Alex Carr Of WillowTree On The 5 Best Ways to Elevate Your Product’s User Experience
An Interview With Rachel Kline
Brand your experience — Utilize the patterns of your platform to give users consistency but don’t succumb to a sea of sameness. Use opportunities throughout the experience to accentuate your brand, whether be in the language you use, the colors, the typography, the motion, the sound (not enough companies think about sound). All these details add to the experience and makes your product more sticky than competitors.
In today’s competitive market, delivering an outstanding user experience (UX) is critical for product success. A well-designed UX can lead to higher user satisfaction, increased engagement, and ultimately, improved brand loyalty. But how can product designers, developers, and organizations create user experiences that truly stand out and make a lasting impression on users? In this interview series, we are talking to UX professionals, product designers, developers, and thought leaders to explore “The 5 Best Ways to Elevate Your Product’s User Experience.” As part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Alex Carr.
As the Chief Design Officer at WillowTree, a TELUS Digital Company, Alex leads WillowTree’s global multi-disciplinary design and content teams to deliver digital-first, branded experiences for our clients and their customers. He brings over 18 years of experience in interactive design, creative direction, and digital strategy, with a passion for solving complex problems and creating engaging solutions.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to learn more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I learned to code when I was young. My father wanted me to learn C and bought me a book that taught me how to make a Mad Lib program in the first lesson. After I got through that first lesson I promptly gave up out of boredom. It wasn’t until I discovered Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash that I started to get interested in design and interaction. I took the little bit I learned making the Mad Lib program and started making games and silly animations. Flash was special in that way. It married drawing and animation with interactivity and programming. Playing with Flash was the moment that I realized I wanted to design things people could interact with. That they could manipulate, get feedback, and get something out of it.
As I got older I learned about the world of design and focused on a path studying traditional graphic design while continuing to apply it to digital experiences.
Do you have any mentors or experiences that have particularly influenced your approach to product development and user experience?
Early in my career, I worked very closely with someone who was then, and is still now a mentor to me. Their approach has always been to take the shortest path to a result. I try to embody this as much as I can, even though the perfectionist in me wants to spend more time on everything. They’re someone who believes in getting it out there, seeing what works, and then adjusting. To spend more time on something without knowing if it will resonate is just increasing your risk.
It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
During my first internship, my manager and his boss took me out for sushi. I had only ever had sushi once in my life so I didn’t really know how to order sushi — I thought it was by the piece. So I ended up ordering like seven rolls and a whole boat showed up just for me. Nobody said anything. Nobody gave me a hard time. All of these established designers and leaders just laughed and then my manager said “Let’s get to work” and everyone started eating.
It’s easy to put people down or embarrass them. Being in an environment where you can make mistakes, even silly ones like that, and see the humor in them and move on is important. I’ve tried to keep that in mind throughout my career.
What do you feel has been your ‘career-defining’ moment? We’d love to hear the lead-up, what happened, and the impact it had on your life.
Having our plugin Contrast featured at Figma’s Config conference was pretty significant. It maybe wasn’t so much the impact it had on my life at that point but all of the experiences leading up to that making it possible.
I’ve made lots of things in my career. Most things do not take off. Some of them resonate here and there. Contrast came from a place where I didn’t try to solve a problem for the widest audience; it focused entirely on my immediate team and the need we had — a way to continuously check visual contrast in our designs without breaking our flow, ultimately increasing the accessibility of our work. That approach of making something just because we wanted to see it exist meant we didn’t really worry about appealing to anybody else. We didn’t get bogged down in what a wider audience might want out of a tool like this. That freedom is something I’ve only understood after doing this work for so long. The result has been a tool that is used by over 400K designers around the world. It solved the thing we needed it to and there just happened to be others that felt the same way.
Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
I considered giving up when I started managing other designers. I didn’t think I was particularly good at it and wasn’t feeling fulfilled by it. Designers, although not exclusive to them, tend to suffer from imposter syndrome. I didn’t believe that I was a leader or had anything to offer younger designers. All of that led me to managing in a way that wasn’t me — trying to emulate other mentors and leaders I had myself. This basically got me nowhere and this sense of not belonging continued.
It only changed when I stopped trying to be like other leaders I have had and instead found my own voice. What was my version of leadership? I started doing what I thought I should do and trust that others trusted me and my approach that I started to really thrive. Then the work became easy and infinitely more rewarding. It started to feel like I had something to contribute and share with the people on my team.
Let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. How do you prioritize user experience when developing a new product, and what steps do you take to ensure that the final product meets the needs and expectations of your target users?
Meeting user needs requires talking to them. It’s that simple. Talk to users, understand their challenges, and derive some key insights to form the basis of the product experience. Stick to those insights as you make design and product decisions. Then continuously iterate and revise those insights or form new ones as the audience, product, or goals change.
Prioritizing the user experience is all about making sure everyone on the team understands the value. We align our design and experience decisions to business outcomes. We designed it in this way because it has the highest likelihood of achieving this outcome. That puts design decisions in a language that makes them business decisions. Often the thread to prioritizing the user experience is a perceived lack of value.
A more universal way to think about it is realizing that after one or two bad experiences with your product, a user will probably leave and find something else (assuming they are not forced to use your product or are locked in in some way). Not investing in the UX means you’re wasting money everywhere else. You could make the most amazing technology anybody has ever seen, but if it’s hard to use, nobody will stick with it.
Can you share any strategies you have for effectively gathering and analyzing user feedback?
We have an amazing Research team at WillowTree. Researchers and designers working as partners on a project results in relevant, easy to use, products that get better with every sprint. I am a big fan of the RITE method (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation). More traditional usability studies may be conducted over a few weeks and result in a bunch of feedback a team can decide to implement or not. RITE testing is much faster and more agile. As you test and uncover problems, you make changes. Then you keep at it for a set amount of time. You don’t need to see an issue 30 times to realize you should fix it. Once or twice for most things is enough to make an improvement, and RITE testing allows us to do that very quickly, ending up with something that is measurably better in less than a couple weeks.
How do you balance the need for simplicity and ease-of-use with more complex or advanced features in a product, and what strategies do you use to make sure that users can navigate those features without getting overwhelmed?
Minimizing everything to its simplest form in the name of reducing complexity has its limits. Not everything can be boiled down to a single action or simple button. Realizing that allows you to embrace complex tasks or features in a different way.
I like to think about them like video game tutorials. The best ones teach you as you go, not as a separate lesson. Progressively introduce how a complex feature or tool works by having the user actually complete tasks along the way. Then as you go, award them through positive feedback.
The other side of that is to make errors easily recoverable (h/t Jakob Nielsen). So many people have anxiety about messing something up in a product or doing something wrong. Making the recovery path easy when a user makes a mistake can help them feel more comfortable, especially in a product that may have some complexity to it.
What are some of the strategies you’ve used to make your product ‘stickier’ and increase user retention?
A thoughtful, personalized, and timely push notification and messaging strategy continues to win the day for designing engaging experiences. For a quick-serve restaurant group, we were able to drive a 10%+ lift in conversion through our personalized AB testing efforts (across email, push, and in-app messaging). But great messaging can only get you so far. If you bring a user into a poorly considered mobile app — that isn’t performant, or isn’t as personalized as the notification that brought them there — they probably won’t open the app again. That’s why we bring marketers, writers, UX designers, and engineers together to solve these problems of engagement.
There’s no single thing. It’s everyone’s work coming together. For a global hospitality brand, we drove a 240% increase in app engagement because we brought all those pieces together — inclusive, personalized messaging, an engaging design, and a performant and well built experience.
In your experience, what are some of the most effective ways to measure the success of a product’s user experience, and how can this data be used to continuously improve the product over time?
We think about successful user experiences, outside of business outcomes, as experiences that hit on three areas: usability, accessibility, and desirability.
We use some version or flavor of the System Usability Scale (SUS) when we are measuring the perceived usability of a product — often a combination of the Single Ease Question (SEQ) and Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX-Lite). These are easy ways to understand if a user finds the product or feature valuable and if they thought it was easy to use. It’s subjective but with a good sample you can calculate the mean from the tests.
There are a lot of tools for measuring accessibility, both during design and development. I think most folks are aware of those. But a majority of accessibility issues, something like 70%, cannot be captured with automated testing. We are trying to do more and more usability testing with people with disabilities. It is less about compliance and passing but ensuring that an experience is actually usable by everybody.
The final area is around desirability. This one is the hardest. This means someone chose your product over another option they had. Usage and adoption are good indicators of desirability but you can also use NPS surveys or similar to understand how likely someone would be to recommend your product to someone else.
Thank you for all of that. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience, what are your “5 Best Ways to Elevate Your Product’s User Experience”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
Test and Iterate
You can get a lot of low hanging fruit just by watching somebody use your product. Most companies skip this step. Things may seem obvious but you will quickly find all the little things that are stopping people from engaging.
Brand your experience
Utilize the patterns of your platform to give users consistency but don’t succumb to a sea of sameness. Use opportunities throughout the experience to accentuate your brand, whether be in the language you use, the colors, the typography, the motion, the sound (not enough companies think about sound). All these details add to the experience and makes your product more sticky than competitors.
Think beyond chat
AI-driven chat experiences can be helpful, especially in your product, but if you want to really elevate the experience, consider how you might use AI to accomplish user goals faster, or more succinctly, without necessarily requiring a text conversation. It can go much further and more smoothly fit into their expectations of the experience. Look for AI opportunities by task not by medium. There you can find the places to leverage new models without needing a chat interface as the default.
Sweat the animations
Motion orients the eye, it adds context to how different screens and windows work together in a product. It can also, when done well, add moments of delight to an experience. Use motion purposefully and not only can it help your users better understand how your product is organized but also add moments of delight.
Be Critical
Not every idea is a great idea but it does take some bad ideas to get to the great ones. Healthy discourse between product owners, designers, and engineers results in a better product. The features you introduce will be more valuable and the quality going out the door will be much higher if you can facilitate debate and investment in the product.
Close Your Feedback Loops
Interacting with software is all about feedback. A lack of feedback or unclear feedback means users will be uncertain about what happened, or if it happened, and start to feel lost and frustrated. Find the moments where you are not giving the user feedback (interesting moments, interactions, and tasks) and make sure you have good, visible feedback.
Use the Language of the People
The words you use to describe objects, or things, or actions might not be the same as your users. Working with content designers can be hugely beneficial when it comes to mapping the language of your audience’s world and reflecting that in your product.
Follow Patterns and Break Rules
This one is tough. Your baseline product experience should follow all the established patterns of the platform — the interactions people know and can recall as soon as they start using your product. But nowadays most products all work exactly the same. As much as you should align with established patterns, you should be finding opportunities to create new ways of interacting or doing. Pushing the boundaries and making something better and novel can give a big boost to how sticky and elevated a product is.
Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!
