Building a winning product & UX strategy from the Kano Model by Jared Spool at Mind the Product 2015

[Music] [Applause] hey I'm excited to be here are you excited to be here let's make some noise we're excited about everything we're gonna learn today fantastic let's get this thing started in 2009 the CEO of Hyatt Hotels facing lagging revenues and dropping customer satisfaction scores decided that he wanted to do something that no one in the hotel industry had ever done before he was going to give away free stuff and what he was going to give away were things like in-room massages and picking up people's bar tabs and he was going to have all his employees just do this completely at random when customers least expected it he called it random acts of generosity the idea was that if customers suddenly received some gift they would forget about all the things that were making their stay miserable it didn't work he thought that if he were to give out these amazingly awesome free DES lighters he called them that the things that were frustrating his customers like broken air conditioning or hot water not working in the showers or the banquet staff frozen who frozen the banquet staff serving frozen pies frozen serving pies I'm from America we speak English the banquet staff serving frozen pies and just a grumpy guest services staff that never seemed to want the guests to be in the hotel that that somehow would disappear now it seems obvious in retrospect that this wouldn't work but more interesting we can predict why there are tools that are disposals that help us see what happens when someone uses our products one of the ones that I happen to love is called the customer journey map customer journey map is very simple to make first thing you do is you just list out all the things that your customer is going to do in the process of using your product or service then as a timeline you basically measure how it goes from extreme frustration to extreme delight and you see what happens for example in this case where our customer is trying to book a hotel online we can see that searching for the hotel worked really well but once we got to the property actually figuring out which room we wanted to stay in was not very good because the descriptions didn't seem to tell you anything useful once we started booking things got better but then getting into billing and payment information that was frustrating because it kept asking me to take spaces out of phone numbers and wear that silly security code was and there were all sorts of things that I kept getting errors for and suddenly we we work through this and we're done that's it and suddenly we can tell what is working well and what isn't and if we do this once twice a dozen times a hundred times we suddenly have a way of measuring what is frustrating and what is delighted our customers and if we take this a step further we can look a little deeper we can see what's going on here you can think of any experience as one that goes from the range of of being frustrating to being delightful and we want delight I don't know any team who sets out to frustrate their customers nobody says you know what would be awesome if we just made them a little bit more frustrated than they were well maybe the airline's do that but nobody else seems to want to do that so this is this is the path we want to bring our our scores up but it turns out that the way we do that changes because of the middle the middle is this idea of something being usable something being just sort of neutrally okay it's neither frustrating nor delightful and it's an important point to be pay attention to because the things we do to get to the middle are different than the things we do to get away from the middle to get to that usable point really the rule is stop sucking so much but to get to the delightful part we invert that and we say start being delightful and that difference is really important it turns out that being not sucky is an act of removal you take things away it's similar to how Michelangelo deals with sculpture right carving out the stuff that he doesn't want whereas delight is an additive activity we add to make something delightful so we actually have to understand this difference between getting to that neutral point of usable because our whole process has to change once we get there and everything we were doing that got us the success to that point we'll stop working to get us further so when we think of strategy we think of okay if we're gonna have some sort of user experience strategy for our product what does that mean well it's simply just that process of getting things from frustration to delight that's really its simplest form but the way that we do that turns out to be not as simple fortunately we have a guide through this and it's a Japanese economist named noriaki Cano and Cano was smart enough to ask a simple question what's the amount of investment that an organization has to make to truly delight their customers and he started to plot out what companies had done and he created this interesting model of of how businesses work and the model uses our friendly scale here from extreme frustration to extreme delight and it compares that to investment from low investment to high investment now when he started to map out what made companies successful he saw three basic patterns the first one he called the performance payoff this is just the creation of features so if we're building a hotel that you know putting in a restaurant putting in a pool putting in air conditioning these are the things that are features that that basically add to the experience of the hotel make more investment than you get payoff but he also found two other interesting patterns that were as equal if not more important than the payoff the performance payoff and the first one he called basic expectations basic expectations are the things that you bring that you expect the product to do for either in my hotel room there's a water closet it's got a sink a toilet a shower no we're in the hotel brochure did it mention this they didn't have to give it to me they never promised it to me yet I showed up and had it not been there I would have not been a happy guest at that hotel that's a basic expectation we expect certain things to just happen even though the company never promised it to be there the other curve that Cano said we need to pay attention to was what he called excitement generators and excitement generators tell us what will delight our customers often with not very much of an investment just teaching the hotel staff to smile would make hi it's much better to stay at it doesn't cost a lot to do that so we can do this and this is where this notion of des lighters in products come from is through these excitement generators it turns out there's a lot of richness in this chart that Connor gave us so let's take it a step further and look look a little deeper and let's start with the performance pay off now when an apple comes out with a new version of their operating system they talk about features and it's not what the features are per se it's just how many there are and they try to get the biggest number they can and of course we're all excited we line up at 4:00 in the morning to get copies of this thing so that we can find out what the new features of textedit are going to be because that's what we've been waiting for and this is what companies do you know a start-up comes out with their first product and what do they do they put a three features in it because frankly that's the only resources they have so they can get these three features built and because they've thought real hard about it for a long time they've built amazing features and everybody it's great and then maybe there's two more features that they couldn't get into that first release before they ran out of money so they put that into the 1.5 release and then people loved the thing and and they say okay you know why it'd be awesome if you had more features so that's when version 2.0 comes out and they add a few more and now people are suggesting features and and coming up with with even more things that they'd like to see in the product and features are coming in and now suddenly big companies are paying attention they're like you know we'll buy ten thousand seats if you add a whole bunch of features here so sure enough we add a whole bunch of features here and finally we get to this point where someone's putting big bags of money on the table and they're basically saying you know we will buy thousands and thousands of seats if you put this one feature that we know no one else will use but we will use it into your product and bam here we are feature held this is the sad life of the product manager [Music] yes feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature and feature like listening to Donald Trump talk about China are you've heard of him I don't know if you were paying to the American elections but the entire Republican Party central casting has done a fantastic job this year just been awesome so this is the thing right now we've got this product that takes forever to do anything with it's hard to learn it's hard to use it's hard to maintain just making small changes takes forever because there are so many options and configuration changes we have to change with every possible combination and then there's the billing engine nobody will touch the billing engine right the last person who worked on the billing engine ran out of the building naked welcome to experience rot experience rot is what happens when we add so many features that we haven't created this massive amount of complexity and we have completely destroyed the users experience it happens with every product but it turns out that there is something we can do about this something that's under our control the smart organizations this is where they often really rally around this idea of creating a user experience team and doing user experience research and what they do when they do the user experience research is they send people out into the field to study what the product is being used as and what they learn is that hardly anybody is using any more than just a handful important features nobody's using the other features so just knowing that helps you quite a bit because you can organize the product around those features but you can do even more and the really smart companies do this what they do is they come out with a whole new version of the product a new release that only has those features and they carefully design those features so they all seamlessly work together and they all fit together and the underlying architecture is such that they're easy to maintain and easy to enhance and the whole thing is done well this is how you get past experience right so often whenever I'm talking about this someone will come up to me and say you know that's really awesome except at our company that could never happen at our company we have an unwritten law that once a feature goes in it has to stay there until we all die features can never come out so there's no way our company will do this and I look them straight in the eye and I say I have no problem with this you don't have to do this because if you don't do this your competitor will this is how we make new startups right every startup is because there's some major player in the marketplace who has experienced rot and has created something awful so you don't have to do this you don't have to be the startup you don't have to own the market from that point on it's ok with me I still sleep well there's another way to prevent this but you have to start much earlier than release 6 it's a two word two letter methodology it's called no no we're not gonna put that feature in no that's not going to happen we're gonna keep the design clean and useful we're only gonna add things that actually help the users experience that actually solve a problem for the customer that's what we're going to focus on this is the real job of the product manager and this is what has to happen to make sure that products are well designed and that's basically how we deal with the performance payoff but that's not the only thing we have to deal with Connor pointed out that probably the most complicated thing was dealing with basic expectations basic expectations are things you don't get to decide there are things the customer brings with them I'm staying in a hotel we're up on the seventh floor when I turn on the shower I expect the water to be hot like that I don't know where that expectation comes from it definitely doesn't come from my one-story house where I turn on the hot water in the shower and it takes three minutes for it to get hot so it's not because this is what I live with at home but I've had this expectation that water should be hot instantly this is a crazy expectation particularly on tall hotels right imagine what it's like to get the water up into the thirty second floor of a hotel and have it be hot all the time how does that work I bet you don't know how that works it actually is pretty cool you see the way the hotel does it is they have heaters all along the circulation system and they constantly circulate the hot water through the hotel at tremendous expense to you the guests they are constantly making sure that hot water is never more than a few inches away from the tap of the shower they don't tell you this they just do it because of this expectation that they didn't get to set and if they don't meet that expectation you are a unhappy customer this is a map of a township in Ireland called airfield and one of the fascinating things about this little township of Ireland is that within its borders it does not contain an airfield at least not until iOS 6 maps came out iOS 6 maps somebody decided that it must have been a mistake that air-filled Ireland did not have the air-filled symbol so they gave it that and everybody in the UK and elsewhere was completely amused by this well everybody except for the UK Civil Aviation Authority who did not find this amusing in the bit they actually were quite petrified of this because they imagined some poor pilot having some sort of emergency needing to make an immediate landing reaching into their pocket and pulling out their iOS device looking up the nearest airfield and being told there's a safe landing in airfield Ireland where there is not now here's the thing about iOS 6 maps technically it was one of the best mapping platforms to ever hit society the underlying technology was amazing just one example of many is that it's the first mapping system to be fully accessible to people who are blind it has complete audio cues for everything on the map when it gives you directional guidance it actually makes a tone in the background that lets you know that you've gone off the path or the bus you're sitting on is taking a turn it shouldn't have taken so that you can do something about it it's completely amazing in many different ways except for a couple little problems [Music] like the post-apocalyptic view of Manhattan the flattening of the Eiffel Tower the read destruction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge the dipping of the Hoover Dam and my personal favorite the discovery of the long-lost castle of the Burger King [Applause] now the thing is is that the technology worked great but the data did not the data was the problem here and the thing that you go to for a map app is the data you would prefer not to find your house listed as being in the river just alongside it where it actually is and so it turns out that that that's a basic expectation that apparently Apple didn't know it's hard to get these things right and it's easy to miss basic expectations and that's the thing if Apple had gotten the data completely right nobody would have talked about it you would get neutral satisfaction nobody talks about things that are neutrally satisfying they talk about things that are delightful and they talk about things that are frustrating but they don't talk about things in the middle yet if you spend all the money you're going to spend on basic expectations the best you will ever do is neutral satisfaction that's it because it's an expectation we just expect this to work we expect the toilet to flush when the toilet doesn't flush we tell people when it does it we don't talk about it I got to tell you about this toilet you only had to press it once that's American thing so the only thing we can do with basic expectations is get them wrong right that's the problem we have they cost a lot and we can only screw it up this is what makes our jobs difficult because we have to constantly be ensuring we have met expectations that our competitors set that other industries have set that we had no say in so we constantly have to work at ensuring that we are making basic expectations but let's talk about excitement generators I want to go back to that customer journey map because the customer journey map gives us a picture of what things are like today but what we can do with this map is we can ask a really interesting question what would that same customers experience be if we made the entire thing delightful what is that experience like well that's what excitement generators are for and to talk about excitement generators the way I like to do it is to use a model that a speaker will be on stage later danishes know is going to use are going invented and and Dana's model basically breaks things into three different areas what she calls pleasure flow and meaning and these three areas make up the different ways we can approach getting delight to our customer so let's start with pleasure there were these two professors from the University of Michigan who created a project that called the significant objects project and what they did was they went to ebay and they would buy pieces of junk little statues and other sort of katja that was that was all about sort of these these things that people would have in their homes for no reason whatsoever and they wouldn't pay a whole lot of money for these things they would just pay pennies for them but then what they would do is they would give these things to people who are working on the project all of whom were writers and they would ask the writers to write a story telling the history of this object and why it was important to the owner and so these guys would fictionally create these stories that would make up why this figurine was a good luck charm for somebody and and and how it been passed down for generations and now the the last generation doesn't need it anymore and they're selling it on eBay and and maybe someone else can get good luck from it they would take the story and the little piece of junk that they'd bought and they'd put them back up on eBay together and see what would happen and what would happen is people would buy it this one sold for a hundred and ninety three dollars and fifty cents now the only difference between the original statue and what they put back on eBay was the story the story that gave it the value a value of a hundred and ninety dollars and fifty cents the writer didn't even get paid that much and at first this seems like an interesting experiment but we've seen this repeat itself over and over again we do a lot of studies of people shopping on ecommerce sites and we were watching people shop for cameras that they wanted to buy on walmart.com and what we noticed about walmart.com is when people would try and figure out which camera was best for them they'd end up on the product description page and the product description page was basically content that Walmart coms buyers had copied and pasted onto the description page what they didn't do was add any value there they just took what the manufacturers got gave them so the problem was that if you looked at one camera versus another it was very hard for the customer to figure out what the differences were because every product description page was in a different format with different terms with different elements this was obviously done for the speed expediency of getting the product up but not necessarily for helping the shopping experience and pretty much every electronics vendor that we studied they did this same thing they would just copy and paste what the manufacturers gave them after all the manufacturers know their product better than anybody why wouldn't we do that every company did this except one a company called Crutchfield Crutchfield didn't use the manufacturers descriptions instead what they did is they would give the products to they're very passionate customer support people and ask them to give the thing a thorough run through those support people in turn would then make videos they would create large databases that would allow you to compare one product to another and they would excite extensive product research reports that would give all sorts of details about the product just at a level of depth that nobody else does for instance they would list out everything that comes in the box including the USB warning note now when we would watch customers finally buy their cameras we noticed something fascinating every customer had a budget the budget was always set to be slightly higher than the camera they were hoping to buy so what we would find on sites like Walmart is that the customers would spend about 89 percent of their budget exactly what we predicted they would spend when they were shopping but on Crutchfield the average customer spent two hundred and thirty seven percent of their budget they would not only spend the hundred percent that we gave them they would add a hundred and thirty seven percent of their own money to finish the product purchase process the only difference between Crutchfield and Walmart was the story and when we talked to customers the word they use to describe the difference in the shopping experience was pleasure it was way more pleasurable to shop on Crutchfield now what was fascinating about this is that there wasn't anything in Crutchfield's design that would indicate it was a happier place there wasn't anything that was smiley or fancy happy talk or any of that stuff it was all business it just was the business the customer wanted and since the customer was making an expensive purchase and they needed confidence this was pleasurable so pleasure doesn't take a lot of effort it's a small investment and it doesn't have to be putting dancing gerbils on the site it can be just doing a good job what about flow well in the United States there's an insurance company called progressive and it turns out that their mascot is a woman named Flo but that's actually not what I want to talk about when I talk about is how progressive actually completely changed the online insurance industry turns out before the progressive launch their site the average insurance quote online would take twenty minutes and eighty percent of the time you would find out you were declined most of their time you were declined because they did not sell insurance in your state it would take twenty minutes to get to that point now progressive decided to change the whay insurance quotes were done online so the first thing they did was they asked you what your zip code was that immediately told them whether you were in their service area or not turns out now they sell service wide so you're always in their service area then the next thing they did was they asked you for your name and your address and your birthdate and that's it and this is a very different structure than the multi-page forms that the previous insurance companies we're using this is all they asked because from this data they could then go and look up in the registry of Motor Vehicles what your owned cars were ask you which of those you want to insure get other information from you about who's going to be driving those cars they could deduce from the database what the safety information was so they didn't have to ask you about that they could deduce a whole bunch of things except for things like mileage and finally they would then give you a quote they reduced it from 20 minutes down to under three minutes with a quote that was competitive now they've gone even further not only do they give you a quote for their product they give you a quote for their competitors products - right on the screen and sometimes the competitive products cost less than theirs but because they managed to reduce the number of screens from about 40 down to 6 and the time from 20 minutes down to 3 they are actually now selling more insurance even when the competitors have cheaper prices so this is how they were able to get delight from floo floo is removing all the things out of the process all the things that computers can do out so that the user can do what they need to do the hardest thing for delight is meaning in the States we have a company called zip car zip car parks cars and cities so you don't have to own one and you basically rent them by the hour and you do the whole transaction online and that by itself is pretty delightful but what makes it even more delightful is that because the cars are all parked in your neighborhood they regularly get people together in the neighborhood for little parties and on the badges for those parties they put your name and the name of the car you always rent turns out every car has a unique name like Mustafa and they have the badges say what cars are the ones you like to rent so you can go around the party and meet your neighbors who you may have never met before but you share something in common which is you all rent the same car which is actually an important thing to know because next time you're thinking about leaving it a little dirtier or not filling up the gas the way you should you will remember that party and who you met but they do even more than this when that they do little programs like on Election Day they will let you rent the car at a discount if you promise to take people who can't get to the polling place to the polling place or they will on Thanksgiving let you rent the car if you promise to deliver turkeys to people who can't normally afford them or on Christmas deliver gifts to families that can't afford those and it's those acts that really help the customers find meaning in what it means to share a car with the community and it's that notion of sharing the car with the community that the the company really gets around their delight that's what people talk about those are the stories they tell the thing about Zipcar is it's authentic and it turns out that authenticity is he United Airlines would love me to believe that they actually care about me and when they ran a bunch of commercials talking about how much they actually cared about the Olympic athletes that I might be following the thinking was that I love the Olympics they love the Olympics we're all together on this but here's the problem I love the Olympics they love the Olympics they hate me this is clear they don't hold back on this so I cannot get meaning from their little gesture with the Olympics I'm sure it's awesome I hope they don't do the same thing to the Olympic athletes that they did to me which is make the Olympic athletes hate them too meaning is the hardest of the things to do it takes the most investment it takes a long time but if you can pull it off it has huge returns so this is basically it the thing is that you have to know that over time things that are delight us today will become basic expectations tomorrow it used to be that it was delightful to go to a hotel with Wi-Fi now if the hotel doesn't have Wi-Fi or if it doesn't work or if it's not fast enough we get pretty upset about it they never promised any difference that's our expectation that we're bringing so you have to be prepared for basic expectations to change over time that's the essence of excitement generators if we go back to the customer journey map one more time and we look at what the map is telling us we can see that we have our current experience we have the experience that we're aspiring to that's going to be all delightful the gap between the current experience and that aspirational experience has a name we call it innovation innovation is what gets us to our aspirational experience in the United States doing your annual taxes is a chore it's particularly a chore for people who have probably not mastered a lot of math skills because of their education or they they have issues understanding the complexity of the process of what all these things mean in business and they make mistakes on their tax form into it came out with a product called snap tax snap tax is very simple you take your phone you take a picture of the form that your employer gives you known as your w-2 or your 1099 you snap a picture of that it scans the document turns out everything that's needed to file your taxes is actually on that document so it scans all the information off it opens up an electronic filing docket it pushes that information into the docket if you happen to be one of the people who works at more than one employer you take a picture of every single one of your w-2s it compiles them into a single tax form it shows you the outcomes it does the math correctly it says would you like to file if so here's the refund you're going to get will file it today you'll have your refund in two weeks you want to do that yes filing your taxes becomes a less than 15 minutes or that's delightful that's innovative but here's the thing about innovation innovation is a word that we use all the time and frankly I don't think it means what we think it means people think that innovation is about inventing something Intuit didn't invent anything they didn't invent taking pictures they didn't invent using a camera phone they didn't invent scanning documents they didn't invent filling out forms they didn't invent electronic filing they invented nothing and yet it's still innovative its innovative because they added value we don't need to invent anything we just need to add value where it didn't exist before which brings me to the road map Martin promised we were going to talk about road maps you're a product manager you probably always talk about road maps the road map for those of you who haven't experienced this joy is a detailed description of what we're going to do over the next few releases it talks about all the features that we're going to add to the next few releases some of which may not happen for months or years but yet we still have to commit to all the features feature feature feature feature feature feature feature feature that's the road map and we have to get more and more features so we can have more and more stuff with every release and I thought this was the way it had to be until I talked to this guy this is Bruce McCarthy he's sort of a product managers product manager he's really sharp dude he's been doing this for a long time and he has an idea he calls themes and themes the basic essence of themes is you take out the features and you'll place them on the roadmap with the actual problems you're gonna solve for your customer so instead of having a list of features we have a description of customer problems that we are committing to solve now his big contention is the basic benefit from this is that you no longer have to commit to some sort of technological solution that three years from now may be completely inappropriate and that's great but frankly that's not the big win the big win comes from the fact that we have the entire organization basing its strategy on customers and their problems you cannot start to fill this out until you've done some basic research as to who your customers are and what they do with the product you can figure out what your competitors are doing better than you but you can also figure out where they've completely missed the gap and there are problems out there that nobody's solving and you can go for it the beauty of this is that we're not talking about solutions and one of the things we've known for a long time is that the best designers don't fall in love with their solutions the best designers fall in love with the problem and the beauty of focusing on customer problems is that we are focused on falling in love with the problem and this turns out to work perfectly with the journey map because where are the problems they're really easy to find they're right there at the bottom of the journey map and when we look at what Cano's model told us we can see that there are problems that we can solve in every possible one of the tracks so we are in a perfect place to solve the problems to understand them to focus on customers to make sure that we're doing the right thing and to get to the basic expectation problems and to get to the problems that would delight this makes a complete strategy a strategy that is based on our customers problems is in essence a strategy it's based on user experience so this is your UX strategy so that's what I came to talk to you about today we need to cut out features to avoid experience rock we need to make sure that we are constantly understanding the users experience to be able to figure out what those missed basic expectations are we can create delight by focusing on pleasure flow and meeting themes allow us to shift the conversation from features to actual customer problems and finally our roadmap can be centered around what users really need not what we think we need to ship to make the checklist as big as possible if you found this the least bit interesting I write about this a tremendous amount on UI EECOM if you're in the design space and we're not connected on LinkedIn please by all means connect to me on LinkedIn I'd be more than happy to find out more about what you're doing and what you're up to and the challenges you face and finally you can follow me on the Twitter's where I tweet about design design strategy design education and the amazing customer service energy in the airline industry ladies gentlemen thank you very much for encouraging my behavior [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: Mind the Product

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Length: 48min 27sec (2907 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018