybrid models with a gamified dash board. If the driver drives the vehicle with high fuel efficiency, he will see green leaves and wines growing. Better the driving performance more lush and beautiful the leaves will be. It has proved to be rewarding for driver and most of the owners have built a emotional attachment with these car model. It’s a good case study where gamification can bring engagement.
• #35: Amsterdam urinal fly Cost of cleaning due to spillage Unintentionally aim Made urinating a enjoyable while reducing cost ------------------------ This is another cool experiment for gamification. Amsterdam International Airport, had an issue of too much of cleaning cost the urinal fly is a great example of a usable yet fun product. Its intent is to keep the bathroom floor clean; when you aim for the fly, you’re less likely to spill. You can urinate without trying to hit the fly, but for a lot of people trying to hit it is a better and more fun experience.
• #36: Gamification works It will work for you too We built a guide, model developers can follow