BlogmyQuery – BMQ

User experience design isn’t just about building wireframes and Photoshop mock-ups. It extends to areas that you wouldn’t necessarily think are part of the discipline.

For example, your customer service department can have a huge impact on your website’s overall user experience. Similarly, the design of your user experience could have an awfully big effect on your customer service department. Of course, not all of your users will interact with the customer service department, but for those who do, their experience can improve or destroy the customer relationship.

Improving Customer Behavior

Consider the difference in customer perception between Zappos and Comcast. Customers routinely rave about one, while the other was attacked with a hammer. Clearly, there’s a difference in the way they deal with their users.

An excellent customer experience is a core value for Zappos

One of the biggest differences between the two is that Zappos appears to go out of its way to deliver great customer service long before a user ever has to deal with a representative. The differences aren’t just in the way they treat unhappy customers. Zappos makes a concerted effort to prevent customers from ever being unhappy in the first place. And that’s a good policy, because unhappy customers are expensive.

I spend a lot of time talking to customers, customer support reps and community managers. I’ve learned that there are three types of users who take up an inordinate amount of time and energy for customer service departments and cost far more money than they should. The great thing is that the behavior of many of these users can be improved or corrected with the right set of features and a proactive interaction design.

Let’s look at some of the folks who are costing you money and time. I’ll call them idiots, drama queens and scammers.

The Idiots

Customer service representatives spend a lot of time explaining obvious things to users.

Recently, I spoke with a community manager for a web-based marketplace where users can sell things to other users. The community manager was annoyed because he routinely had to explain to the sellers, “If you ship something to an overseas army base, it will take longer than it does to ship within the country.� He couldn’t believe that people didn’t know this. He thought they were idiots.

(Image: JD Hancock)

But are these sellers really idiots? Of course not! They might be geniuses who just don’t ship things on a regular basis, so they don’t know that an APO address indicates an army base that might be overseas. As far as the seller is concerned, they’re shipping to a regular domestic address and now have to wait almost a month to get paid.

In fact, a huge proportion of the time, the “stupid questions� that customer service representatives get over and over aren’t stupid at all. They’re opportunities to improve the user experience design.

If you’re getting the same question, it probably means you’ve made an incorrect assumption about information that a typical user is likely to have. In our example, the company was mistakenly assuming that everyone knows what an APO address is and that delivering a product to one could take up to a month.

How to Turn Idiots Into Geniuses

Spend some time with your customer service people, and find out what questions are being asked repeatedly. Figure out a way to answer those questions within the interface so that someone doesn’t get to the point of having to contact support.

In our example, the company could add a small note to all APO addresses, pointing out to sellers before they ship that the address is for an army base and warning that delivery could be significantly delayed. It probably won’t stop every inquiry they get about this problem, but it should help just by letting people know what to expect.

The Drama Queens

Too often, interactions with certain customers blow up far more quickly than service reps expect. As soon as their special requests are denied, some users will rant and rave and threaten legal action, while others calmly accept the fact that rules apply to everyone equally.

(Image: F. C. Photography)

If you talk to customer service reps or community managers, they could probably name a dozen drama queens off the top of their heads. And they won’t look happy doing it either. You’ll see eye rolling and head shaking.

One client complained that every time they released a new feature or a significant change, their power users would blow up and start screaming and yelling about how the company was trying to ruin their lives. It got to the point that the product manager was terrified of releasing anything new for fear of angering customers.

The saddest part of all of this is that the people who cared the most about the product were the ones who were complaining the loudest when things didn’t go their way.

How to Turn Drama Queens Into Advocates

You might think that you couldn’t do much as a user experience designer to calm drama queens, but you’d be wrong.

One of the main reasons why people escalate to that point is that they feel they’re being ignored. In fact, one of the most common reasons that customers leave is that they believe the company doesn’t care about them. Your job is to make them feel that their opinions are important and that they’re being heard.

One way to do this is to provide a good venue for them to express their opinions. Unmoderated or lightly moderated forums where they will talk to other people who are also unhappy are not good venues. One-on-one conversations with staff are the best, but talking to every unhappy customer is obviously not always possible.

A client of mine had a great way to deal with this problem. The company needed to recruit people for user research. Meanwhile, a number of people were writing in with complaints. So, the company frequently asked those people to participate in user research sessions. Two birds!

You’d think that the users’ responses would be skewed because they were already unhappy, but this could be easily controlled in the sessions. The complainers were much easier to book as research participants because they had initiated the contact, and they always ended the sessions much happier for having been asked their opinions.

Another important way to minimize drama is to involve important customers early on in design changes. Sure, power users often push back when you make a major design change, but that push is significantly softer when the change is an obvious improvement and people know what to expect and feel that their opinions have been taken into account.

You can keep the community on your side by getting their feedback during the design process and keeping them in the loop on the progress of changes. Allowing them to opt into changes and to give early feedback can really improve your relationship.

Even more importantly, involving your most important users early on will significantly improve the design of the feature, since you’ll be able to anticipate any complaints and edge cases.

The Scammers

Scammers are both the hardest and the easiest group for customer service reps to deal with.

They’re tough, because determining whether someone is a scammer or just an idiot or drama queen is not always easy. They’re easy, because once you know for sure that someone is a scammer, the correct thing to do is ban them immediately and never let them come back.

The biggest problem is that misidentifying legitimate users as scammers can have an incredibly negative impact on your business. No one likes being accused of something they didn’t do.

Also, in a social environment, the behavior of scammers can have a negative effect on other users. Think of fraudulent buyers and sellers on eBay or the highly publicized assaults by people who advertise on Craigslist.

How to Turn Scammers Into Good Citizens

Sorry, you can’t! What you can do is quickly identify the bad actors and get them off your website as quickly as possible before they negatively affect your good customers.

Enlisting the help of the community in policing can make this process much faster and more effective. Give users tools, such as flagging and comments, to report and protect themselves from scammers. Enlist community moderators to interact regularly with other members and alert you early on when someone seems to be doing something sketchy.

Also, give customer service reps tools to track the behavior of individual users so that they can resolve disputes quickly and appropriately, without a lot of “He said/She said.�

Other Problem Customers

Obviously, these three aren’t the only types of users that your customer service people will deal with. There will be the normal folks who have a genuine problem with your service or who find bugs. There will be people who want to cancel a subscription or ask a question about a policy.

But idiots, drama queens and scammers are the ones who will take up a disproportionate amount of your time and energy. They are the ones who can sap the spirit from your customer service reps and make them less able to deal with other problems.

Luckily, they also have the kinds of problems that you can address in your user interface. By providing the right information at the right time and enabling customers to report bad behavior, you can dramatically lower the amount of time you spend dealing with problem users.

And that means you’ll have a lot more time to deliver fabulous service to your best customers!

(al)(fi)

© Laura Klein for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Metrics can be a touchy subject in design. When I say things like, “Designers should embrace A/B testing� or “Metrics can improve design,� I often hear concerns.

Many designers tell me they feel that metrics displace creativity or create a paint-by-numbers scenario. They don’t want their training and intuition to be overruled by what a chart says a link color should be.

These are valid concerns, if your company thinks it can replace design with metrics. But if you use them correctly, metrics can vastly improve design and make you an even better designer.

First, when I talk about metrics, I’m talking about making use of a couple of very specific tools:

• User analytics,
• A/B or multivariate testing.

User analytics are what you might get from Google Analytics, KISSmetrics or Mixpanel. They tell you things like which pages users have viewed the most, which call-to-action buttons they’ve clicked, and how many tasks they’ve performed while using your product. They can also show you where people drop out of critical flows, such as registration and purchasing.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Infographic by KISSmetrics

A/B and multivariate testing involve looking at how changes affect key metrics such as revenue and retention. When you run an A/B test on a change, you’re comparing user behavior with the new design to user behavior with the old design in order to answer the rather important question of “Which design caused the user to do more of what I wanted and less of what I didn’t want?�

By incorporating analytics and A/B testing into their process, designers can not only improve the business outcomes of their redesign projects, but also become better at design.

Metrics Tell You Where Design Is Needed Most

Unless your resources are unlimited, prioritizing design changes can be tricky. For example, if you’re working on an e-commerce website, who’s to say whether optimizing the sign-up flow is more important than revamping the check-out flow or rebuilding a product page or simplifying the navigation? Any of these could be pretty good ideas.

Metrics are fabulous for making these decisions. For example, analytics can show exactly how much of a drop-off your shopping cart is getting. It can show you precisely how many visitors aren’t converting into signed-in users. It can pinpoint how many people bounce right off of product pages.

Metrics tell you where your biggest business problems really are, so that you can use design to fix them.

Of course, metrics can’t tell you how to actually fix the problems. Your job as a designer is to learn why users might be having problems in certain areas of your product and come up with brilliant solutions.

How Should You Use This?

When deciding on your highest design priority, examine your product’s analytics to identify where your biggest problems are.

Metrics Help You Track Real User Behavior

How many times have you been designing and thought something like, “I wonder how many products people have in their shopping carts on average when they drop out?� Or, “What is the average number of friends a user has in such-and-such a social network?�

(Image: Adriano Gasparri)

Answers to questions like these can have an enormous impact on the way you design. After all, depending on whether users have no more than a few friends or they tend to have more than a hundred friends, the interaction for selecting from a list can be quite different.

Metrics and analytics free the designer from having to guess the answers to questions like these.

Again, knowing the answers doesn’t tell you how to design the product, but it does give you a lot more insight into the real problems you’re trying to solve.

How Should You Use This?

The next time you’re debating with someone about where users are dropping out of a flow or how many users are watching a video tutorial, remember that these questions are easily answered by metrics.

Or if you’re trying to decide what sort of widget to use to access some data, remember that the right solution often depends on how much data there will be, and that question is entirely answerable as well.

Metrics Tell You Which Changes Are Most Effective

Let’s be clear. Your job as a designer is to improve the customer experience in some measurable way, right? If you do a complete redesign, and every designer you know loves it, and it wins awards from experts, but every single one of your users hates it and leaves and stops giving you money, then that’s a failure for the company.

Design changes — like code changes, marketing changes and customer service changes — should eventually make a company more money, because that’s how the company will stay in business and pay the designer’s salary.

With metrics, you can learn exactly what sort of an effect your changes will have on the numbers you care about.

Let’s say you’ve been obsessing over the navigation of your website. You feel it’s confusing for users and is frustrating them and causing them to leave. So, you revamp the navigation and run an A/B test so that half of users see the old version and half see the new one.

After a few thousand people have seen both versions, you have a very good idea whether changing the navigation has resulted in good things like increased revenue, time on site, and the number of users who would recommend you to a friend.

Of course, not every change you make will have a direct and significant impact on revenue. But knowing that any major change you make is having a measurable influence on the things you care about is very nice.

As a bonus, once you’ve made a few demonstrable improvements to revenue, asking for a raise or for more design resources becomes a lot easier.

How Should You Use This?

Get into the habit of A/B testing your design changes.

Obviously, you can make a few changes that you know will negatively affect certain metrics because they’re part of a larger strategy. But at some point you need to put a stake in the ground and say, “If we make the following design changes, then important metrics such as revenue and retention will improve.�

If you test all of your design changes against the status quo, you should eventually see those key metrics go up as a result of your work.

Metrics Give You The Freedom To Take Design Risks

Big design changes can involve big risks. After all, if what you’re proposing has the potential to vastly increase revenue, then it also has the potential to vastly decrease revenue.

Knowing that all of your changes will be A/B tested gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to try new and potentially dangerous things. If they pay off, you’ll find out immediately. If they cause problems, you can identify and fix them quickly.

You no longer need to worry that some change you’ve made will mysteriously ruin everything. And if you weren’t worried about that before, you probably should have been, because even very small design and text changes can have an enormous impact on user behavior.

How Should You Use This?

Be bold! The next time you’re inclined not to make an important change because you’re concerned it might have a negative impact, go ahead and try it. Roll the change out to 10% of your users, and get real data on whether it helps or hurts the product.

What Metrics Won’t Do

A lot of the push-back I get on measuring design is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of A/B testing and analytics. Some designers hear about Google testing dozens of shades of blue, and they feel that design shouldn’t be reduced to that level. After all, design is more than about picking a shade of blue.

Which blue is better? (Image: visualpanic)

In fact, metrics are terrible for a lot of things that design does well. For example, metrics can’t tell you how exactly to improve a design. They can only tell you whether your design is better or worse than another. They can tell you exactly what users are doing, but they can’t tell you why they’re doing it or how to make them stop.

Metrics can be an incredibly powerful tool, but they don’t replace design or make it irrelevant. In the end, the designers are still the ones making the decisions. They’re just making them with better information.

Want To Get Started?

• “Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metricsâ€�
• “5 Big Mistakes People Make When Analyzing User Dataâ€�
• “7 A/B Testing Resources for Start-Ups and Solo Developersâ€�

(al)

© Laura Klein for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

I read a lot of design articles about best practices for improving the flow of sign-up forms. Most of these articles offer great advice, such as minimizing the number of steps, asking for as little information up front as possible, and providing clear feedback on the status of the user’s data.

If you’re creating a sign-up form, you could do worse than to follow all of these guidelines. On the other hand, you could do a lot better.

Design guidelines aren’t one size fits all. Sometimes you can improve a process by breaking a few rules. The trick is knowing which rules to break for a particular project.

Recently, I did a project for Outright, a product aimed at simplifying accounting and tax preparation for small businesses. The product automates accounting tasks for sole proprietors and online product sellers so that they don’t have to do things like categorize receipts and generate profit and loss reports.

To get the most value out of the product, new users have to hook up one or more of their own accounts, so that their business finances can be automated.

The Original Design Rules

When first designing its user set-up process, Outright followed some very reasonable design rules:

• It kept the process to one page in order to reduce the number of steps users had to go through.
• It allowed new users to easily quit the set-up process, so that they could explore the interface before committing.
• It provided constant feedback about the status of each account as it was being updated.

Then we did a redesign, broke every single one of those rules and decreased the cancellation rate by 20%.

Why did breaking those rules help in this particular case? Let’s look at them one at a time.

Rule #1: Reduce The Number Of Screens In The Set-Up Process

This rule is normally great, because requiring a lot of unnecessary clicks just slows the user down as they try to sign up for your product. But in some cases, combining too many different concepts onto one screen can complicate things.

In the old version of the application, the user saw only one search box, in which they could enter the name of a bank, a credit card or one of several e-commerce partners, such as eBay.

Putting everything on one screen can be overwhelming.

During the preliminary user research, we found that this was a little overwhelming for new users. It made them wonder which piece of information they should add first. There was occasionally a rather dramatic pause as they tried to process what was being asked of them.

By breaking the process down into three explicit steps, we freed users from having to decide which information to input at any point. This made the whole process seem much simpler, because users always knew what was expected of them.

Keeping each screen focused reduced confusion.

Of course, we have not required users to input something at every step. They can skip ahead if, for example, they don’t have a business credit card. But still, the only decision they ever have to make is whether to enter the requested information.

When to break rule #1: Adding steps can simplify the experience, if it makes each individual step very clear.

Rule #2: Allow Users To Test Drive Before Making Them Submit Data

For many products, allowing users to play around before entering any information is a great tactic.

Think of Yelp. I must have read hundreds of reviews before getting around to reviewing anything myself. The same goes for online shopping; I’ll often visit a website several times before making a purchase.

But other products don’t make much sense without personalized content. Social networks, for example, are significantly more useful once you connect with friends on them.

This is certainly true with Outright. The experience for users who plug into a financial data source is so much better than for users who don’t. Letting people test drive the product before importing their account information simply doesn’t make sense. Users won’t understand the value of the product until they see and manipulate their own data.

When to break rule #2: While letting people explore before committing can be useful for some types of products, assess whether your product can be fully understood without personalized content.

Rule #3: Always Provide Feedback On Status

Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to import or export data and you don’t get any feedback on how long it will take or whether any errors have occurred? Everyone does. That’s why Outright kept users informed as their data was being imported.

Providing too much feedback caused confusion.

The problem was, when users imported data from more than one account, the status messages started cluttering up the screen. This distracted them from adding more accounts.

Now, instead of showing constant feedback about the status of each data import, we simply let users know that they have successfully connected to their data source and then move them on. If there are errors, we provide a place at the end of the process for the user to recover.

Giving just enough feedback helps users move on.

When to break rule #3: Feedback is often good, but too much can overwhelm users, especially if it distracts them from moving on to the next task. If the user can’t do anything with the feedback or if moving on is more important, consider not giving constant status updates.

Rules That We Did Follow

Of course, we didn’t break every rule. Rules exist for a reason. We followed a lot of best practices, with great results. For example:

• We made sure to have a single, clear, primary call to action for each screen, so that users always know what they’re supposed to do.
• We kept each screen focused on a single task.
• We made sure that users always know which step of the process they’re on and how many more they have left to go.

I’d love to be able to say that breaking certain rules and following certain others will improve the sign-up flow of your product, but design isn’t like that. You need to figure out which rules apply to your product and users. And once you’ve figured that out, don’t be afraid to break a few of the ones that don’t apply, just to see if that makes things better.

Cover image credit: Ferrell McCollough
(al)

© Laura Klein for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

I read a lot of design articles about best practices for improving the flow of sign-up forms. Most of these articles offer great advice, such as minimizing the number of steps, asking for as little information up front as possible, and providing clear feedback on the status of the user’s data.

If you’re creating a sign-up form, you could do worse than to follow all of these guidelines. On the other hand, you could do a lot better.

Design guidelines aren’t one size fits all. Sometimes you can improve a process by breaking a few rules. The trick is knowing which rules to break for a particular project.

Recently, I did a project for Outright, a product aimed at simplifying accounting and tax preparation for small businesses. The product automates accounting tasks for sole proprietors and online product sellers so that they don’t have to do things like categorize receipts and generate profit and loss reports.

To get the most value out of the product, new users have to hook up one or more of their own accounts, so that their business finances can be automated.

The Original Design Rules

When first designing its user set-up process, Outright followed some very reasonable design rules:

• It kept the process to one page in order to reduce the number of steps users had to go through.
• It allowed new users to easily quit the set-up process, so that they could explore the interface before committing.
• It provided constant feedback about the status of each account as it was being updated.

Then we did a redesign, broke every single one of those rules and decreased the cancellation rate by 20%.

Why did breaking those rules help in this particular case? Let’s look at them one at a time.

Rule #1: Reduce The Number Of Screens In The Set-Up Process

This rule is normally great, because requiring a lot of unnecessary clicks just slows the user down as they try to sign up for your product. But in some cases, combining too many different concepts onto one screen can complicate things.

In the old version of the application, the user saw only one search box, in which they could enter the name of a bank, a credit card or one of several e-commerce partners, such as eBay.

Putting everything on one screen can be overwhelming.

During the preliminary user research, we found that this was a little overwhelming for new users. It made them wonder which piece of information they should add first. There was occasionally a rather dramatic pause as they tried to process what was being asked of them.

By breaking the process down into three explicit steps, we freed users from having to decide which information to input at any point. This made the whole process seem much simpler, because users always knew what was expected of them.

Keeping each screen focused reduced confusion.

Of course, we have not required users to input something at every step. They can skip ahead if, for example, they don’t have a business credit card. But still, the only decision they ever have to make is whether to enter the requested information.

When to break rule #1: Adding steps can simplify the experience, if it makes each individual step very clear.

Rule #2: Allow Users To Test Drive Before Making Them Submit Data

For many products, allowing users to play around before entering any information is a great tactic.

Think of Yelp. I must have read hundreds of reviews before getting around to reviewing anything myself. The same goes for online shopping; I’ll often visit a website several times before making a purchase.

But other products don’t make much sense without personalized content. Social networks, for example, are significantly more useful once you connect with friends on them.

This is certainly true with Outright. The experience for users who plug into a financial data source is so much better than for users who don’t. Letting people test drive the product before importing their account information simply doesn’t make sense. Users won’t understand the value of the product until they see and manipulate their own data.

When to break rule #2: While letting people explore before committing can be useful for some types of products, assess whether your product can be fully understood without personalized content.

Rule #3: Always Provide Feedback On Status

Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to import or export data and you don’t get any feedback on how long it will take or whether any errors have occurred? Everyone does. That’s why Outright kept users informed as their data was being imported.

Providing too much feedback caused confusion.

The problem was, when users imported data from more than one account, the status messages started cluttering up the screen. This distracted them from adding more accounts.

Now, instead of showing constant feedback about the status of each data import, we simply let users know that they have successfully connected to their data source and then move them on. If there are errors, we provide a place at the end of the process for the user to recover.

Giving just enough feedback helps users move on.

When to break rule #3: Feedback is often good, but too much can overwhelm users, especially if it distracts them from moving on to the next task. If the user can’t do anything with the feedback or if moving on is more important, consider not giving constant status updates.

Rules That We Did Follow

Of course, we didn’t break every rule. Rules exist for a reason. We followed a lot of best practices, with great results. For example:

• We made sure to have a single, clear, primary call to action for each screen, so that users always know what they’re supposed to do.
• We kept each screen focused on a single task.
• We made sure that users always know which step of the process they’re on and how many more they have left to go.

I’d love to be able to say that breaking certain rules and following certain others will improve the sign-up flow of your product, but design isn’t like that. You need to figure out which rules apply to your product and users. And once you’ve figured that out, don’t be afraid to break a few of the ones that don’t apply, just to see if that makes things better.

Cover image credit: Ferrell McCollough
(al)

© Laura Klein for Smashing Magazine, 2011.