Welcome to our interview series on Experience Design Strategy.
In this series Tim Loo, Executive Director of Strategy at Foolproof, will be talking to global leaders and experts on the thinking and doing of experience design strategy.
Tim’s fourth interviewee is Pamela Pavliscak, founder of Change Sciences and an advisor to the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science.
If you’d prefer to listen on the move you can also listen to the interview as a Podcast on iTunes. Alternatively you can download the interview as a PDF to read later.
You can watch our interviews with Paul Bryan, Ronnie Battista and Jaime Levy on our YouTube channel.
Interview notes
- What does a design researcher do? [2.02]
- The importance of understanding and measuring ‘impact’ [3.54]
- Measuring customer experience via NPS (Net Promoter Score) [6.35]
- Why numbers need stories [9.19]
- The potential of other measurement frameworks [11.20]
- The importance of interweaving multifaceted data into key metrics [14.10]
- Designing for customer happiness [16.10]
- Is frictionless user experience possible, or desirable? [19.26]
- How do companies measure the success of their investments in ‘digital transformation’ [23.10]
- Is ‘love’ meaningful in a business context [26.45]
- The future of experience design [30.08]
Transcript excerpt:
Q. What’s the impact of the products and services that organisations provide for their customers? What’s the impact of technology on the wellbeing of people and society? It’s such a big idea and yet, as design specialists, we don’t have a really good handle onunderstanding impact, or measuring impact.
A. Of course, in design we’re very deeply committed to understanding people — gaining empathy — and we use a lot of qualitative methods for that which are great. But it’s hard to translate those into something that we can measure and track, and get on the radar and understand. There’s a truism: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But I think if you can’t measure you can’t improve it, either. It’s this weird tension because I think we in design have an antipathy to reducing something to a number, or to just one simple measure. At the same time, it’s pretty hard if we don’t have that kind of way of understanding — it’s pretty hard to understand if we’ve succeeded to make a case, to branch out. I think that’s what we’re all contending with, every day. It’s a complicated issue.
Q. What is your take on this idea of happiness and how businesses think about customer happiness?
A. I think that’s evolving too and that’s a really interesting conversation. For years we had this concept of delight, and that would be the candy on the table, or a really delightful detail. I think what’s happening now is that we’re realising (as all of these other academic fields are coming in to have their say about happiness) that we know a lot more things about happiness, little touches can add to your happiness in the moment but they wear off — delight has a shelf life. We have to think about other factors and that’s where looking at all of this great research that’s coming out of behavioural economics, psychology and sociology comes into play, because we can see some consistencies. There are some things that consistently drive wellbeing and that is strong relationships, great conversations, feelings of belonging. Lots of things that are relevant to our tech experiences, that we know in the back of our minds, but they might seem squishy.
Q. Do you have any thoughts around what areas of impact and measurement these ‘digitally transformed’ or ‘digitally re-platformed’ companies should be focusing on?
A. I think a lot of organisations at this point are thinking about how do they measure the long-term value that they’re having in people’s lives and that’s really hard. Because right now we’re measuring stuff that’s pretty easy and available, that’s why we’re in this mess, because it’s pretty easy to collect really basic engagement measures like time, or clicks, or scrolling and it’s harder to measure these other aspects of experience. I think those are the numbers that people are going to want to start to measure — what place does this have in my life, long-term? For the organisations we work with its been a bit of an individual experience, but it always revolves around some balance of those traditional metrics because those aren’t going away and you have means to measure those. But bringing in other measures that are not purely attention, or economics, that are situated with other human beings — the other stakeholders in this system, is equally important.
Useful Links
- Connect with Tim on Twitter
- Connect with Pam on Twitter
- “Designing for Happiness” by Pam Pavliscak
- 6 Myths about Data-Driven Design by Pam Pavliscak
- More useful articles for Developing a UX Strategy
- Find out about our Strategy & Planning practice
