Building value solutions by understanding the user experience
Part 1 — Understanding the business and audience
Introduction
The world of experience includes customer (CX) and user (UX). Our concern is not about the focus of customer vs user but instead about getting the right balance between experience research, technical and commercial considerations. These ensure the job gets done in a way that creates and adds value and that the research is proportionate to the likely benefits. In other words, we need to involve all the right business functions.
This first essay looks at building our understanding of the landscape, be that the business, the audience or the context we find ourselves in. From an understanding of where we are, the second essay looks at how we can start to work on the problem to identify viable solutions. Finally, the third essay explores how we work with and communicate the change to a wider audience, especially when that audience comes from different backgrounds and disciplines.
Within this paper we’ll cover a few areas to understand:
- the business and audience
- where the value is
- how to map out the audience and their experience
So please jump to the sections you need support with. We hope to give you enough detail to understand the value of the different approaches so you can research them further when the need arises.
Understanding the business and audience
Researching interactions and businesses
When it comes to understanding the business there are both some general considerations and then a number of specific ones related to your existing or potential customers and users.
From a general perspective of understanding your business, you cannot go far wrong by following the Strategyzer book Testing Business Ideas. It suggests a simple and clear way to represent the business hopes and dreams on a single page. We recommend this as foundational reading to anyone who wants to understand and be able to explain what your business does to others.
We also need to consider the question, given the evolution of business, can you survive in today’s changing times? Have you considered how you interact with your customers, your suppliers, and those affiliated with you?
But this essay is concerned about the more public-facing aspects of understanding your business.
There is now an expectation that we can interact 24/7 and that digital channels also deliver business value. They’re smarter, cost-effective, and trackable. These allow you to create efficiencies that automate your processes and minimise human interactions to only those which provide the most benefit/value.
With this change of ways of operating also comes a change in how we present ourselves online. While competition has increased, the information available about our competition has also increased. We can gather insightful information about them just as they might gather information about us.
We also know consumers are doing more research — they are comparing you and your competition and you need to stand out from the crowd. You need to up your game when it comes to your search engine optimisation (SEO) and visibility across the web — use good quality targeted content and let Google do the hard work to bring you customers.
Red routes
So when reviewing your business I’d recommend you start with your public face: what does the customer see when they search and interact with you? What are other websites saying about you? Just like finding out what people are saying about you by Googling your own name, you might Google your company’s name a few times a week to see what is being said.
Your next step would be to look at the ‘red route’ — the service or product in most demand. This is a way to understand your potential markets as well as those you’ve currently targeted. Speaking to current employees will help to fill part of this and the rest should be able to gather from looking at competitors.
As we continue through this paper you’ll be introduced to, and have the chance to use, different methods of research such as personas and profiles. You’ll be able to come back to red routes and look at ways you can diversify the business to expand into adjoining markets. You may use your existing customer base to springboard into the mix and potentially leapfrog the incumbents.
Understand where the value is
A company’s income derives from three scenarios of how customers pay them — getting someone to pay them for something new; continuing to pay them; or by getting someone else to pay them.
Start in these areas to identify how your business generates the most value (not profit!) for your customers.
Sales Functions
The first area of your business to explore is to look just at your normal sales function and considers how you distinguish your product from that of someone else in such a way that someone is willing to try you out. Is it a product or service which you can allow people to try before they buy, or where you can understand the reason people would want it, to such a degree that you can target their emotional reasoning? If you can allow them to try before they buy, then it can mix with the other two, but if you cannot and need to understand the emotional reasoning, then it must be considered independently as to allow effective targeting.
The second and third areas (pain points & Net promoter score), below, are intrinsically linked as both require consistent focus to ensure a good user experience. You need to show the customer the quality of the offering to such a degree that they fall out of a space of negativity — and area of ‘meah’ — into the area of ‘talking about it’ space. Strategyzer does a really good describing this in more detail in their value propositions design book. This will teach you how to make a ‘canvas’ to explain your value chain.
We will summarise some of the core elements of such a canvas here;
Pain points
You need to understand the value you’re presenting and whether it’s about generating gains or removing pains. A gain is a clear benefit that is looking to be satisfied — this can be emotional or tangible. If you give a donation to a charity, for example, this is an emotional gain as it gives you some social impact. You have a potential emotional gain if you start a gym membership. You might also offer tangible access to things, be they virtual or physical. You’re enabling customers to achieve something through the purchase: setting up an electricity supply and food shopping are two tangible services. Most services merge the boundaries.
Net Promoter Score
Many people use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine levels of pain and gain — which isn’t a bad approach. NPS splits your surveyed audience into three groups — detractors, passives and promoters. It is also skewed to account for human behaviour; it’s harder to get into the promoter group and you might not pay much attention towards the passive group.
For me, this is illustrated by a fairly typical conversation that might happen in a pub between friends. Let’s say the subject of which broadband provider you use came up in a conversation.
- detractors would be telling everyone about the bad experiences they’d had and how the service was not meeting their needs;
- the promoters would usually wait until the detractors had finished and would mention the company they had a good experience with, or that offered quality service;
- but the passives would stay quiet, not mentioning your company at all.
Our job is to find the value — find that point, the golden nugget which distinguishes us enough to move customers out of the detractors and into the promoters camp, so when our subject/sector comes up, we are at the front of their minds in a pub conversation.
With all three audience groups, you need to understand the value proposition so let's move onto that next.
Value proposition
As I’ve said, realistically, a value proposition fits into two camps: you’re either removing pain or providing a gain. Some people count one as more important than the other but we think that’s a matter of perspective. We use research to understand the significance of the activity — to that person, in that situation, at that moment of time.
As an example: Let’s say you’re in a period of financial distress and need a loan or some support in delaying or paying your bills. Can someone who has never experienced this understand the pressure you would be under in that situation? What information would you feel you need to gather to have a feeling of control? This is where the different research methods come in: we observe people’s behaviours in those situations or talk to people who have been through such events. We need to recruit them as test subjects for products designed for people in that situation.
When we’re creating value around the removal of pain we are removing things which makes someone feel or look bad. They’re usually the bad elements in life which when removed, resolved or mitigated result in a feeling of relief or happiness.
On the flip side, we have the gains, when products and services bring about a positive effect. Buying a new set of shoes can elicit delight; so can a good meal, online gambling or gaming. There are many elements which make up a ‘gain’. They may provide short term happiness, such as having a good coffee, or they may build a longer-term relationship such can be gained through purchasing a car or a house. Or they may bring longer-term negative effects, such as gambling.
In each case, to understand the audience and the product, we need to understand the situation, the motivation and the value three elements come together to create your value proposition — situation, motivation and value.
But this is missing a valuable component — the audience. To truly understand the value being proposed, we also need to understand the audience: who they are, how many of them are there and what category or segment of people do they fall within.
Mapping out the audience and the experience
Understand the audience and experience
There are three key methods that aid you to develop a comprehensive view of an audience:
- Personas construct pen portrait characters of target audiences
- Profiles add further information about what might attract or guide customers towards you
- Journey maps provide representations of how people experience your service through different interactions
Personas
A persona is a simple representation of the target audience. It shows what motivates them and what makes them different from other audiences. The easiest way to start is to start with a segment persona allowing you to begin to group your audiences based upon their purchasing/engagement behaviours. When doing so, give them a character and build a personality around them so you can understand the type of person who would buy X over Y.
These help but, if they are fairly basic, they only provide a small glimpse into the type of person you’re dealing with. There is a little controversy surrounding the benefit of personas and, whilst these should be treated as only representation of data about the customer, we do find they are a helpful way to ensure thinking about the customer is brought into the conversation when they might not otherwise be considered. Obviously, in a perfect world, everything will be fully customer-tested before release.
The example Persona below is a good starter example. It doesn’t show the customer motivations but it does show some of their needs and opinions. This puts a face to the person and gives a little backstory to help put you in their shoes.
Whilst this is a good place to start, it is often better to invest in a fuller understanding of your audience so that you also understand their motivations, the type of characteristics they show, their history etc. This will allow you to also build profiles that can help give you a competitive edge and allow you to better target your audiences.
Profiles
When creating a proper persona you get under the skin of your audience and, as such, you gain valuable insights into who they are and what they like and dislike. So whilst creating a persona to understand the audience helps you to think a little like them, the creation of a profile to go alongside that persona is a great added extra.
The Profile tells you how to target that persona — what they respond well to, what irritates them, what products would be of most interest and what else interests them.
For example, from a university perspective, you may find an engineering student who loves music but they’re only looking for information on extracurricular activities rather than a course. This is information that you can potentially use. Whilst you may pick some of this up from a persona, the profile highlights that you need to do X but not do Y as this will make them interested rather than push them away — all in a really easy to understand snapshot.
You will usually find that a persona is a public document, often shown on posters around an office or even sometimes online. A profile, however, being made up of more confidential information and something that would be of use to competitors, is more of a company document.
Journey mapping
Once you understand who your audience is then it makes sense to understand the journey(s) they are on and where you fit. Depending on the type of organisation you are, different approaches to journey mapping may be better suited to you. Here are a few examples.
- Comparative mapping
This is where you show a journey but then show a variation to part of that journey. These are usually used to show that a change won’t, or will, enhance an audience’s experience. These can illustrate multiple perspectives of a change within the same view, such as showing that the impact of a change would be minor to a lecturer’s journey but would provide a major enhancement for the students.
- Staged journey maps
These illustrate the stages which can be followed as well as the persona’s thoughts along the journey, usually following a time from left to right, and provide a clear storyline. Notes or comments can also be added on what could be improved to make this journey better for the particular customer.
Why would someone interact with your organisation at all? This can seem to be so obvious a point that your organisation might not state it explicitly. However, it’s often the case that people in services find this very difficult to define or they haven’t really thought about it.
For example, in the illustration journey provided above, the assumption is that Linda’s starting point is that she wants information about getting a grant. However, by thinking about the underlying purpose, from Linda’s perspective, we may construct a statement such as “Linda wants a career in IT and she understands that a government grant will provide the income she needs”. With this statement in mind, it’s possible to consider what type of help and guidance Linda is most likely to actually need.
Without this type of understanding, you won’t be able to join all the other dots necessary to get her to where she needs to be — quickly. It may turn out that the educated guesses people make around purpose is not entirely right, but it’s likely to be a reasonable starting point that can be improved later with a better understanding of the users. So don’t assume it’s finished just because it’s up on the wall — or that you need all the information to make a start. Don’t be scared to iterate and improve as you will bring about a better journey as a result.
- Simple journey map
These are exactly what they say on the tin. Each stage of the journey is drawn out and, for each of these, you identify what the customer is doing, thinking and feeling. Follow this up with an emotional temperature (in simple smiley form :-) :-| :-( allows you to see different customer reactions at each stage of their journey — and where improvements are likely to be needed.
From the below snapshot we can see there are a few stages which generate positive emotions, a few which are neutral and two where the experience has been negative. So these customers know what good looks like but also know what bad looks like.
Tip: if you have a few areas in the negative and some in the neutral, try to get as many as possible to neutral before getting them to positive. Experience is subjective so if you jump from a negative to a positive, this could make the negative feel worse — even though it’s the same negative as you experienced moving from a negative to neutral. Strange but it works.
- Process Maps
While process maps are not a journey map, they’re commonly misinterpreted as these as they show a series of activities to take place for an audience to get from the beginning to the end. However, they don’t provide an understanding of the audience or the customer’s perception as they move through the process.
Process maps are heavily used within service development and design and, if the whole end to end process is show, they identify all the points of customer/client interaction to achieve the end goal. They therefore provide a method of showing back to an organisation/service the extent to which processes serve the customer. They also explain how hard customers have to work to navigate around a company’s processes. We find they can provide great insights on what works and doesn’t in a system — which is very helpful for gathering wider knowledge on views and insights from within an organisation. Therefore we find them a good first-pass method, helping to work out experience points to be checked out in future research.
- Swim lanes
These are another useful process mapping tool as they help build a better understanding by showing the different actors involved in an audience’s experience — even if they do not clearly show the journey.
Service blueprints
Blueprints layer on the organisational functions integral to the customer experience. These provide a good balance for showing a customer’s experience alongside the technology which supports it. The key to a service blueprint is that time is always progressing — whether it is a millisecond or an hour. Time is time where a customer can be aware of activities being undertaken by the organisation or can be ignored. A service blueprint highlights these gaps in customer interaction and awareness which can show how efficient a service is or how long you're forcing a customer to wait without a signal.
The above sections provided the foundations for understanding your customers and users — existing or potential — and you are likely to need to return to these again and again to ensure that your business knowledge and information remains current and up to date.
Essay 2 — Working the Problem
Essay 3 — Understanding Impacts and Communication
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Author Bio
Throughout the last 20 years I have been designing and implementing experiences for people: from a family partnership running a children’s farm and hedgehog hospital in Devon; to working at both of the universities in Nottingham — the later working on a global solution; to British Gas and now at a leading consultancy. I’ve worked on IT service models, designed a superlab, implemented product delivery models and performed countless ‘art of the possible’ workshops — to stimulate free-thinking and break free of what we ‘know’ to be true.
But I would say for the first 10 years of my work supporting the user experience, I didn’t know this is what I was doing. It just felt like the right thing to do to come up with a good quality of service. Through my varied experience I have found that you can focus on the experience — but if that is the only point of focus, you won’t be able to make your business idea a reality.
A Special thanks to Jo Herlihy for her relentless support and determination exploring the thoughts and ideas through discussion and debate. — without your support, you would not be reading this today.
Also thank you to Bobby King for his editorial work as well as project management work pulling us all together.
Last but no means least is Ade Murphey who had the idea and network to bring us all together to support such a good cause.
