There were two topics in particular that I found most interesting at this year’s NetFinance conference in Miami:
Digital strategies to support the Omni-channel experience
Is Personal Finance Management (PFM) dead?
The first topic was a major focus of this year’s conference (two of three days devoted to Omni-Channel), so I found it rather ironic that the guest speaker, Chris Skinner, who was invited to talk on Day 1 of Omni-Channel has consistently stated “there is no such thing as a channel.” His belief is that in order to be a truly digital bank, which supports the 24*7 real-time world, the core of the bank needs to be a singular digital one.
With this digital core, a bank can deliver the real-time access to information that banking customers now desire. A digital core will also enable banks to provide a consistent experience regardless of how customers choose to access their bank (e.g., mobile, in-person, smart watch, etc.).
Having read Chris’ book: Digital Bank a few months ago, I agree. The outdated Omni-channel structure where legacy sits on top of legacy enables disruptors like Simple and Moven to quickly enter the arena of banking and make huge waves. The transition to a digital core sounds both costly and a tall mountain to climb, and it is, but it’s an evolution that needs to happen for banks to move past becoming a ‘mobile’ bank and towards becoming a digital bank.
The second topic, is PFM dead, was of particular interest to me because it aligned with some research I conducted in 2014. If your definition of PFM is tools by which customers can self-manage their spend and create budget goals themselves, then yes PFM is dead. But if you think about PFM as the usefulness that can be derived from this type of analysis, then no, PFM is NOT dead but very much alive.
Our competitive research has shown that banking consumers (those who are affluent and to a lesser extent all consumers) not only find this type of information useful, but they want their banks to be the provider of such insight. It is not enough for banks to simply present this data to consumers, but rather share this insight in both a contextually relevant and actionable way. Consumers want their bank to be a ‘trusted advisor’.
Banks have a wealth of information, historical and current behavior, to leverage that can enable them to better advise their customers of the behaviors and/or products and services they can benefit from to become more financially secure or achieve their goals. Making sure the message is goal oriented and clear for consumers to see how these actions will benefit them is critically important. However, the push to new products/services needs to be subtle and NOT the goal of PFM 2.x. The value of these types of insights can go a long way to instill loyalty, a more personalized touch, and a greater sense of financial confidence for your customers.
If you are interested in learning more about either of these topics, how to execute PFM 2.x, or are interested in how Key Lime Interactive can assist you in your transition to becoming a digital bank, please feel free to reach out to me.
The transition from Omni-channel to a digital core will happen faster than you think, so stay informed and ahead of the curve.
by Rick Damaso
Let’s face it. We have become a “Google it” society. We can answer almost any question in .00012 seconds (according to Google’s search results page) and get a pretty accurate response. So, before attending the LeanUX15 conference in Brooklyn, NY, I wondered what would Google’s response be for UX’s impact on modern day Systems Development Life Cycles (SDLCs)? Was it even possible to wrap terms like DevOps, Kanban, Lean or Agile into a neat package with a UX bow on top?
More importantly though, does this matter? Or were these terms just the buzzwords from the “The Valley” that larger companies all around were simply talking about emulating? Do new philosophies really only announce themselves when blue chip companies start adapting them?
To say it depends is a boring answer. But, of course, it depends. As a researcher, however, I wanted a straight and narrow answer.
I thought it would be prudent to first set the stage. Here are some quick snippets of what a quick Google Search will give you relating to these new SDLCs and UX. Agile- Developers focus on sustainable development. Sustainability is about good estimation, effective branching strategies for managing code, automated testing to protect quality, and continuous deployment to get fast feedback from users. DevOps- DevOps is a software development method that emphasizes communication, collaboration (information sharing and web service usage), integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other IT professionals. Kanban- Technique for managing a software development process in a highly efficient way. Producing software is a creative activity and therefore different to mass-production (Kanbans’s roots are in auto manufacturing) allowing us to apply the underlying mechanism for managing “production lines”. Lean UX- Lean UX is a set of principles that may be used to guide you to better, more desirable solutions for users. It’s not a process in which each tool is rigidly applied. Instead a group of ideals and principles to guide you in the design process.
So, that makes sense. If I was a designer sitting in a room with other designers, communication and putting this philosophy in practice shouldn’t be that difficult in theory. But, when you take these practices out of Silicon Valley and introduce it to the landscape of companies like Microsoft or Spotify with teams of designers on separate continents, it can make your head spin. How could you package what looks and feels like a startup mentality and scale it up effectively?
LeanUX15 took this challenge head on during a four day event in Brooklyn, NY. This conference was not all that different from any other, unless you consider flamingo colored windbreakers and Paul Bunion beards different. But, all “hipster” jokes aside, the usual laid-back vibes you find in the heart of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood was noticeably different. Product managers, Lead Designers, Software Engineers and representatives from some of the world’s most iconic brands were buzzing with excitement on bringing these results driven practices to companies everywhere.
As UX researchers, we encounter organizations along all stages of the UX maturity cycle and work on projects from formative to summative stages, so I was pleased to hear that UX research is taking a prominent role in these SDLCs. As opposed to traditional validation testing, we were now seeing rapid production of software married with UX researchers, architects and designers alike.
So what does this force us to do? To borrow from one of the themes of the conference, it means we are now in the age of Designing for Service, Not Just Software.
Here are some quick hits as to how UX is impacting development and strategic vision:
Visualize your work, in knowledge clusters. Ideas are then disseminated to users as solutions in terms of their problems.
With a UX lens, setting realistic Work In Progress limits for each stage of production is critical. Accounting for time slots within stages for user testing as opposed to piecing it together at the end.
Manage flow to clearly identify bottlenecks and accurate metrics. When infusing UX research into your design process, you are hedging against expensive “revamps” at the tail end of your SDLC.
Make Policies Explicit. Stick to your design, research and implementation policies! However, the #1 policy should always be, “If one of your policies does not work, change it”. By first following your process and analyzing what is wrong, you will be in a much better position to fix it.
Implement Feedback Loops. Communicating accurate measurement with your target market is key. Measurements need to be relevant to the timing of your project, not “at the end of each quarter” or when “you have time for it”.
Empowering yourself and your team to think- you are allowed to think and change processes. These SDLCs are not recipes, instead they are thought of as disciplines. Every question you ask yourself must be phrased as, “is this a driving force to consider design for servicing users or just designing software?”
The message for us as researchers when entering a new frontier of rapid development and testing can be wrapped up with a quote by Prof. Barbara Adam: “The message for research is unambiguously clear: learning is a process with a history and a future; it is thus not containable within observable moments. It entails a joining of life-worlds, a drawing on collective and individual past knowledge as well as projected vision, all of which are brought to bear on the interactive present.”
by Eugenio Santiago
For all you sports fans I’m sure you’ve seen and formed an opinion about the new ESPN responsive website. Most of the comments I’ve seen have been negative. In fact, most site visitors who have expressed their dislike for the redesigned site have done so in a very colorful way:
I spent a fair amount of time on Apr 2, 2014 reading through thousands of user comments and was only able to find three that were not negative:
I can’t really say they were positive, just not the common variety of “this is the worst thing EVER!” or “is this an April Fools joke?!”.
Now we all have heard the adages: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” or “people don’t like change”, but many of the comments were very specific in detailing WHY they disliked the new design. In short, it is different, but more importantly it forces them to change the way they normally interact with the site. No longer are they able to scan headlines, but now must scroll endlessly through entire stories that ESPN deemed newsworthy*. *This has been changed since the writing of this article. The homepage now features bi-lines of top stories instead of displaying them in full. Here’s an example of how site visitors indicated they typically interacted with the site: I would normally come to ESPN for a quick glance of the top stories then, as time permitted, would dig deeper into the topics / articles that are of highest interest to me.
What I read over and over in the user comments was that site visitors would normally use the homepage of ESPN primarily as a means to scan. Therein lies the problem with the new design. It’s much harder to do that now. The number of stories/headlines that are available, above the fold, has decreased.
Those in charge at ESPN have taken their 6+ months of user testing along with their business objectives and have decided that the homepage interaction should now be different. Did they underestimate or misinterpret their data and come away with a design that didn’t meet the needs of their site visitors? Or did they intentionally redesign the homepage in a way that would force users to interact with it differently?
As of the afternoon of April 3, 2014 the answer is clear, they goofed. Midway through my article I noticed a change on the homepage. The endless scroll of the homepage where you had to view full stories before advancing to the next was replaced to only include snippets of the main stories. Scanning is now much easier than its initial release, however, some may still not enjoy the endless scroll. While many site visitors commented the design was yet another example that ESPN didn’t “listen” to them, I’d have to say this is clear evidence of how responsive ESPN can be.
If this is any indication of things to come, I could see ESPN making continued updates to further refine the interaction, but how many customers did they alienate in the first two days of this new release? Since I started this story, not only have they changed how they display stories on the homepage, they have darkened the background from white to a gray to increase the contrast, which too, was another complaint site visitors had.
There still remains much to do. Some secondary pages still have the endless scroll from story to story (e.g., ESPN Cities blog pages), which is even more difficult to deal with when on your smartphone. Navigating horizontally through the site content once you go 1 or 2 levels deep is a major issue, and not every team page has the same layout (e.g., Boston Red Sox = New/Good, Boston Bruins = Old). These are some of the first enhancements that would go a long way to improving the user experience.
New Team Page Layout
Old Team Page Layout
Conducting user research is important, but what you take away from that research is much more important in our opinion. At KLI, we like to call that ‘being data informed rather than data driven.’ ESPN has shown they can be responsive and make on-the-fly changes that correct/improve the user experience, but are you as flexible?
We at KLI pride ourselves in making sure the insights you learn from research are in alignment with user needs and respect, not only what they do, but why they do it. Whether your user research need is at the concept/ideation stage, pre-launch phase, or post-launch phase, Key Lime Interactive is ideally suited to partner with you.
To learn more about what Key Lime Interactive offers and how we can help you with enhancing your user experience, contact us at: 305-809-0555.
One of the big themes of nearly every SXSW event we attended was personalization. Even events about the Future of TV had panelists talking about supplemental apps or making sure people could watch on the devices they chose. A news discussion with Dan Rather and Dan Pfeiffer also discussed how people consume news on the platforms of their choice, like Facebook and Twitter. Customers are looking for a more personal, customized experience in the place of their choice.
Predictive technology is making big strides in making these more curated experiences accurate. Facebook’s facial recognition technology is making use of their extensive data on user tagging so they can auto-tag your photographs when you post them. This technology may be more accurate than that of law enforcement. Netflix’s House of Cards was famously made by using data to understand that a political drama starring Kevin Spacey directed by David Fincher would be popular. An important consideration with using predictive data for customer recommendations is providing said data to customers.
Personalization is changing the landscape all over. I went to a talk by Karlie Kloss and Sara Wilson about technology and its role in Fashion Week. Models and editors can now deliver a more personal experience to a massive audience using Instagram and Twitter. They can let people into their lives remotely and enable fan interaction. Vogue recently had a cover featuring nine models with large Instagram followings.
Companies are integrating data into their operations in a variety of ways. Capital One is experimenting with personalized financial recommendations AND personalized offers / rewards recommendations in new apps Ideas and Level Money. Ideas provides recommendations for different types of activities in 4 beta markets: NYC, LA, Richmond, and DC. Level Money lets customers link accounts and program in budgets and receive alerts and content depending on their spending.
For television, companies are looking to make the experience more intimate for viewers. Some companies are experimenting with companion apps, especially in the UK. These might let viewers answer quizzes or play related games while watching. Other companies are trying to make promotions / advertisements more personal. For Game of Thrones Season 5, HBO ran a promotion called The Sight in which people would get text messages with video links that would disappear. The videos would be different for different users but communicate small snippets of information about the upcoming season in the guise of visions / dreams. In Spain, Canal + ran a promotion called 19 Reinos that turned all of Spain into an interactive Game of Thrones-themed game played via multiple different channels: Twitter, Facebook, brand websites, and physical stores. Customers all over the world are looking for targeted, personal experiences. User experience research is one way companies try to identify what kinds of experiences are most valuable to customers. Airbnb mentioned that when they redesigned their website, they made sure to keep the hosts involved in the process since their feedback was critical to its success. There was a fantastic talk by Etsy about how user experience feedback, both from users and from their clickstream data, was extremely valuable to their design process and their feature prioritization. Part of Capital One Labs’ approach to every project is a pilot study with 5-10k end users to understand how they’re using the product.
Stay tuned for more SXSW recaps in the coming months!
A few weeks ago, many of us woke to a media firestorm surrounding the question, ‘What color is that dress, gold and white or blue and black’? While many shrugged and said, ‘who really cares’, there were those of us who thought of it as a fun and interesting discussion to follow, especially those of us who find the topic of color perception to be fascinating. While in this instance it seems that the dress patterning and differences in lighting may have both played roles in the variant dress color, we should also consider color perception. The simple fact that much of how we experience color is subjective, that is to say, that color resides within the realm of human sensation. As it turns out, two things are certain; first, color vision is a complex topic and second, it is one that most of us don’t really think much about. Yes, we might delight in an especially lovely color or proclaim to others that of which is our favorite color but we rarely, if ever, wonder or question how it is that we ‘see’ color.
Many people, if they do give any thought to how we experience color, make the assumption that a color is a color is a color and that unless someone has a color vision deficiency such as color blindness, an object is seen as the same color by all. This is not the case: The way that we perceive color, like so many other facets of the human experience, is subjective (not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but as it turns out, so is color). Have you shopped with a friend and commented on a shirt or backpack, maybe referring to it as say ‘blue’ only to have your friend point out that you are clearly wrong, that the color of the item is obviously ‘purple’? If so, you have experienced firsthand that color is subjective and that people can and do experience the same item as being a different color or hue.
Upfront, let me say that color perception is far more complicated than will be discussed here, but an overly simplified explanation goes something like this (this assumes normal color vision):
Our visual system is most sensitive to that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum called visible radiation (or what we commonly refer to as ‘light’). This is approximately that portion of the spectrum sitting between 360nm – 760nm. If you think about the range of colors that you see when you pass a light beam through a prism, or when you witness a rainbow and that is the approximate range that we humans are visually equipped to see.
When ambient light is present, it strikes an object. Depending on the characteristics of that object, some of the spectrum’s light waves are absorbed by the object while some are not absorbed but, instead, reflected.
When we then view or see that object, the portion of visible light that is reflected off of the object enters the eye as a physical stimulus, where it quickly comes in contact with a small area at the back of the eye called the retina. The retina is tiny, but powerful. It is made up of specialized neurons called photoreceptors that are sensitive to light. Once the light enters the eye and comes in contact with these photoreceptors, the physical stimulus (light) begins a process that eventually triggers a series of neural signals that travel to the part of the brain responsible for vision and it is there that the brain attempts to process the neural patterns produced by this chain of events and make sense of them. Now, we are no longer experiencing the physical properties of the stimulus but are instead experiencing the ‘personal’ sensation of that experience. It is at this point in the process that the subjective or individual aspects of color perception begin and we can interpret the color of an object in different or individualistic ways. As is the case with any aspect of human experience, our perceptions personalize those experiences and they become a collective part of that which we jokingly say ‘is all in our head’.
There are so many factors and any one or any combination of several can influence our decision as we decide what color we believe an object to be. These factors can be past experiences, memories, expectations, age, education, culture – just to name a few. It is safe to say that we still do not know all there is to know about this fascinating aspect of the human experience.
So, now I will ask you again, ‘what color is that dress?’
by Phil McGuinness
In one of those rare and fine occurrences where work and play intersect, I found myself at the Games User Research Summit at the Sony Computer Entertainment facility in San Mateo on March 3rd, 2015. I had heard about the conference from another usability professional, and thought it would be interesting to see how usability practices are applied by professionals in the video gaming industry. Although we live in an age of specialization, I find that it’s important to step back from time to time and look at things from a different angle. What unique challenges are faced by usability professionals in video gaming? How do they approach similar tasks, like recruiting representative candidates and designing a product on a rapid time scale? These were the questions I wanted to answer, and a few of the talks that I attended shed light on these key topics.
One of the first talks of the day was held remotely by Bill Gardner from Xperienced points due to unforeseen circumstances. In an experience much like gaming online with friends across the country, Bill presented remotely via video, coordinating with the local staff to change slides when necessary. Bill spoke of an experience working on the game Swat 4. In the game, you control a SWAT team member from the first person, and perform missions using authentic SWAT tactics. The development team made an initial assumption about the player’s movement speed, keeping it low so as to mimic the controlled actions of a real life SWAT team. Maps were designed on a scale according to the movement speed as the game was developed.
When the team went into usability testing late in the development process, they found out that the testers wanted their players to move faster, that they felt sluggish and slow. However, at this point changing the movement speed would result in sweeping changes to the level design, and there was no time in the development process to make the adjustments. Had they tested earlier in the process, these changes would not have had such drastic implications. This is a good example of how testing early and throughout design can save resources and avoid pitfalls later on.
Figure 2: User Researchers and gaming fans watch Celia Hodent speak about Usability Heuristics in the main conference room.
Another talk that piqued my interest was a panel led by Klayton Vorlick from Sony, and with Karl Steiner, Nathan Cook, and Steven Shulmister. The panel touched on recruiting for niche markets, finding the right incentive, and fielding externally. Additionally, the panel covered challenges recruiting candidates in the video game industry and shared lessons that can apply to all industries. One problem faced by recruiters everywhere, is that when money is involved, people will do whatever they can to be in your study. One novel approach to this issue was touched on by Steven from VGMarket; when Steven’s company calls potential gamers, rather than asking a list of standard questions, they use recruiters who are knowledgeable about the subject to ask pointed questions that verify knowledge. For instance, when a user claims that they have played a specific game, recruiters will ask who their favorite character or boss battle was. This provides a checking process while screening that isn’t always applied in a traditional approach.
The final talk I’ll cover here was presented by Eric Hazan, regarding Games User Research practices at Ubisoft Montreal. Eric spoke of the methods used by Ubisoft’s team on the development of Far Cry 4, released in November 2014. Eric’s talk covered the diverse set of tools used when testing, which included eye tracking, skin sensors to measure sweat levels and register excitement, as well as telemetry in the form of tracking in-game actions and locating them on the 3-dimensional gaming map, and time stamping videos to observe those actions. Using Tableau software to sync these diverse sources of data, he showed numerous examples of how these tools helped make usability issues easy to identify and then report back to designers in the form of bite-sized videos. The multiple layers of data can be a lot to handle, but with intelligent use of software they can enrich the analysis of the player experience. His lesson can be applied across industry as well. Although we may not have the ability to perform eye tracking and other more costly methods with every study, we can use behavioral data captured from users as well as analytics data to help get a deeper picture of how users are interacting with the site. The more sources we can pull from and sync up, the more likely we’ll be able to identify key issues when testing.
The video game industry has grown extraordinarily in the past decade, and is now a $20 billion dollar industry in the United States alone. Learning from usability professionals in this field was a great experience, and it was especially valuable seeing how they attack usability problems specific to their field. I highly recommend the GUR summit to all usability professionals across all industries. There’s no doubt that we can all learn something from our colleagues in usability, as long as we take some time to step back and connect.
