Putting The User First - Arrk Group€¦ · Putting The User First White Paper HOW TO DESIGN...

Enabling theDigital Enterprise

Putting The User First

2© copyright Arrk Limited | 2015

PUTTING THE USER FIRST WHITE PAPERApril 2015

Digital solutions should improve people’s lives. They should save time, save money and produce better outcomes for end users.

To achieve this, it is critically important that customers are willing to use a digital service, and that they find it intuitive, speedy and accessible. This means that investment has been well employed and that customers’ needs and preferences have been sufficiently taken into account in the design and implementation of the service.

In this White Paper we explore:

ɴ How to design customer focused digital services

ɴ How customer focused services relate to current trends in digital technology

ɴ Navigability and customer interaction with digital services

ɴ Case studies detailing radical improvements in services, through adopting a more customer-focused approach

In conclusion, we present a checklist of recommendations for customer-focused ecommerce websites, along with suggestions of ways to engage and retain customers.

Andreas EnglandSenior UX/UI ConsultantArrk Group


Putting The User FirstWhite Paper HOW TO DESIGN CUSTOMER

FOCUSED DIGITAL SERVICES

Using Agile practices in digital services is now a crucial factor in making them customer focused.

In mid-2014, the UK Government Cabinet Office described Agile development of public services as: ‘building a core digital service quickly and then continually improving it.’

‘This new approach not only puts customers at the heart of what we’re doing but puts them in the driving seat. We ask them “Is this what you’re looking for?” It’s open, it’s transparent and the continual iteration has helped us to see a product develop. We have moved from product to customer outcomes. We no longer measure how long it takes to move a piece of paper, but the impact on customers.’1

This statement sums up the exceptional value of Agile practices in digital service provision. It enables people to make decisions, but it is not the whole story. To fully embrace the end user, it is crucial for businesses to understand how consumers behave, not simply by asking them what they want – because they are likely to give you the answer you’re looking for, rather than what they really feel.

To get under the skin of consumers and digital service end users, the approach needs to be more gradual, more detailed and more sensitive to users ‘pain points’, as you build up a picture of the way someone will react to what they are offered, and how this can be shifted and tweaked to produce a higher quality product or service.

Working through these stages with customers, ahead of a product or service launch, means that there is a vastly greater prospect of a successful launch. Investing time and resources at this point in digital development costs a fraction of what businesses have to spend to correct a faulty service.2

1, 2. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/09/26/the-public-guardian-on-agile-development/

Here are some of the key strategies that have been proved to be effective:

ɴ Working with customers in a team environment: identifying a problem and finding a solution together

ɴ Visualising the virtual service delivery by using paper illustrations and charts on the walls in a workshop and physically walking through processes

ɴ Recognising where you have hit a virtual brick wall, sleeping on the problem and returning to it with fresh ideas

ɴ Taking the approach that progress is best achieved through a series of small failures. The better you get, the quicker you fail and the less you fail

ɴ Paying particular attention to the way a customer behaves (a more important signal than what a customer says)

ɴ Monitoring customers’ routes of travel through a digital service, noting the stages at which they lose interest or become frustrated, where there is an anomaly

ɴ Measuring the customer’s level of satisfaction with the service


Putting The User FirstWhite Paper

3. http://www.slideshare.net/teresarothaar/avons-catastrophic-promise-project

A LESSON IN HOW NOT TO DO IT: AVON PRODUCTS3

In 2009 Avon Products Inc., a global beauty company, decided to redesign its sales management system by combining a back-end Enterprise Resource Planning system with a front-end tablet-enabled ecommerce system. The idea was to streamline and modernise the company’s order process, allowing sales reps to make real time inventory checks and to save the company around $40 million per year.

Four years later, in 2013, the new system launched in Canada with the code name ‘Promise Project’. It was an immediate disaster. Representatives found that the system was slow, difficult to use and had numerous technical glitches. They couldn’t log in, they couldn’t save orders and the ‘real time’ inventory checks were nothing of the sort.

Within a few weeks, Avon had lost an estimated 16,000 representatives across Canada, fed up of the awful IT system that had been forced upon them. The company lost somewhere between $100 million and $125 million as a result of this disaster. Analysing what went wrong, experts pointed out that many Avon reps are small scale sellers earning little commission (under $100 a month) and decided that, in the light of the headache this new system was giving them, that it wasn’t worth their time.

The ‘upline’ representatives, who earned commission from the many smaller scale downline reps, were never consulted on the change (never mind the downstream reps). ‘Their input was never solicited at any time; they were simply told that a great new system was coming and they’d love it,’ reported Teresa Rothaar in her paper entitled ‘Avon’s Order Management Disaster’, published by Wilmington University.

Noting that the majority of Avon’s sales force is amateur, with varying levels of education and experience, Rothaar concluded: ‘With this end user base, ease of use was imperative. If upper management had asked the field representatives what they wanted, and solicited their input and feedback at every step of the process, the Promise Project might have been highly successful.’


Putting The User FirstWhite Paper CURRENT TRENDS IN DIGITAL

TECHNOLOGY

BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE (BYOD) &

MOBILE PLATFORMS

Since the majority of the UK population now owns or uses more than one device on which to access digital content (smartphone, iPad, laptop and PC among others), service providers cannot be prescriptive over how their product will be consumed.

Current best practice is to design services initially for smart phones, because this forces you to remove all the elements that aren’t absolutely essential (for example page headers and footers).

The result is that you produce a very clean and efficient design. This can be alarming to some organisations, who have become used to elaborate, highly-designed material. They can feel exposed by the amount of white space in a design. But the outcome of a minimal design is always positive: the layout will be more logical to follow, and users’ eyes are less distracted by spurious content.

Any design that has been created for a mobile device will automatically work on a desktop. This principle does not apply the other way round!

SOCIAL MEDIA

There are plus and minus sides of social media as a means of enhancing customer focus.

On the plus side, it is a tremendous way of gathering a body of data on customer preferences and feedback on products and services. Allowing customers to write peer reviews of something they have purchased brings an immediacy and strong sense of contact for other prospective customers: they are likely to trust peer reviews above marketing messages from the company itself.


Putting The User FirstWhite Paper Many companies now solicit feedback from customers via

social media, for issues as fundamental as product design and specifications. Taken to a further extreme, using social media can become a form of crowdsourcing, where data gathered from many thousands of customers (or website visitors) can help organisations understand their market in ways that smaller scale market research would struggle to do.

On the down side, many companies are wary of placing personal details of employees into the public domain, or entering into debates with users over the merits of goods or services. Many businesses have had significant problems with staff using social media and posting inappropriate material online, or giving out messages which run counter to the company’s brand.

Ideally, employees should be able to act without seeking authority from their managers: but in the case of social media, this course can land a business in hot water.

As social media evolves and there are more nuanced ways for information to be shared though these extremely well-used platforms, there will doubtless be more opportunities for businesses to harness them, as part of a customer-focused strategy.

WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY & MULTI-DEVICE

STRATEGIES

With a host of new and hotly anticipated products reaching the market in 2015, this is expected to be a breakthrough year for wearable technology. Devices such as watches which provide haptic feedback and are synchronised with social media feeds will change the way that we receive information.

The rate of take-up will determine how important wearable technology is for businesses and organisations. If, like smartphones, there is a huge and very fast adoption, then it will be crucial for digital service providers to design for these platforms. Companies need to be ready for this eventuality.

Areas in which wearable technology will have an impact



include the emerging area of short-term notification. If you are expecting a delivery and need to know the date and time, receiving data via wearable technology such as a watch could be very helpful. Knowing that a parcel will arrive within a window of 20 minutes could mean that you are downstairs ready for it, minimising wasted time. This is a user-friendly application of technology.

Wearable technology means scaling down content even further than for mobile devices, reducing it to perhaps a couple of lines of text – a development known as ‘glance-able’ technology. At the other extreme, digital service providers need to scale up, as wide screen digital televisions become fully internet-connected.

The likelihood is that consumers will soon watch movies or other traditional TV content at the same time as receiving information, or ordering goods, on a portion of their screens. Building on the current ability to (for example) watch a particular player in a viewing box while a soccer match is in progress, viewers in future will have a far wider range of on-screen options.

So businesses and organisations must be ready to cater for this entire information spectrum, from glancing at an internet-connected watch through to watching a 60-inch plasma screen, ensuring that the data provided remains consistent, accurate and accessible.



CASE STUDY: LOCAL AUTHORITY WASTE MANAGEMENT SERVICE

To improve waste management systems for residents of an inner city borough, a programme was devised so that users would register online, giving them their own personal account. To motivate people to take this step, general waste management information (such as the time of bin collections) was provided without registration. But users were promised even easier access to information, on condition that they signed up.

This registration then provided users with a single point of entry for a range of local services, including parking permit purchase for example. In terms of waste management, once someone had registered, the Local Authority could then better coordinate collection of different kinds of refuse, encouraging residents to separate recyclable and food waste and streamline the entire operation.

Since the authority pays subcontractors to handle household waste, the more time these contractors spend on waste collection, the more cost accrues. And if residents have queries over collections, a well-functioning digital service will answer their questions and provide suggested remedies for problems. The alternative is for residents to contact a call centre, which is a far more expensive option and one which Local Authorities can no longer afford.

Sharing the lessons of customer focused digital services. The programme that this local authority introduced has been presented to local governments across the country as an example of good practice. It is also part of a wide-ranging drive to improve efficiencies, reduce costs and increase productivity in the local authority.

Introducing greater customer involvement in decision making has realised multiple benefits, according to senior decision makers at the council. ‘The authority aims to harness digital technology and Big Data…to save money and improve services through co-production and collaboration,’ wrote the cabinet member for finance in a recent briefing paper. Noting that both taxpayers and residents now have higher expectations from public services, he argued: ‘There are now opportunities for councils to be the first to redesign public services around the consumer experience, enabled by personal mobile technology and open source thinking.’ Predicting data insights, he believes, can drive down costs and mean that investments can be made in a smarter way, to prevent future costs.

For example, the rising trend of the internet of things can help to ‘redesign smarter public services around citizens and businesses,’ while ‘putting the customer’s needs and experience at the heart of how new systems will operate and work’.

As a large inner city borough, with an exceptional concentration of both wealth and deprivation, this local authority is a tremendous example of the power of digital services to transform people’s lives, made particularly effective by the close involvement of citizens themselves.



4. http://www.valuablecontent.co.uk/valuable-content-award-for-ling-valentine-lingscars-com/

CASE STUDY: CAR LEASING

For one major UK-based car leasing firm, the contractual process, prior to online services, was complex and lengthy. Customers had to complete a series of documents, signing each one.

Once car leasing had migrated online, this drawn out system remained in place, frustrating customers and causing many to drop out of the process altogether before they reached the check-out stage.

Feedback from customers made their annoyance clear: ‘Oh God is it over yet?’ some would write. ‘Please let me finish!’ wrote others.

To improve the usability of the leasing website, a new system was proposed which removed more than a third of the transaction process, along with a ‘breadcrumb’ function, showing users which stage they had reached (‘step 3 of 7’, for example). Whereas before there were several screens which users had to navigate, there were now far fewer, removing much irrelevant or unnecessary material.

User satisfaction increased markedly following this redesign, together with the proportion of customers who stayed in the process and confirmed their purchase.

Other car leasing companies have found that putting customers’ needs at the forefront of their operations has paid remarkable dividends. Lings Cars, based in Gateshead, in Northeast England, has an extremely unusual website (www.lingscars.com) full of eccentric details. But it has nevertheless won industry awards because it is geared around the customer rather than the business.4

‘Customers are number one. It’s as simple as that,’ says owner Ling Valentine. ‘This has helped, and hurt, my business. It’s massively good for my public relations and customer confidence, but equally suppliers in the motor trade hate me because I am firmly on the side of the customer.’



NAVIGABILITY AND NEW MODES OF

COMMUNICATION

Could you buy your shopping via smartphone on a Manchester tram using only your thumb? This was a test set by usability experts, to judge how intuitive and technically straight forward a digital service was. A few years ago, this would have been a virtually impossible task. Today it is something consumers expect.

So smart companies will invest in technology and modes of communication that will emerge over the coming years. Just as mobile phones were a rarity in the 1980s but are now omnipresent, other means of communication – whether physical devices, new platforms or online channels - will become standard very quickly. Snapchat and Instagram for example, have experienced explosive growth in recent months.

When building a digital service, organisations need to keep content divorced from layout. This is so that the content can be reformatted for new platforms and devices, making it resilient to change.

This level of consistency is important: technology is continually revamping and upgrading, but the standard of service and the quality of access to information needs to remain unchanged.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CUSTOMER-

FOCUSED ECOMMERCE SITES

As mobile devices are more widely adopted, businesses need to design ecommerce sites with smaller screens and simpler navigation processes in mind.

A recent report from Forrester Research showed that many online customers fail to complete forms because they did not wish to register to a site, or were asked for too much information.

Examples of best practice in e-commerce design, with the aim of keeping users firmly at the centre of the concept:

ɴ Keep the number of questions to a minimum, to prevent irritation or boredom

ɴ Make password requirements secure without being over-complex. And enable customers to recover their passwords and user names easily, so they don’t abandon the site

ɴ Offer drop down forms, radio button or checkboxes in preference to text fields

ɴ Use multiple steps in preference to scrolling down a long form

ɴ Tell the customer how long the form will be, and where they are in the process

ɴ Group fields in a logical progression (name, address, phone number, email address, payment details). Deviation from this order may cause confusion

ɴ Display prominent and clear security policies, along with verification badges from third parties such as VeriSign. Assure customers that they will not receive spam

ɴ Thank customers for completing the form and send a confirmation email



Organisations are naturally keen to gather customer data and contact details, but they need to weigh up the benefits of gaining this information against the negative aspects: putting off potential customers by demanding unnecessary details and insisting on registration.

Other off-putting factors include broken links, slow loading pages, hard-to-find navigation buttons and links which go to irrelevant locations. Offer a range of options for customers to get where they want to go, along with a search box and search engine.

Customers are more likely to volunteer personal details and complete online processes if they feel that there is a reward for doing so.

So try to engage with customers in ways other than simply selling goods or services. Offer news and opinions on relevant issues, for example, or white papers (like this one) which add value to a customers’ online experience and set your business apart as an up-to-date source of industry knowledge and expertise.

© copyright Arrk Limited | 2015

About Arrk Group

Arrk Group is a software engineering company with core competency in three areas:

ɴ Building easy-to-use, robust digital applications and platforms

ɴ User centred design and high performing engineering practices

ɴ Through dedicated, distributed customer teams

Founded in 1998 we have designed and delivered award-winning large scale bespoke digital engagement platforms and membership management systems and have a strong track record of delivering digital transformation in a variety of industries.

Our approach brings together our experience in user centred design with leading Agile based software engineering practices, delivered by distributed teams to provide intuitive but industrial strength solutions that focus on business outcomes. As we provide digital applications and platforms, our solutions have to be engaging and easy to use.

We prefer to automate much of the testing, continuous integration and build and deployment pipelines. Our development skillsets encompass a broad range of technologies including the Microsoft technology stack, .NET, Java and J2EE, Rails, Grails, Cloud based solutions and Mobile Development.

Our SpArrk communities programme challenges our consultants to stay at the leading edge of technologies and processes and follow key trends in our industry to generate thought leadership and internal R&D. The SpArrk communities focus on 3 main areas:

ɴ Digital Platform & Architecture

ɴ High Performance Software Engineering

ɴ Leading Edge Technology

Get In Touch

+44 (0) 161 227 9900

www.arrkgroup.com

[email protected]

@arrkgroup

UK: Greenheys, Pencroft Way, Manchester Science Park, Manchester, M15 6JJ India: Building 5, Sector 2, Millennium Business Park, Mahape, Navi Mumbai - 400 710

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