Internal disconnects within your organization always show up in your end user experience..always, without exception. This talk unpacks common cultural issues and how they manifest in your end UX , originally presented on the stage at 2018 SXSW Interactive with my beloved friend, Olivia King Hayes (she did amazing, I thought I was going to pass out).
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Leah: Hi, friends. We are so glad you guys are here. It’s a full house. A few house keeping before we start. Our hashtag for today’s talk is #exposedux. You can find us on Twitter, or Instagram, or wherever else the cool kids are hanging out online. Olivia and I will jump on those channels after the talk, and we’ll be happy to answer questions then. So without much ado, let’s get started. My name’s Leah Hacker. I am Head of Research for Accomplice. And this is my friend and colleague, Olivia Hayes, Head of Product Strategy at Accomplice. Accomplice is a strategic design agency that specializes in curating consumer experiences, everything from digital to physical spaces.
Leah: So our topic today, each of you will have a unique perspective over our conversation today, so we’re really excited you both are here. We are talking today about what user experience exposes about your culture. So we believe that internal disconnects always find their way into your end user experience. Always, without exception, if there is chaos within your organization, there is chaos in your product. This conversation originated rather organically for Olivia and I. Our unique perspective of business objectives and product affords us a really holistic view of end to end user experience. So, from inside your organization and the strategic positioning of your product, all the way to the product performance and how well it’s…how well your users are engaging with it. After years of working with organizations on their data and product initiatives, we’ve began to notice that the product mirrors the disconnects that we’re seeing within the organizations. However, companies oftentimes are really unaware of the through line of this user experience, or they believe that they can segregate the two, compartmentalizing their internal chaos from the end product deliverable.
Leah: Our goal today is to draw that through line of user experience. By understanding how your internal disconnects can manifest themselves within end user experience and show up in your end business objectives, our hope is that organizations can begin to create more holistic user experiences, and take steps towards creating long-term success and sustainability.
Olivia: So just to give you a little context for how we’re going to tackle this issue. First, we’re going to start by talking about the case for culture. So why culture actually matters to your product and to your end user experience. And then, what we’re going to do is take you through some of the most common issues that we see, and how those symptoms manifest both internally and in your end user experience. Finally, we’re going to leave a little bit of time at the end, so if you have any questions for us, we’ll be answering those then.
Olivia: So to start with the case for culture. We’re going to talk about culture and why it impacts your end user experience and your product. So culture is defined as the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization. So culture is something that an organization actually builds, just like the products and the services that we build. So it makes sense that those two things would impact one another. A few comments on constraints, just so you can understand how we looked at this topic and created our thesis. Because of mine and Leah’s collective backgrounds, we looked at this topic from the intersection of empirical evidence, human behavior, our experiences, and natural systems. We wanted to lay out a few parameters to give you a sense of the context for how we laid out this thesis.
Olivia: So, first of all, we’re not debating financial success here. Plenty of financially successful organizations are absolute dumpster fires on the inside. You know that, I know that. You’ve probably worked for those organizations. Maybe you’re working for one now. Who knows. For that reason, we aren’t using financial success as the primary benchmark for what we consider to be health. Obviously, a business needs to make money in order to be a business, but plenty of financially successful and, you know, prominent businesses have very toxic internal cultures. So we aren’t going to use financial success as the primary benchmark here. Our argument is for overall sustainability. And the way that we are judging sustainability is using two primary metrics. So, the first one is longevity. So, how long has a business been able to stick around in the market. The second one is employee and customer happiness and satisfaction. These metrics, obviously, all have a financial impact on the organization. For instance, unhappy employees cause a lot of turnover, and that’s very costly for an organization. But we’re going to get to the empirical evidence a little bit later on in this talk.
Olivia: Finally, we’re working with the laws of the universe here. A business is like an organism, it’s a system of systems. So, much like what you put into your body shows up on your skin, so to does it go with the internal ecology of your organizations. A big part of the reason we decided to give this talk is because we noticed that organizations don’t seem to make the connection. They think that they can separate their internal strife from what actually impacts their end users and what their experience is like. But, oftentimes, if you have chaos internally, that chaos will manifest itself in your product. So those two things are not as separate as companies seem to believe that they are.
Leah: After identifying the constraints around our conversation, we wanted to understand what exactly was already known about culture. So we took to empirical evidence. We know that culture directly impacts outcomes. So we all know stories of organizations that have had fast and furious growth, toxic internal cultures, and strong revenue lines. However, when we look to long-term sustainability as a success metric, research indicates that the role of culture becomes significantly correlated with success, or failure, of that organization. We also know that culture is influential in employee variables such as employee performance, job satisfaction, company loyalty, and even competitive advantage. All of these variables work together to directly influence the customer satisfaction. Research in this line suggests that even the most broad conception of our work environment serve to inform and even influence some of our most specific business strategies, such as customer satisfaction.
Leah: And finally, we know that culture influences innovation. So empirical evidence suggests that culture is a key factor in either encouraging or actively impeding innovation across an organization, all the way down to the individual level.
Leah: So after scouring through academic literature to figure out what was already known about culture, we wanted to know what the everyday individual thought about their work environment. So we took to the streets of Austin to find out.
Leah: All right, we are going to walk through four case studies that demonstrate the most common internal issues that we frequently come across in our roles. How these issues manifest themselves within the business objectives, and ultimately, manifest themselves within the UX symptoms of the products that we see.
Leah: So our first issue up is the single visionary issue. Oftentimes, this is referred to as the genius with 1,000 helpers or the loudest voice in the room phenomenon. We’ve all had these experience where we’re sitting in a very uncomfortable conference room, and there is one very strong voice, one singular point of innovation within the organization that moves the product, and the culture, and the organization forward.
Leah: This genius, oftentimes, fails to implement strong management teams or process to propagate the vision across the organization. And as long as that voice remains the driving force behind the product or the organization, oftentimes, both company and product succeed. However, companies are ran by people. People leave, governing boards step in, and people die. When that voice is silenced within the organization, it’s here that we see the product and, oftentimes, the company begin to lose their way. Oftentimes, the teams begin to attempt to mimic their predecessor with bold moves in the product that, oftentimes, fail in the marketplace. From a business perspective, this is an issue of scale. The inability to replicate the vision of the product across the operational teams that are ultimately responsible for ideation, design, and development of the product, make it difficult to innovate forward. And it ultimately leads to an inconsistent product experience. This translates to a loss of competitive edge in the marketplace, and eventually a loss of market share.
Olivia: So after the exit of the visionary, who is, by the way, often designated the company’s product person, we start to see these products slowly fall further and further away from the design benchmarks that initially set them apart within the industry. What that means for users is a gradual degradation of their experience over time, and it significantly hurts the brand image.
Olivia: So as a case study for this issue, we’re going to start with Apple. And the reason for that is because Apple is a universally recognized brand and we are all so deeply indoctrinated in Jobsian design aesthetic, that we can practically rattle it off from memory. So what are some design philosophies that we associate with Steve Jobs’ Apple? Just yell them out.
Audience: Clean.
Olivia: Yes, clean. Simple. Intuitive, that’s another great one. Yeah, simplicity, streamlined, innovative, functional. These are all things that we associate with Steve Jobs’ Apple. So when we start to see product developments like this, we intuitively know that Steve Jobs would not have signed off on this. What Apple users expect from Apple is innovation, but not at the cost of a streamlined experience or at the cost of aesthetics. So the result of the degradation of the experience is that customers lose loyalty to the brand. And the brand itself loses focus on those core values that initially set it apart and made it so valuable to begin with. In worse cases, actually, the company can become a parody of its former self.
Olivia: Leah and I make a podcast for Accomplice called It’s Worth Doing Right, where we explore the intersection of creativity and data. This clip is from a future episode with whurley, who is a startup founder and also one of the 2018 SXSW keynote speakers. These are his thoughts about what innovation has meant over time at Apple.
Leah: All right, our next issue is the growth-at-any-cost issue. This is an issue that’s driven by an aggressive growth mentality. Almost an irrational emphasis is placed on speed and quantity. The focus here on speed and quantity is in presence of little or no consideration of market fit, user need, or even the infrastructure requirements of that point in time in the product. Typically, in these environments, we see design and dev sprints become chaotic. Usually because of a lack of resources or a lack of communication in the presence of intense pressure to get the product out the door as fast as possible.
Leah: From a business perspective, this becomes a money drain really quickly. The failure to do due diligence within the marketplace to understand the consumer needs, the user needs, and the product requirements in the fundamental product decisions creates an inability to scale the product to the next iteration. Ultimately, this costs the organization more time and more money trying to retrofit the product with features and infrastructure that should have been there in the first place.
Olivia: So from a UX perspective what we tend to see here is feature bloat. So a kind of keeping up with the Joneses sort of feature addition, rather than executing on a strategically thought out product roadmap. The other thing that happens with this issue is, because there’s such huge emphasis placed on speed, these products are not built with the kind of infrastructure that can grow and then handle all the kinds of issues that a massive influx of users bring with them. So whether that makes your application have performance issues or exposes you to intense security breaches, either one of those things can be absolute killers for products.
Olivia: So to illustrate this issue, we’re going to talk about Yik Yak. So Yik Yak was a location-based app founded in 2013, that allowed users to leave anonymous posts that were then either upvoted or down-voted by the community. It was mainly intended for sharing to happen in close geographic proximity with one another, so it really took off in places like college campuses, for instance. As with any anonymous platform, Yik Yak started to receive user complaints about hate speech, and threats, and bullying, and threats of violence fairly early on. Harassments and threats, that’s something that every social platform has to deal with, but it’s especially pronounced when you choose to create an anonymous platform, and we know this. We’ve seen this happen time and time again. Sometimes we’ve even seen anonymous products have to completely shut down over this kind of harassment and threats of violence.
Olivia: Simultaneously, Yik Yak secured massive infusions of cash in a very short period of time, something like $73 million in one calendar year. And a portion of that money was specifically earmarked for growth and marketing. Now it might seem like a huge infusion of cash is nothing but a good thing for a startup, but many of you might know that cash and money is like throwing gasoline on a fire that’s already burning. So in general, it can just exacerbate the problems that you’re already facing. Sometimes with these issues, money alone is not enough to fix it. Sometimes what your product needs is just time and maturity.
Olivia: So meanwhile, certain schools were banning Yik Yak and loudly calling on them to do something about the threats of violence and the harassment that were happening on their platform. So they attempted a geofencing fix, where certain schools could make it impossible for kids to use the apps within certain geographic locations, but as we know, kids are very resourceful and smart, and they got around it. So that wasn’t enough. With too few attempts on the part of Yik Yak to curb this bullying, it eventually became so widespread and toxic that usage fell 76%, and the platform eventually shut down permanently last year.
Olivia: So in this case, that growth-at-any-cost mentality, actually cost the organization the entire product and the company.
Leah: Our third issue today is the reactive cycle. On the surface, this looks a lot like the growth-at-any-cost mentality. However, a deeper look at some of the symptoms, and the UX manifestations indicate there may be something different going on. Moreover, this is one of those issues that are really foundational within an organization. If the organization is dealing with a reactive cycle issue, chances are there are other maladaptive business strategies at play as well.
Leah: All right, so unlike the growth-at-any-cost mentality, the reactive cycle is deeply rooted in fear, fear of missing out, fear of losing success, fear of growth, fear of change, or fear of being left behind. And that fear becomes prominent in your decision-making process. It’s here that we see copycat syndromes begin to evolve. This is where an organization starts to mimic their competitors in attempt to keep up, versus really differentiating or innovating in the space. Or we see a knee-jerk adoption of business strategies, almost in frantic search for the next big thing. These new adoptions and directions are often accompanied by a lot of internal fanfare, business meetings, new pitch decks, branding, and, oftentimes, a lot of press coverage and external fanfare as well, announcements, and the like. This is usually accompanied with abrupt shifts in mission, value propositions, and even focus of the company.
Leah: Now, I know we’re talking about digital products today, but it is important to note that this is not a new phenomenon. This is not unique to tech companies. This is an issue that has long plagued business strategies across industries. The Doom Loop is a cycle that was identified by Jim Collins in his 2001 book, Good to Great. In this book, Collins studies 11 companies that successfully make the transition from good companies to great companies. As evidenced by their sustainability in the marketplace.
Leah: Collins also studied the companies competitors to understand why they didn’t fare as well in the marketplace. What he found was those companies that failed to make that transition from good to great, all of them exhibited some level of this Doom Loop within their decision-making process. Essentially, they would release a product or a service out into the wild and they would garner disappointing results. So instead of stopping to understand what went wrong and employ a data-driven strategy, they would react without understanding. They would usher in a new direction, a new program, a new event, a new leader, or they would even go and make new acquisitions. At first they would be able to retain a little bit of results within the marketplace, but because of a lack of sustained momentum, they would ultimately fall flat, and the results would lurch them back into this reactive cycle.
Leah: From a business perspective, this becomes a sustainability issue. It’s really hard to gain momentum of any kind with continual stops and starts. When we look at business strategies, these abrupt about-faces can translate into disconnects within the brand, the product, and the service. Disconnects like this translate into critical points of failure in the marketplace. Not to mention, the chaos that occurs internally within the organization creates an additional toxic culture that straps the organization with even more costly operational costs.
Olivia: So some of these are experience symptoms of this reactive cycle panic are features that are pushed out into the market before they’re fully valuable to users. So a lot of times what that can look like is partial features or disjointed features, and dramatic shifts in actual product or feature offerings. So then, you create up a lot of confusion with your users around what you’re doing and how, and you know how much users love that.
Olivia: So to illustrate the swirling panic of the Doom Loop … Which what a great term, Doom Loop. We’re going to talk about Yahoo. So as you all know, Yahoo began its lifetime as a search engine, and a very successful one at that. In its heyday it was one of the most visited sites on the internet. And even as it started to expand out to be more of a media company, it’s website was still receiving seven billion views a month.
Olivia: But this whole idea of being a media company became very mushy, and over time they fell prey to one of the hallmark Doom Loop behaviors, which is this rapid acquisition of widely varying and diverse companies. The companies they acquired left and right were sort of all over the map and as far as their media focus was concerned. As a user, this is really confusing to say the least. So the experience became that, maybe you’re playing fantasy football on Yahoo Sports, and your grandmother is starting her day by reading Yahoo News, and maybe your younger sister is like microblogging her festival looks on Tumblr, and it’s, kind of, all over the place. And as a user it becomes, “What is Yahoo?” So over time, even the Doom Loopy move of bringing in a brand new, shiny CEO with a lot of fanfare, didn’t help to turn Yahoo around or get it to refocus in a significant enough way. And eventually it was sold to Verizon.
Olivia: It’s very difficult to retain users when your users don’t know that they’re your users. And in fact, they’re not even quite sure what you do anymore. Confusion is never a benefit to your user experience.
Leah: Our final issue today is the lack of diversity. Now this is a top of mind conversation. And we are talking about the diversity of race and gender, but we’re also talking about the diversity of experience, diversity of thought, and diversity of backgrounds and training. Without these things, it can lead to a very narrow perspective of your company vision, your value proposition, and even your product offerings. Typically, this is exhibited by lack of transparency, and process, and procedure across the organization. A homogenous leadership team and decision makers influence the groupthink mentality that we see across the organization. And groupthink mentality make it incredibly difficult to come up with creative problem-solving techniques or innovation. From a business perspective, this has a direct product influence. A lack of diversity creates blind spots that can translate to critical points of failure for your product. These blind spots within your product ultimately influence things like customer acquisition and churn numbers, increase of customer distrust, and an inability to innovate the product to solve problems.
Olivia: So one of the outcomes of lack of diversity in your end user experience is tone-deaf or even actually broken features or products, which not only leads to bad press for your brands and your organization, but also means that you could potentially alienate key critical user types. That’s all going to inevitably lead to a poor product experience, not to mention a lot of eye rolling that can be really difficult to shake from your brand image.
Olivia: So to illustrate how this can manifest in your user experience, I’m going to use two product release examples, starting with Apple HealthKit.
Olivia: So when Apple launched their HealthKit in 2014, it had the ability to track your weight, track how much water you were drinking, track how sedentary you’ve been, but it did not include the ability to track menstrual cycles, or actually anything related to reproductive health. This was around the same time that Apple launched their first ever diversity report, which showed that most of their organization were white males, actually 70% to be exact. Now a lack of team diversity is one thing. So maybe your team isn’t actually that diverse, but launching a product that ignores an experience that roughly 50% of your users have once a month is egregious to the point of being offensive. How did this happen? A minimal amount of user testing or user research would have uncovered this issue prior to this going to the market. And sure enough, when the product went to the market, users were upset, and confused, and panned Apple in the press, as well they should have. And Apple didn’t manage to rectify this problem until 2015.
Olivia: Another well publicized failure was Google, which is a company that actually prides itself on centering user experience as one of its core values. In 2015, they launched an image labeling feature within Google photos that would group similar photos together and then tag them. And a black software developer on Twitter discovered that it was labeling groups of black folks as gorillas. Of course, this was horrifying for them and they scrambled for a fix. But it brought up an issue that we now know to be true, which is that artificial intelligence and algorithms, they aren’t color blind. They’re encoded with the same unconscious biases as the folks that create them, which is why diversity of creators is exceptionally important. And once again, how did this happen? Even if there were no black folks on the actual team, a diverse set of test images would have caught this issue prior to it launching into the market. Just a diverse set of sample faces would have been sufficient. After all, black folks are not an edge case.
Olivia: Okay. So now that we’ve highlighted some of these dominant, internal issues that can have such a profound impact on your end user experience, how do we move forward, both as individuals and organizations? We’re going to share with you the high-level process that we use in order to help our clients and organizations face these issues, and then figure out what they want to do about them.
Olivia: So the first step is actually just awareness. Understanding that these issues that you have internally, they do impact your users and they do impact your product. So that’s the first step. The most effective way for your organization to gain awareness is to employ a third party organization to help you uncover these issues, and to understand what they are. This creates distance, first of all, and third party objectivity will remove some of the emotions that can sometimes be associated with what is, kind of, a touchy process.
Olivia: The next step is evaluation. So this is where your data-driven, decision-making processes come into play. What can you do about these issues once you’ve uncovered them? So implementing new processes are important, but creating benchmarks for success that can be measured, actual KPIs, both internally and in your end user experience, are critical. And that’s a lot of what we help organizations do, figure out how to measure and track their progress.
Olivia: Finally, you have to iterate on these processes. So, it’s not enough just to do this work one time, and then expect for the results to be long-lasting. What we’re looking at here is sustainability, so figuring out how we can do this over and over again in a sustainable way. And what that means is doing this at a regular cadence. So reevaluating these processes, looking at your KPIs with regularity in a way that you incorporate into your internal processes.
Olivia: So what might it look like to be an organization that actually operates in a way that prioritizes the sustainability and health that we’re talking about? This clip is from a podcast called How I Built This with Guy Raz. He’s talking to Yvonne Chouinard here, who is the CEO of Patagonia. Which is a company you all might have heard of. And he talks about how they came about their sustainable business practices.
Olivia: So Patagonia is a brand that has been in business for 45 years and it’s beloved by their customers and employees alike. Last year they made an estimated $750 million in revenue, they’ve never run a TV commercial, and they pioneered some of the most sustainable and ethical practices in manufacturing. So if this thoughtful and sustainable way of doing business is good enough to work for Patagonia, then it’s good enough to work for the rest of us as well.
Olivia: If you want to hear more about these kinds of topics, please check out our podcast, It’s Worth Doing Right. And here are some other places where you can find us online. Thanks so much for joining us today, and we will be taking whatever questions you might have after this. And otherwise, enjoy the rest of your SXSW experience.
