Finding Ideas

Visual Revolt

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick, but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me that is.” “The other trick to finding ideas is figuring out the difference between power and knowledge. You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world. My friend Dave, who taught me about ketchup, is a middle guy. He’s worked on ketchup. That’s how he knows about it. People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so) because they have position and privilege to protect — and self consciousness is the enemy of ‘interestingness.’

~ Malcolm Gladwell, "What The Dog Saw"

I want to give you great (C)eX

Pertaining to the, "joys of good design." This post is authored by Andy Curry - Head of UX and Design at Branded3.

How joined up Customer Experience (CEX) and thinking beyond digital can transform every step of your business.

Ah, there’s nothing like a good clickbait headline is there? Customer Experience is yet another exciting industry phrase (with a childishly amusing acronym), but sat alongside everything else we have to contend with – ‘User Experience’ (UX), ‘User Interface Design’ (UI), ‘Conversion Rate Optimisation’ (CRO) and a dozen other industry phrases covering the gamut of analysis-based system design.

So before I continue, let’s have a quick top-line refresher of what each of these jumbles of letters actually means (more detailed definitions can be found here).

User interface design (UI): The visual and interactive design consideration of discreet elements in a system, i.e. a form, a price slider, etc.

User experience (UX): The design of a user’s journey from entry to exit in a system, based on user research and analysis.

Customer experience (CEX / CX): The customer’s entire experience of the brand, their products and services, across all utilised channels (and even further).

The coverage could be vast and unwieldy so let’s break it down into two:

Online customer experienceIf we consider the customer experience online, we can easily see that it extends further than just a journey on one site.

An example online customer journey to online purchase  – Source: Google

You also need to consider your user’s journey between devices – from discovery on a Facebook link clicked on the mobile app during a rushed lunch break, followed up the day after with a visit to the site on the iPad over the morning coffee, to a final purchase on the office laptop that afternoon. Or vice-versa.

The wider picture

A true customer experience extends further: offline > online > offline again.

It covers the full ecosystem of a user and their interaction with the brand (from the car you see in the street, to the ad you read in a magazine, to the online research you conduct, to the dealership you visit, to the final choice and purchase, to the after care, to the service arrangements via an online portal) and you have a relationship that could go on for the life of this car and the next 10 – IF you work it right.

Good CEX:

• turns a prospect into a sale
• turns a sale into a re-sale
• turns a user into an advocate / evangelist – you create a vessel for recommendation: one of the most powerful marketing tools you can possess.

A perfectly realised user-centric online purchasing experience is for naught if the delivery is poor and the returns service a joke. Make the whole thing work and – most importantly – work together.

So how do we do it?

Joined-up customer experience requires a joined-up company. Specific user experience work by one group or agency within a company (such as the redesign of user flow on a website) can lead to insights and approaches that can be applied further afield.

The user research we might conduct in developing personas for a website redesign will likely reveal experiences, motivations and new requirements in users. This insight can be applied not only to website planning, but to all aspects of the company’s interaction with the user – in the store, in their marketing strategy, and in their aftersales processes.

It requires those of us working in digital to begin thinking outside the realms of our pixels and screens, and requires those working in ‘the real world’ to think about the digital domain as part of their plan. And for that to work we’re going to need to work together, to create a rounded strategy that allows the experience to continue seamlessly on and offline.

We might even have to leave the house. Be careful out there!

The user now and the future user

Centre your efforts on your existing users for sure, but don’t forget to consider those users yet to come. It sounds obvious, but so many times a redesign is conducted based only on research about how your current users act.

What about those you know should be users but aren’t? What’s stopping them? What can you do to make things better for them? (Without pissing off your existing clientèle of course!) And once you’ve made things better – how do you tell this new audience about it?

There’s no “If we build it they will come” in this industry – if they don’t know, they won’t go.

So it’s by no means a simple task: it takes collaboration, understanding, research, and plenty of lateral thinking – plus the will from a company’s various departments to work together, to change how they think and operate, and to create a truly effective, engaging and customer-centric experience that will increase conversions and create evangelists for your brand.

Introduction and Statement of Purpose

Welcome to my new blog.

The purpose of this blog is to serve as an opportunity to delve deeper into my studies in UI/UX Research and Design. I've used blogging as an educational tool before and have found it to be quite helpful.

I'm embarking on a field specialization certification offered through Coursera, via UC San Diego. While I've audited many MOOC's through Coursera, EdX etc., I have never actually paid for the certifications and therefore never fully participated in completing and providing feedback for other peoples homework or projects. It's my intention to be fully absorbed in the material, research, message boards and lectures in order to get the most out of the material presented. While the courses are not worth transferable college credit, they can be displayed on my Linkedin - and the projects can be added to my portfolio.

My hope is that this 8 course specialization, costing just $39 a course (for a total of $312 for full certification) is a cheap, quality alternative to formal credited coursework that will lay the a strong base for me to apply to grad school for Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing at UofM. This specialization starts tomorrow and lasts 9 months until the end of July.

While Wayne State has a perfectly fine, completely online, masters program, it's always been my goal to officially be a wolverine, and I think a masters from UofM would fetch more money in my initial job search.

So what is UI/UX Design? We're going to be exploring this together. My undergraduate background is broad based, hard-nosed, 4-field anthropology. I wasn't sure what I wanted to specialize in so I tried to get a basic grasp on everything. What anthropology helps someone like me do is bring to bear other knowledge and skills to specific problems.

Anthropology is uniquely suited to UI/UX Design, because anthropology is charged with being at the forefront of studying human beings at every layer and angle throughout all time an space. UI stands for user-interface, and UX stands for user-experience.

A man using a cane to assist in walking is interfacing with a piece of technology. The handle where he holds it is the user-interface. If it was a poorly designed cane, uncomfortable to hold, too heavy, slippery on the bottom, these reflect poorly on the overall user-experience.

Similarly, when using a computer, you interface with the computer via the monitor, keyboard, mouse and whatever other peripherals or devices you use (printer/scanner). These are hardware interfaces. In addition to hardware interfaces, there are software interfaces. What kind of operating system do you use? What kind of browser, programs, apps etc.? All of these come with their own interfaces, and the goal of the UI/UX researcher, is to study people using these things and develop analysis that enables the designer (often the same person or team) or refine the interface and improve the experience.

So that's what I'll be doing for my career. I think it sounds really cool. Whether I'm working with engineers to innovate more spacious interiors to automobiles or airplanes, designing more intuitive apps and websites, or helping to crack the cultural algorithm that I believe is necessary to create a truly anthropomorphic A.I., this is bound to be an exciting journey!