Journal tags: brands

Following on from Jeffrey and Margot, the third talk in the morning’s curated content at An Event Apart Seattle is from Sarah Parmenter. Her talk is Designing for Personalities. Here’s the description:

Just as our designs today must accommodate differences of gender, cultural background, and other factors, it’s time to create apps, websites, and internal processes that account for still another strand of human diversity: our very different personality types.

In this new presentation, Sarah shares real-life case studies demonstrating how businesses and organizations large and small are learning to adjust the thinking behind their websites and processes to account for the wishes, needs, and comfort levels of all kinds of people.

We know that the world is full of different conventions—currency, measuring systems, and more—and our web forms address these differences. Let’s do the same for the emotional and psychological assumptions behind our customer profiles. Let’s learn to design for a palette of different personalities.

I’m going to do my best to write down some of what she says…

Sarah works with Adobe, and at a gathering last year, she ended up chatting with some of her co-workers about ancestry, for some reason. She mentioned that she had French and Norwegian roots. The French part is evident in her surname: parmentier means potato farmer. So Sarah did a DNA test. It turned out that Sarah had no French or Norwegian roots—everything in her ancestry came from within an eighty mile radius of her home. It was scary how much she strongly believed for years in something that just wasn’t true.

It’s like that on the web. There are things we do because lots of people do them, but that doesn’t mean they work. Many websites and digital processes are broken and it’s down to us to fix it.

With traditional personas, we make an awful lot of assumptions about people. Have a look at facebook.com/ads/preferences. See just how easy it is for computers to make startling amounts of assumptions.

The other problem with personas is that they are amalgamations. But there’s no such thing as an average costumer. The Microsoft design team add much more context so that they can design for real people in real situations.

Designing for personas only takes care of a fraction of the work we need to do. When we add in another layer of life getting in the way, and a layer of how someone is feeling, you’ve a medley of UX issues that need solving.

The problem is that personality traits aren’t static. They evolve with context. Personas are contextual but static. What we should really be doing is creating the most desirable experience for the user, and we can only do that by empowering them, as Margot also said. We need to give our users control.

If there were such controls, Sarah would use them to reduce motion on websites. She suffers from motion sickness and some websites literally make her sick. There is a prefers-reduced-motion media query but so far only Safari and Firefox support it. It’s hard to believe that we haven’t been doing this already. This stuff seems so obvious in hindsight.

Sarah asks who in the room are introverts. People raise their hands (which seems like quite an extroverted thing to do).

Now Sarah brings up the Meyers-Briggs test, a piece of pseudoscientic bollocks. Sarah is INFJ—introversion, intuition, feeling, judging. Weird flex, but okay.

Introverts will patiently seek out complex UX patterns if it aligns with their levels of comfort. These are people who would rather do anything rather than speak to someone on the phone. An introvert figured out that if you sat on the Virgin Atlantic homepage long enough, a live chat will pop up after twenty minutes.

Apple is great for introverts. They don’t bury their chat options (unlike Amazon). Remember, introverts are a third of the population.

Users will begin to value those applications and services that bother them the least, respect their privacy, and allow them a certain level of control.

Let’s talk about designing compassionate products.

What we’re asking of people in time-critical or exceptionally personal situations is for them to have the foresight to turn on incognito mode. Everyone has an urban legend horror story about cookies following them around the web. Cookies can seem like a smart marketing solution until context lets them down.

Sarah’s best friend got pregnant. She started excitedly clicking around the web looking for pregnancy-related products. She sadly lost the baby. Sarah explained to her how to use a cookie eraser. Her friend that she was joking. Sarah showed her how to clean her search history. But if you’ve liked and subscribed a bunch of things while you’re excited, it’s not that easy—when the worst happens—to think back on everything you did.

There’s an app that’s not in the US. It’s a menstrual cycle and fertility tracking app. It captures a lot of data. At the point when Sarah’s friend lost her baby, this change was caught by the app. The message she got was lacking in empathy. It was more like market research than a compassionate message. At a time when they should’ve been thinking of the mindset of their user, they were focused on getting data. No one caught this when the app was being designed.

The entire user experience of our websites and apps is going to rely on how empathetic we are.

We don’t always save things to reminisce; we save to give us the option to remember. We can currently favourite a photograph or flag as inapropriate. It would be nice to simply save something to a memory vault.

Bloom and Wild is a company in the UK. They send nice mailbox flowers. On March 5th last year, Sarah sent an email to the CEO of Bloom and Wild. She had just received a mailout about mother’s day after her mother passed away. Was their no way of opting out of receiving mother’s day emails without unsubscribing completely?

Well, yesterday they finally implemented it! Bloom and Wild have been overwhelmed by the positive response.

For those of us trying to make the web a better place, sometimes it can be as simple as reaching out to point out what companies could be doing better. And sometimes, just sometimes, they listen.

Also, read Design For Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher.

As standard, we should be giving users end-to-end control over how they interact with us.

Sarah wants to talk about designing a personal UX journey. For one of her clients, Sarah dip-sampled hundreds of existing customers. There were gaps in the customer journey. They think that what was happening was the company was getting very aggressive after initial interaction—they were phoning customers. Sarah and her team started researching this. That made them unpopular with other parts of the company. Sarah gave her team Groucho Marx glasses whenever they had to go and ask people uncomfortable questions.

Sarah’s team went on a remarketing effort. They sent an email to people who were in the gap between booking an appointment and making a purchase. They asked the users what their preferences were for contacting them. The company didn’t think they were doing anything wrong but this research showed that 76% of people prefered to avoid phone calls.

They asked a few more questions. If you ask questions, there has to be value in it for the users. Sarah got the budget for some gift cards. They got feedback that many people don’t like taking calls, especially when they’re at work. The best: “I’m an intorvert. I hate calls. Sorry.”

The customer feedback was very, very clear. Even though this would take a lot of money to fix, it was crucial to fix it. Being agile was crucial.

Then they looked at a different (shorter) gap in the customer journey. It was clear that an online booking service was desirable. They made a product quickly that booked more appointments in ten days than had previously been booked in a month by sales agents.

They also made a live chat system. You see a very slow roll-out. At the beginning, it has all new customers. After a while, people return with more questions.

The mistake they made was having a tech-savvy team with multiple browser windows open. That’s not how the customer service people operate. They usually deal with people one on one. So they were happy to leave people waiting on live chat for twenty or twenty five minutes, and of course that was far too long. So when you’re adding in a new system like this, think about key performance indicators that you want to go along with it e.g. live chat must have a response within five minutes.

There’s also a long tail of conversion. Sometimes the sales cycle is very lengthy. They decided to give users the ability to select which product they wanted and switch options on and off. It was all about giving the power back to the user. This was a phenomenal change for the company. They were able to completely change the customer journey and reduce those big gaps. They went from a cycle of fourteen weeks to seven days. They did that by handing the power back to the user.

Sarah’s question for the audience is: What is stopping your user completing your cycle? This can be very difficult. You might have to do horrible things to validate a concept. It’s okay. We’re all perfectionists, but sometimes you have to use quick’n’dirty code to achieve your goal. If the end goal is we’re able to say “hey, this thing worked!” then we can go back and do it properly.

To recap:

• Respect privacy and build in a personal level of UX adjustment into every product.
• Outlier data can create superfans of your product.
• Build the most empathetic experience that you can.

The second talk of the first day of An Event Apart Seattle is from Margot Bloomstein. She’ll be speaking about Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World. The talk description reads:

Mass media and our most cynical memes say we live in a post-fact era. So who can we trust—and how do our users invest their trust? Expert opinions are a thing of the past; we favor user reviews from “people like us” whether we’re planning a meal or prioritizing a newsfeed. But as our filter bubbles burst, consumers and citizens alike turn inward for the truth. By designing for empowerment, the smartest organizations meet them there.

We must empower our audiences to earn their trust—not the other way around—and our tactical choices in content and design can fuel empowerment. Margot will walk you through examples from retail, publishing, government, and other industries to detail what you can do to meet unprecedented problems in information consumption. Learn how voice, volume, and vulnerability can inform your design and content strategy to earn the trust of your users. We’ll ask the tough questions: How do brands develop rapport when audiences let emotion cloud logic? Can you design around cultural predisposition to improve public safety? And how do voice and vulnerability go beyond buzzwords and into broader corporate strategy? Learn how these questions can drive design choices in organizations of any size and industry—and discover how your choices can empower users and rebuild our very sense of trust itself.

I’m sitting in the audience, trying to write down the gist of what she’s saying…

She begins by thanking us for joining her to confront some big problems. About ten years ago, A List Apart was the first publication to publish a piece of hers. It had excellent editors—Carolyn, Erin, and so on. The web was a lot smaller ten years ago. Our problems are bigger now. Our responsibilities are bigger now. But our opportunities are bigger now too.

Margot takes us back to 1961. The Twilight Zone aired an episode called The Mirror. We’re in South America where a stealthy band are working to take over the government. The rebels confront the leader. He shares a secret with them. He shows them a mirror that reveals his enemies. The revolution is successful. The rebels assume power. The rebel leader starts to use the same oppressive techniques as his predecessor. One day he says in his magic mirror the same group of friends that he worked with to assume power. Now they’re working to depose him, according to the mirror. He rounds them up and has them killed. One day he sees himself in the mirror. He smashes the mirror with his gun. He is incredibly angry. A priest walking past the door hears a commotion. The priest hears a gunshot. Entering the room, he sees the rebel leader dead on the ground with the gun in his hand.

We look to see ourselves. We look to see the truth. We hope the images coincide.

When our users see themselves, and then see the world around them, the images don’t coincide.

Internal truths trump external facts.

We used to place trust in brands. Now we’ve knocked them off the pedestal, or they’ve knocked themselves off the pedestal. They’ve been shady. Creeping inconsistencies. Departments of government are exhorting people not to trust external sources. It’s gaslighting. The blowback of gaslighting is broad. It effects us. An insidious scepticism—of journalism, of politics, of brands. This is our problem now.

To regain the trust of our audiences, we must empower them.

Why now? Maybe some of this does fall on our recent history. We punish politicians for flip-flopping and yet now Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump simply deny reality, completely contradicting their previous positions. The flip-flopping doesn’t matter. If you were a Trump supporter before, you continued to support him. No amount of information would cause you to change your mind.

Inconsistency erodes our ability to evaluate and trust. In some media circles, coached scepticism, false equivalency, and rampant air quotes all work to erode consensus. It offers us a cosy echo chamber. It’s comforting. It’s the journalism of affirmation. But our ability to evaluate information for ourselves suffers. Again, that’s gaslighting.

You can find media that bolsters your existing opinions. It’s a strange space that focuses more on hiding information, while claiming to be unbiased. It works to separate the listener, viewer, and reader from their own lived experiences. If you work in public services, this effects you.

Do we get comfortable in our faith, or confidentally test our beliefs through education?

Marketing relies on us re-evaluating our choices. Now we’ve turned away from the old arbiters of experts. We’ve moved from expertise to homophily—only listening to people like us. But people have recently become aware of their own filter bubbles. So people turn inward to narcissism. If you can’t trust anyone, you can only turn inward. But that’s when we see the effects of a poor information diet. We don’t know what objective journalism looks like any more. Our analytic skills are suffering as a result. Our ability to trust external sources of expertise suffers.

Inconsistency undermines trust—externally and internally. People turn inward and wonder if they can even trust their own perceptions any more. You might raise an eyebrow when a politician plays fast and loose with the truth, or a brand does something shady.

We look for consistency with our own perceptions. Does this fit with what I know? Does this make me feel good? Does this brand make me feel good about myself? It’s tied to identity. There’s a cycle of deliberation and validation. We’re validating against our own worldview. Referencing Jeffrey’s talk, Margot says that giving people time to slow down helps them evaluate and validate. But there’s a self-perpetuating cycle of belief and validation. Jamelle Bouie from Slate says:

We adopt facts based on our identities.

How we form our beliefs affects our reality more than what we already believe. Cultural predisposition is what give us our confirmation bias.

Say you’re skeptical of big pharma. You put the needs of your family above the advice of medical experts. You deny the efficacy of vaccination. The way to reach these people is not to meet them with anger and judgement. Instead, by working in the areas they already feel comfortable in—alternative medicine, say—we can reach them much more effictively. We need to meet a reluctant audience on their own terms. That empowers them. Empowerment reflects and rebuilds trust. If people are looking inward for information, we can meet them there.

Voice

The language a brand uses to express itself. You don’t want to alienate your audience. You need to bring your audience along with you. When a brand changes over time, it runs the risk of alienating its audience. But by using a consistent voice, and speaking with transparency, it empowers the audience.

A good example of this is Mailchimp. When Mailchimp first moved into the e-commerce space, they approached it from a point of humility. They wrote on the blog in a very personal vulnerable way, using plain language. The language didn’t ask more acclimation from their audience.

ClinicalTrials.gov does not have a cute monkey. Their legal disclaimer used to have reams of text. They took a step back to figure what they needed to provide in order to make the audience comfortable. They empowered their audience by writing clearly, avoiding the passive voice.

Volume

What is enough detail to allow a user to feel good about their choices? We used to think it was all about reducing information. For a lot of brands, that’s true. But America’s Test Kitchen is known for producing a lot of content. They’re known for it because their content focuses on empowering people. You’re getting enough content to do well. They try to engage people regardless of level of expertise. That’s the ultimate level of empathy—meeting people wherever they are. Success breeds confidence. That’s the ethos that underpins all their strategy.

Crutchfield Electronics also considers what the right amount of content is to allow people to succeed. By making sure that people feel good and confident about the content they’re receiving, Crutchfield Electronics are also making sure that people good and confident in their choices.

Gov.uk had to contend with where people were seeking information. The old version used to have information spread across multiple websites. People then looked elsewhere. Government Digital Services realised they were saying too much. They reduced the amount of content. Let government do what only government can do.

So how do you know when you have “enough” content? Whether you’re America’s Test Kitchen or Gov.uk. You have enough content when people feel empowered to move forward. Sometimes people need more content to think more. Sometimes people need less.

Vulnerability

How do we open up and support people in empowering themselves? Vulnerability can also mean letting people know how we’re doing, and how we’re going to change over time. That’s how we build a conversation with our audience.

Sometimes vulnerability can mean prototyping in public. Buzzfeed rolled out a newsletter by exposing their A/B testing in public. This wasn’t user-testing on the sidelines; it was front and centre. It was good material for their own blog.

When we ask people “what do you think?” we allow people to become evalangists of our products by making them an active part of the process. Mailchimp did this when they dogfooded their new e-commerce product. They used their own product and talked openly about it. There was a conversation between the company and the audience.

Cooks Illustrated will frequently revisit their old recommendations and acknowledge that things have changed. It’s admitting to a kind of falliability, but that’s not a form of weakness; it’s a form of strength.

If you use some of the recommendations on their site, Volkswagen ask “what are you looking for in a car?” rather than “what are you looking for in Volkswagen?” They’re building the confidence of their audience. That builds trust.

Buzzfeed also hosts opposing viewpoints. They have asides on articles called “Outside Your Bubble”. They bring in other voices so their audiences can have a more informed opinion.

A consistent and accessible voice, appropriate volume for the context, and humanising vulnerability together empowers users.

Margot says all that in the face of the question: do we live in a post-fact era? To which she says: when was the fact era?

Cynicism is a form of cowardice. It’s not a fruitful position. It doesn’t move us forward as designers, and it certainly doesn’t move us forward as a society. Cynics look at the world and say “it’s worse.” Designers look at the world and say “it could be better.”

Design won’t save the world—but it may make it more worth saving. Are we uniquely positioned to fix this problem? No. But that doesn’t free us from working hard to do our part.

Margot thinks we can design our way out of cynicism. And we need to. For ourselves, for our clients, and for our very society.

Luke has written up the selection process he went through when Clearleft was designing the Virgin Holidays app. When it comes to deploying on mobile, there were three options:

1. Native apps
2. A progressive web app
3. A hybrid app

The Virgin Holidays team went with that third option.

Now, it will come as no surprise that I’m a big fan of the second option: building a progressive web app (or turning an existing site into a progressive web app). I think a progressive web app is a great solution for travel apps, and the use-case that Luke describes sounds perfect:

Easy access to resort staff and holiday details that could be viewed offline to help as many customers as possible travel without stress and enjoy a fantastic holiday

Luke explains why they choice not to go with a progressive web app.

The current level of support and leap in understanding meant we’d risk alienating many of our customers.

The issue of support is one that is largely fixed at this point. When Clearleft was working on the Virgin Holidays app, service workers hadn’t landed in iOS. Hence, the risk of alienating a lot of customers. But now that Mobile Safari has offline capabilities, that’s no longer a problem.

But it’s the second reason that’s trickier:

Simply put, customers already expected to find us in the App Store and are familiar with what apps can historically offer over websites.

I think this is the biggest challenge facing progressive web apps: battling expectations.

For over a decade, people have formed ideas about what to expect from the web and what to expect from native. From a technical perspective, native and web have become closer and closer in capabilities. But people’s expectations move slower than technological changes.

First of all, there’s the whole issue of discovery: will people understand that they can “install” a website and expect it to behave exactly like a native app? This is where install prompts and ambient badging come in. I think ambient badging is the way to go, but it’s still a tricky concept to explain to people.

But there’s another way of looking at the current situation. Instead of seeing people’s expectations as a negative factor, maybe it’s an opportunity. There’s an opportunity right now for companies to be as groundbreaking and trendsetting as Wired.com when it switched to CSS for layout, or The Boston Globe when it launched its responsive site.

It makes for a great story. Just look at the Pinterest progressive web app for an example (skip to the end to get to the numbers):

Weekly active users on mobile web have increased 103 percent year-over-year overall, with a 156 percent increase in Brazil and 312 percent increase in India. On the engagement side, session length increased by 296 percent, the number of Pins seen increased by 401 percent and people were 295 percent more likely to save a Pin to a board. Those are amazing in and of themselves, but the growth front is where things really shined. Logins increased by 370 percent and new signups increased by 843 percent year-over-year. Since we shipped the new experience, mobile web has become the top platform for new signups. And for fun, in less than 6 months since fully shipping, we already have 800 thousand weekly users using our PWA like a native app (from their homescreen).

Now admittedly their previous mobile web experience was a dreadful doorslam, but still, those are some amazing statistics!

Maybe we’re underestimating the malleability of people’s expectations when it comes to the web on mobile. Perhaps the inertia we think we’re battling against isn’t such a problem as long as we give people a fast, reliable, engaging experience.

If you build that, they will come.