Customer UX SnapShots – A great tool to share your work company-wide and get heard
UX teams do important work but often get sidelined, as most enterprises are lead by business and marketing people who focus on numbers and Dollars and have an abstract understanding of customer values and behaviours. And while business people focus on leading the company, UX people focus on leading customers, the two approaches repeatedly collide. Here is one way I found to be effective in broadening your voice, establishing your team’s profile and sharing the impact of your team’s work company wide. It is easy to do and I call it: Customer UX SnapShots.
The problem
Assume, you are the design leader of the digital (UX) team and are embedded in a large enterprise, where you collaborate on several projects and company-wide digital initiatives. Your task is not only to deliver on the overall (digital-)roadmap but also to mingle and synchronize efforts with other departments from business, product, engineering, marketing, to customer-success and customer-service. Having been embedded as a consultant in large and small companies across the globe, I have seen it countless times: legacy software, politics, power battles and stubborn colleagues are the greatest threat to getting your job done, and that is; crafting products, services and experiences for the ever-increasing and changing demands of paying customers and the new, digital natives. Understanding your customers deeply is your key interest. You know you got your team together and you consistently ship great work. The only problem is – nobody in the company knows about it. Sounds familiar?
During my tenure as a user experience lead working full-time at Electronic Arts Canada – a place where 1400 people are sitting under one roof – I found myself in a fairly similar situation. Through experimenting, our team finally found ways to broaden our department’s reach and influence throughout the organization. Later, I tested a few of the methods in other organizations and here is what I found to be the simplest, most elegant solution.
“Expectations, mindsets, moods, and social or physical contexts all colour customer profiles and market trends. Accumulating this information in form of an event-driven ‘diary’ captures these influences, shedding light onto how the product experience in each timespan has formed or changed.”
The solution
While on one hand, business leaders, analysts and marketing teams often get distracted by looking at their abstract and calculated numbers, the members of your team, on the other hand, are establishing real relationships through research with diverse customers from different markets and cultural backgrounds. Your department constantly accumulates more and more qualitative data about their online/offline behaviours, emotions, needs and values over time. This data is important but not easy to consume, nor easy to share. It often comes in the form of long interviews, screen recordings, diary studies, multi-page reports and so on. The ‘why-people-behave-the-way-they-do’ does not uncover itself in simple terms and vanity numbers — it needs in-depth explanation, carefully crafted illustrative statements and thoughtful, precise conclusions.
Now, we all know people are busy and, at the moment, won’t give you much time and pay attention to your work and findings anyways, so we need to look at ways to communicate our findings and share them more effectively, but how? I found some design and layout inspiration in the title-page of daily newspapers and classic tabloids formats. The layout supports our goals well; it provides a good balance of highlighting what’s currently deemed to be important, plus it gives enough depth to answer a few top questions and spark interest for a deeper analysis. The only thing that’s left is assembling the customer research data and sharing it company wide.
Where to start – step by step
Even though you distribute data internally, you might need some approval to share sensitive customer or project data digitally with other departments in your own company. The first thing I suggest is to anonymize names of customer individuals and refer to a fictive persona or segment. Be respectful and make sure you comply also with new GDPR regulations without loosing important contextual links and behavioural reference points.
Next, you need a way to collect and accumulate (longitudinal) information and key events about your customers; it’s all the stuff you gather from your research initiatives, but also spontaneous customer feedback you can access online (comments, ratings, etc.) or receive from other departments within your company. I wrote about efficient UX documentation in one of my previous articles. It is important that you capture and spot behavioural changes in your customers and the markets they are in and use these as triggers to publish your Customer UX Snapshots, unless you already established a publication cadence. In the latter case, I suggest to publish the email every two weeks, 11am on Tuesdays (based on these insights).
Let’s assume, you laid out the foundation to conveniently access your customers data and research findings – now all you need to do is put it into a format, edit and distribute the ‘newsletter’ via email. All this should not take longer than two hours, otherwise you need to tweak your process and make the (software)tools work harder for you. To save you some time crafting your own layout, I provided you with a Sketch File below, which you can use as a good starting point. I found sharing simple images or alternatively, leveraging professional email marketing tools such as MailChimp (it’s free) to be very convenient and effective (don’t bother measuring open rates and such). Just spread the good work.
The layout
You might discover other ways of structuring or writing your content, depending on the development stage your product is in, the maturity of your team or what research initiatives you just about to finish. Quite often time&budget just dictates the effort that goes into your publication. Here is what I think the key elements should be, to make it compelling enough for other colleagues to read.
Talk about your customer – one product at a time
- The Key Observation is the main headline of the publication you want everybody to read. It can link to a persuasive video snippet, convincing audio recording or short, impactful executive summary. In our case it’s something that highlights a major change in your customer’s behaviour or a new trend in a profitable market of yours (e.g.: consumption- & usage-pattern, values, new jobs-to-get-done, competition, etc.). You want readers to be made aware of new consumer attitudes and behaviours that impact business and major product decisions.
- The Background Story is the lead paragraph and it provides a brief intro to the main headline or can introduce an additional ‘by-line’. It links to a more detailed research report, usability study or similar long-form UX document.
- The Customer Quote illustrates and emphasizes again, key observations your team made, but allows your customers to express them in their own voice. Add a profile shot of a real customer to demonstrate diversity.
- The Past-4-Weeks is a reflection of the customer behaviour you’ve seen over a past period of time. You want to help your readers understand how (product)feature changes can often have negative or positive ripple effects and trigger a platitude of micro interactions, establish new habitual usage patterns or just end up making customers leave to solve their problems in other ways elsewhere.
- The Behavioural Forecast is your interpretation of future customer behaviour and market trends. Here I found it beneficial to look at other products and organizations and demonstrate how similar changes impacted customers decisions and interactions in specific markets and within certain contexts or usage environments. Explain and ‘connect the dots’ in a schematic approach.
- The Experience Vision promotes and iterates your 5-year overall (product)experience vision and strategy. It’s not tied to any specific customer segment and supports business, product and end-users. It helps readers understand and envision what/how/why we all need to work towards. You cannot repeat this often enough. I’ve seen platform businesses use multiple experience visions for each side of the market. It’s up to you to decide.
Talk about your team
- The UX/Digital Teams Next Steps talks about your current and immediate departmental goals, what’s next on your product road map and how you might want to tackle it. If you fancy, include a snapshot of your product roadmap in form of a timeline and point out previous, current and immediate next steps.
- Get Involved is a call for help and support from your peers and other departments within the company. It’s a great opportunity to share your openness and how previous partnerships resulted in great outcomes. Even if it’s just a call to fill out an online survey or participate in user research studies. Inviting people is the best way to get them started talking about you and your team’s efforts.
Happy promoting, inviting and collaborating with your peers.
Hi! Did you know I am a freelance UX designer and Researcher? You can hire me for your next research session or product design sprint.You might be interested in:
