Naming user goals and journeys
We have recently made some changes to our operating model in Consumer Digital. Instead of teams being organised around the business structure we are organising around things users and customers are trying to do.
There will always be silos, but we believe if we put silos where they matter least to users it will improve their experience because the consequences of those silos won’t be surfaced to them.
We used the LBGUPS customer lifecycle (learn, buy, get, use, pay, support) to help us think about our customers’ experiences, at high-level stages. This structure helps us to think about all the things a customer would experience when interacting with their service provider.
For example, when it comes to a goal like get my home connected to the internet — a user needs to do several things. They need to learn what options are available, take an action to buy it and receive the service to get it. Once they are a customer, they use the service, pay for it and get support if something goes wrong.
The next step was to get a holistic view of all the user goals across our services, and a view of the journeys users take to complete them.
Why did we do this work?
Mapping the goals our users and customers have and the journeys they take to complete those goals. helps us in a few ways:
- It provides us a consistent lexicon — so we are all using the same language to describe what we are working on. This helps us to be efficient and not duplicate effort working on the same thing but under a slightly different name.
- It helps us to measure user experience — we need to be able to measure how easy or hard it is for users to complete their goals. If we don’t use the same language and measure the same things, we will never be able to report on our progress on improving the experience for users. We know that to really understand customers experiences we need a rich set of qualitative and quantitative measurements. This helps us to understand what we are doing well and badly across the journeys.
How did we do this?
This wasn’t something we knocked out in a week, it was a process over months, with many teams that are building our services across BT, EE and Plusnet. Gradually building up a shared understanding of these things and committing names to them. We created some simple tools to help us. The most useful was a decision tree. The affectionately named ‘sausage machine’ helped us to turn the raw material, people’s opinions, through a series of questions into clearly articulated, user-centered names. Many workshops later with alliance teams and stakeholders we had captured two things across all our services:
- User goals
- User journeys
Importantly they are all named as a customer would describe them, this helps us keep true to serving the customer not ourselves.
What next?
We are embedding Service Designers with teams to help them see the whole service for each user goal, the experience for the user and how teams, technology and data support these journeys. This will also help us communicate and collaborate better with teams across other parts of the organisation as end to end journeys rarely sit within digital alone.
Teams are mapping out these journeys, understanding the steps within them and utilising them with other techniques to identify how other areas of our front stage and backstage organisation relates to them, ie cost, effort, people, technology.
Teams are utilising the new usability framework to measure efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. This will help us to build up baseline measurements of how easily people can complete their goals and whether the content makes sense to them.
Teams are reporting on the performance of user goals. There now is a digital-wide weekly session where colleagues report on the performance of each user goal, using user-centred language helps us to stay true to what we are measuring, some of the measurements are limited to transactions, CSAT but were improving how we report on experience using analytics and other types of intercept surveys too.
We’re also asking teams to use these names in their work as much as possible. In their team names, file names. The more consistency we get the better.
Interested in joining the team? We have several Service Design and User Research vacancies in London and Birmingham.
We’re continuing our journey into embedding UCD into BT, so please comment below if you have any insights.
