What does it mean to be user centric?
The path towards complete user centricity should start with you thinking inwards. Start looking at how to position yourself where you actually can create most value for your customers/users. If you are going to make a difference and position yourself in the market as a TRUE value creator, you needed to start focusing on the end user’s needs and wants. As the saying goes: “focus on the end user, and everything else will follow…”
With focus on value creation, when you reverse engineering the whole concept of user centricity, you’ll identify 2 key areas that needs to be addressed properly in any company: Identity and Privacy.
Once you realise that the role of digital identity and ownership of the data we generate about ourselves has now reached a turning point, you’ll know that you need to think different about how to solve the challenges of knowing who a customer is and how to interact with him/her in a way that was convenient, understandable and trustworthy. Especially in regards to personal data.
Privacy
New regulations (GDPR/ePrivacy) have turned ownership and control of personal data completely around. Because of this shift, companies are going from being the controllers of personal data, to being the consumers of personal data.
Privacy is not only a human right, but also a potential market opportunity
Gartner predicts that by the end of 2018, more than 50% of companies affected by GDPR will NOT be in full compliance with its requirements. Trend Micro’s (August 2017) research of 1,132 IT decision makers from businesses with 500+ employees in 11 countries (including USA, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland) revealed:
- 64% didn’t realise customers’ birthdates are considered personal data
- 42% would not tag email marketing databases as personal data
- 32% would not place physical addresses into a personal data category
- 21% would not place customers’ email addresses into a personal data category
Administering personal data will become a cost of delivering goods or services — not the business itself. In addition, there are many potential unmet user needs. EU’s own report on e-Privacy (July 2016) reveals that:
- 61% of the youngest respondents or those who browse online daily (49%), are most likely to be in favour of a one-time request from a website to access their information, as long as there is the option to change their mind (48%).
- Close to four in ten respondents (39%), in particular among the oldest respondents want to be asked permission every time they enter a website.
- 64% of respondents say it is unacceptable to have their online activities monitored in exchange for unrestricted access to a certain website.
- 71% think it is not acceptable for companies to share information about them without their permission, even if it helps companies to provide new services they might like.
- 74% say it is unacceptable to pay in order not to be monitored when using a website.
- 67% knows that, according to the law, personal information can only be accessed if they have given permission
The privacy of people’s personal information, their online communications and their online behaviour is very important to the majority of respondents. People know their rights! I believe privacy awareness will only increase in the coming years.
A Mobile Ecosystem Forum study in 2017 found consumers spend more time than most would assume managing their privacy:
- 75% say they always or sometimes read a privacy policy before signing up to a service.
- 46% say they want to be asked permission whenever their data is collected.
- 50% want to be asked permission whenever new data is collected or is to be shared differently.
Personal Information Management Services are in their infancy, but the research above suggests that many individuals are ready for it:
- 67% say the best party to manage data is ‘myself’
- 26% say the best way to give permission is within a single app.
- 43% said they’d be interested in an app that could show what data is being collected across all of their devices.
More than ⅔ of consumers don’t trust brands with their personal information. Companies have difficulties grasping that not only should personal data be kept private and secure, but also that the owner should by rights be able to benefit from what is essentially theirs.
I believe that allowing people to share their data with trust, and to do so at an individual level, will form the basis of a new industrial competition by 2020.
Positive gains through transparency
According to research by IAB Europe — the leading European-level industry association for online advertisers — 67% of Europeans agree with the concept of understanding how their data is being used. They also prefer to judge that usage on a case-by-case basis, rather than defaulting to preventing the sharing of data through privacy settings or avoiding using online services.
I believe that trust and loyalty goes hand in hand with transparency.
Companies and brands that adopt this mindset will differentiate themselves in the market — and most likely be rewarded by choice and reputation. Enabling mutual trust between companies and their customers is becoming more and more a key differentiator and also an opportunity to regain and maintain customer loyalty.
Identity
Everyone and everything have an identity. A trustworthy digital representation of who’s who is key to any digital transaction. Be it between people or machines. The problem around managing one’s digital identity is that there are no common solutions for it. Most digital identity providers build their services for solving their own needs, or for other companies’ needs, NOT based on end user needs.
In addition to identity provider companies not having user centricity as a core pillar of their solutions, continuous development and maintenance of a secure, user friendly and scalable solution is costly in terms of resources and expertise. Leading to adoption of mediocre solutions (bought or built) to solve the Know Your Customer needs of the time.
Additionally, identity solutions are under constant threats of security breaches and data leakage, increasing the requirements for both large and small corporations to mitigate and continuously improve their services.
In most companies with any level of legacy systems, history of acquisitions and merges, or simply not dealing with user centricity as their core business — identity and privacy has historically never been a strategic focus area. The result is that each department/division/service/product that interacts directly with end users within those companies usually:
a) duplicate their efforts in solving identity and privacy challenges separately
b) downplay the efforts and resources needed to do it properly
which in the end leads to varied quality and focus on solving those challenges.
The main problems I’ve seen over the years in this space in many companies are:
- a lack of common standards and best practices around security of personal data
- data in silos, affecting both interoperability and quality of service across the board
- inability to comply with regulatory requirements
- many teams working on the same problems, duplicating the costs for implementation, maintenance and continuous improvements
- lack of a good and consistent user experience across all user facing products and services
It is pretty clear that these challenges are pretty much universal, affecting any company in one form or another.
The path towards user centricity
First step is to have an aligned strategy in your organisation that covers user centricity — including a deep understanding of what that means in regards to user experience, operational support and competence needs.
Next is to evaluate what capabilities you have and need to drive drive business value out of your relationships with your customers. This means figuring out what KYC requirements you need to address, the security model for your service, privacy by design requirements, the channels you will interact with your users, the complete user journey and customer lifecycle, the level of support in the organisation and the list goes on… Based on this understanding of needs and requirements you will be able to address what to build or buy or adopt.
Once there is a buy in in your organisation to transform and become an user centric organisation its time to execute on this strategy. My recommendation is to combine Identity and Privacy capabilities into a neutral, user focused solution, that enables trust between you and your users, solving KYC needs and regulatory requirements along the way. This solution MUST be adopted by all touch-points where your services interact with your users or their data.
What you’d want to achieve in the end should be to:
- Establish and maintain meaningful relationships with your users
- Reduce churn and increase CLTV, loyalty and conversion.
- Meet KYC requirements, privacy regulatory compliance and security requirements — enabling mutual trust between you and your users
- Sync and consolidate identity data, allowing for a unified & user centric view of all your customers
- Reduce silos of fragmented data, resources and competence
- Privacy and security by design
The end goal is to allow the creation of simple, seamless, contextual and secure personalised experiences with your customers, while building up their trust and loyalty with your company and products.
Contextual dialogues and interactions
The key aspect that sets a user centric company apart from the rest is the focus on the user journeys and user experience of the dialogues and interactions a product has with users. This applies to onboarding, authentication, verification of identity, gathering of consent, sharing of personal information, profile and privacy management, notifications and messages, payment and personalisation of the experience with the products and services provided. Basically the complete user jouney for your product — end to end.
Transparency and usability is the key element in these interactions. Building trust requires understanding, clear and consistent dialogues and ultimately an user experience that can constantly evolve based on user needs and context without sacrificing conversion.
Its also worth pointing out that the user experience around consent dialogues, privacy notices and all other GDPR individual rights are for most companies a completely new and an unexplored area in usability and interaction design.
My suggested approach and way of working to solve this is to do:
- Continuous iterations, testing and monitoring
The product is never finished and should be continuously improved. At the same time we must adhere to legal, usability and conversion requirements. - Usability measurements
Making sure we cover all usability requirements, that the interface is easy to use, contextual and understood by users. - Trustability measurements
Making sure that these interactions increase trust towards the service itself and the companies that utilise them in order to maintain the user’s trust and loyalty at all times.
The on-boarding, authentication and permission flows are significant to the conversion rate of your service and to provide a great user experience for your end users. Its important to continuously test and improve your UX/UI and the content needed to create GDPR compliant permission dialogues for your service. This includes any descriptions of purposes, data controller information, third party information, retention and descriptions of data you process.
To help you with this wording, here are several tips and guidelines to help your customers become more engaged in regards to sharing their personal data and give consent:
- Use your user’s terminology, not lawyer speak. Write all the wordings in plain and easy to read language
- Each permission request should provide the user with solid explanations of the value to them — examples are recommended
- Motivations of sharing data are stronger if they clarify the user’s personalisation and/or financial benefits
- A more trustworthy company will gain more trust from their users, hence more data. Be clear and honest about your services and your privacy policy
- If you don’t need the data, don’t ask for it
- When in doubt, test it with your users before finalizing the wording
- Always consult your privacy officer before finalising the wording
The main takeaway is that you need to invest a lot more in the user experience design in order to become a user centric company. This is key to:
- how you communicate effectively and consistently to end-users
- how you make the user experience understandable and engaging, especially in terms of data sharing and privacy
- how you ensure high conversion rate for your services
