Building a Winning UX Strategy Using the Kano Model - Jared Spool, at USI

hello hey let's make some noise if this has been an incredible conference so far there we go let's talk about strategy in 2009 the CEO of the Hyatt Hotel chain decided that he wanted to try something different he had been getting he'd been gotten beaten up by his shareholders because their satisfaction ratings had fallen dramatically so he decided he was going to try something a program he called random acts of generosity the idea was inspired by a story he'd read on the Internet's talking about how people were doing things such as when they would go through a tollbooth on the on the highway they would not only pay for themselves but randomly pay for people behind them as a random act of kindness and he thought that this would actually delight people to get random acts of generosity so the way this worked was he instructed all of the staff of all the Hyatt Hotels to just randomly do nice things they would randomly do things like pay for room service or the bar tab or some sort of massage or an upgrade the idea was that by just randomly picking a customer and doing this random thing every so often it would delight the customer so much that they would tell all their friends and they'd be all excited about it what he didn't do the problems that were causing the satisfaction to drop he didn't fix the fact that the hotel was not working functionally for many of the guests air conditioning was broken the room service was sloppy elevators were often very slow and not working their banquet services would mistakenly serve frozen pies instead of thawed out ones at their events there would be broken glass for days without being picked up in public areas these were the things that were causing the satisfaction rating to drop and he thought well maybe if we just paid people off with these random acts of generosity we could boost the satisfaction but it didn't work not only did it not work we can predict why it didn't work it turns out that we can map the experience that a customer has what we do is we put this on a scale where we lay out all the things that the customer has to do with us all of what we call the touch points that a customer has with our business whether online or in person and we can rate those moments on a scale of extreme frustration to extreme delight and we can actually map out the entire journey of that path going from extreme frustration to extreme delight so for example we might have a great experience on the website looking for the hotel but actually looking at the property description we may not be able to tell if it's for the right hotel or not for us so that's frustrating and then maybe once we decide we're going to stay there the actual process of booking works great but then when we go to pay we keep getting error messages about having dashes and our phone numbers and not putting in the right purity code for our credit card and all sorts of crazy stuff like that and that's frustrating so we can map out the frustrating moments and the delightful moments and this turns out to be one of the most useful tools we have because from this we can decide what we want to do differently we can focus on those bits that are most frustrating and work to improve those now for a long time there are many of us who've worked in the field of usability or human factors and where we started was in this idea of saying okay there are all these frustrating experiences out there let's unfrosted let's make them not frustrating anymore and the process of doing that allowed us to to to work our way up and now we've gotten good at this and we can think in terms of delighting our customers delighting our users delighting our employees turns out that delightful employees make for delightful customers so we want to do that too but it's interesting that we have this scale that goes from frustration to delight because there's actually this sort of awkward space in the middle and when we started in that world of usability and human factors that awkward space in the middle was in fact usable experiences and usable experiences basically are a not delightful but they're not frustrating to get from frustrating to usable the methods we used was just to remove all the frustrating bits basically try not to suck that was the method but to get from useable to delightful we have to do something different we actually have to be delightful and knowing what that means knowing what it takes to get there that turns out to be really difficult because it turns out that not sucky is not the same as delightful they are not the same world when we're trying to make something not suck what we do is we just pull out the frustration it's like how Michelangelo would make a sculpture he would carve away the rock that shouldn't be there but delightful is an additive process we have to add something to it what we're doing to make something delightful and this is where we get it gets tricky to build a strategy so do that we have to sort of think about what strategy means and we can in its simplest form decide that the strategy that we're going to have is about moving our users from this idea of frustration to delight but to do that in any given project that we work on there are all sorts of questions that we have to get answers to we first have to figure out what it is we need to build we then need to figure out where the resources we're going to build that are going to come from it's important that we figure out how to say no to what we're doing we have to figure out how we're going to tell if we've done a good job we need to understand how we're going to make things different than what our competitors are building we need to understand where we're going to add value and build something even better than what we have today and of course the all-mighty cost question how much is all this going to cost us so any sort of strategy has to take some notion of an investment we have to decide that we're going to expend money spend resources in order to get a return and so if we go back to this idea of delight errs and frustrate errs how much does it take to get rid of the frustrate earth and how much will it cost to increase the de Leiter's and this turns out to be an easier question to answer than we thought and the person who figured that out was this dude noriaki Cano and he came up with a model that explained what it means to make a good investment towards getting customer satisfaction what kind of investment does one make and he represented this when he was doing his work as a two dimensional model so on the vertical axis he put satisfaction going from frustration to delight on the horizontal axis he said okay we're going to map investment going from a small investment to a high investment and he started to plot out organizations and companies that were good at producing delightful things and organizations that weren't to see what was happening and what he found was that there were basically three patterns the first one is something that he called the performance payoff and the performance payoff is basically a straight investment of we put more money in we get more results out but then he found that there was another one which had to do with basic expectations basic expectations actually start with a fairly high amount of investment and just go up from there but they don't actually produce much in the way of satisfaction they can get rid of frustration but that's it and then the third one is excitement generators excitement generators are where the delightfulness comes from so let's dive into these a little deeper let's start with the performance pay off when Apple comes out with a new operating system one of the things they love to do is Tao how many features they've put into it they do this by just sheer number number seems to be the important thing here right the fact that they've updated all these apps with all these features is what they're selling you TextEdit has new features I'm sure this is major day you can't wait for the new features in TextEdit and that's how they think they think in terms of just putting out more features because the more features you got the better it's got to be and this is a process we see all the time startup comes up with this little app maybe it's got three things it does and it's a success everybody loves it this thing is flying off the virtual shelf now they say okay we need to get people to pay us to upgrade so what do we do well well had a couple more features people keep asking for stuff so we'll add them in sure enough still successful now we've got ourselves an even better show then it's okay let's try that again put in a few more features people keep coming to them saying we want this and slowly over time the number of features that we keep adding start to increase start to go there people are coming in companies are coming in they're putting big bags of money on the conference table and saying we will buy hundreds of these thousands of these if you keep adding features to this and so all of a sudden we are swimming in features with every new release and here's the problem all those features mean that we have to have a user interface with menu items and and links and other elements that make all of this stuff more complicated when we were just three features it was easy and when we were just three features we could take our time and design something that just worked but now that all these people coming in and asking us to build things and we're just taking those big bags of money and we're just saying okay we're going to build this thing even if there's only one company that's ever going to use this feature we'll build it for you we create options we create elements and every time we do that we create complexity this is experience rot experience rot is what happens when we increase features which cause us to increase complexity and thereby degrade the experience suddenly we've got all of these features that we're dealing with and users are not able to use the application someone who's new comes in can't figure out the simplest things to do and it creates havoc and this is expensive this is designed debt now we have all these features how can we fix this well here's what the smart companies do the smart companies decide to go out and study their users they watch what they do and what they learn is that most of their users the great majority of have only figured out how to use a few of the features in the app so what the smart companies do is take that research and they throw everything else away and they prune the product down to just those features now every time I give this presentation someone comes up to me and says well at my company we could never do that once a feature goes into the product it is there until every employee dies right it can never come out again that's just the rules and I tell them I'm completely okay with that I understand why they do that that makes perfect sense to me and I don't care I don't care because if they're not going to do that there's someone else who will this is called disruption in California and this is basically how it works all competitors come in figuring out that someone else has built this big bloated thing figure out what the three or four or five things that the customers actually use are put out a product that's easy to use it's well thought out that has everything integrated and only those things and the vast majority of customers will switch boom that's the competitive way to do it so how do you prevent this problem well the way companies are doing it now is with a simple two letter word no which I believe is the same in French right no it's not um it turns out that the most important thing that a team can do to help their design is to say no to almost any idea for a feature and if you look at the products that have the best experiences what you see is a team of people who've gotten really good at know the analysts everybody will come up with ideas tell them what should be in their thing and they come out with a product that doesn't do that it's very simple it does what it's supposed to do and that's how it works and they fight every new feature request because that's how keep it curation is the so that's how we deal with that performance pay off we make sure we highly curate our designs that takes care of one of the curves but let's talk about expectations so we're staying at this hotel over by the Louvre and one of the things that's amazing about this particular hotel is when we got into our room it's a beautiful room we got into our room there was this door that went to another room and in that other room was the coolest stuff there was a sink and a shower and a toilet it's amazing you have everything in France and that's the thing right that doesn't surprise you that that room is there but here's the deal a hundred years ago many of the hotel rooms in this city did not have that and it wasn't common for those little rooms inside the rooms to have all those things and so that shower turns out to be an expectation not only do I have this expectation that there's a shower I expect this shower to have warm water hot water when I turn on within seconds I turn it on and I expect hot water to come out I don't know where this expectation comes from because when I'm at home I have a two-story house and I turn on the water it can take five minutes for the water to get hot but in a hotel room I expect hot water right away right now imagine a Hyatt Hotel a 32 story Hyatt Hotel do you know what it takes to get hot water to every room within a second it turns out what they have to do is they have to pull circulators and what hot water heaters all the way through the structure so the water is constantly moving and constantly being warmed even at 3 a.m. when it's unlikely anybody is taking a shower so to get the water hot they have to actually pump it all the way up and pump it all the way down and constantly heat it that's a lot of money that Hiatt spends in order to make that water instantly hot which is the basic expectation the thing about basic expectations is you don't get to pick what they are the hotel website never mentions that every room has a bathroom that promise was never made yet if I went to that hotel and it didn't have one I would be completely disappointed completely frustrated I might even go check into another hotel so they didn't set that expectation somebody else set that expectation yet they have to meet that expectation and that's how expectations work you have to meet them even if you didn't set them sometimes it's not even clear who set them sometimes it's your history that set them Netflix when it was in the United States when it first started was all about DVDs in the mail you would get DVDs of movies and one of the things that made Netflix amazing was the wide selection of movies you could get so you would take all these movies and you'd put them in your queue and you'd have them send them to you and they'd sit on your table for three months and then you'd watch them and that was the Netflix experience and it was fine it was great it was wonderful and people loved that they could not just get the big blockbuster movies but they could get little movies that where art films are things they've never heard of when Netflix moved to streaming things had changed for them when they were in the DVD business the movie industry paid no attention to them they thought they were unimportant so they were able to buy all these DVDs cheap and it was no big deal but by the time they moved to streaming it turns out that the movie industry had decided to come out of its coma and notice that they existed and once they did that they said well we're not going to let you stream our movies cheap we want a bigger cut and they insisted on bigger contracts so Netflix trying to protect its assets said no no we're not going to sign for bigger contracts so they just said no and as a result they ended up not getting a lot of movies the problem was their customers didn't understand the contractual problems that Netflix was having with their distributors and the movie industry they didn't understand the licensing fee problems so they couldn't understand why some movies would be of let's say this Bill Murray film would be available for Netflix but this Bill Murray film would not be available for Netflix they had no idea how to do this and it turns out that now the experience of using Netflix is you sit down on a Saturday night and you spend about two hours trying to come up with a movie that they actually stream that you actually want to watch well what about this no what about this no and so they have this basic expectation that they set themselves that they would have all this catalog all of this content and suddenly it's not there it's not available and this is a very frustrating thing for customers this is a map of a little part of Ireland called air-filled Ireland and one of the interesting things about air-filled Ireland the most notable things about this little village just to the east of Dublin is that in air-filled Ireland there is not a single airfield at least there wasn't until Apple apps iOS 6 came out because in iOS 6 Apple Maps suddenly the icon for an airfield appeared in Airfield Ireland probably a machine learning problem and everybody thought this was really funny everybody except for the Irish Federal Aviation Administration who didn't think it was funny at all because they being the people they are had this scenario in their head that some pilot would have a massive engine failure be in a real distress mode reach into their pocket pull out their Apple device and look for the nearest airfield only to be told that was a place called airfield Ireland for which they would then try and make an emergency landing in someplace that doesn't have an airfield and this scared them now here's the thing Apple's iOS 6 Maps application was the best map application of its time it was by far the most advanced one it was the first iOS are at first online map system that worked completely well for people who are blind it had sonic cues that would tell you whether you were work walking in the right direction or not it would read off street names as you passed them it was a fantastic tool for people who had no vision great features but the problem was the data you may remember some of the problems with iOS 6 maps like this post-apocalyptic view of New York City Central Park or the dipping of the Hoover Dam the rida struction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge the flattening of the Eiffel Tower or my purse no favorite the discovery of the Swedish Burger King while the app was a great app the data was not up to par and therefore it did not meet the basic expectations and this was the problem the thing about basic expectations is that they actually take a fair amount of investment you have to spend a lot of money to make sure you meet those basic expectations it costs a lot of money to get the map data right it costs a lot of money to get the water hot throughout the hotel and you can try and cut those costs but that will induce frustration of course it makes sense for the New Orleans Hyatt to shut off the hot water at 3:00 in the morning because who would possibly want to take a shower at 3:00 in the morning it couldn't possibly be someone who had a 6:00 a.m. international flight and has to get to the airport two hours early they certainly wouldn't want to have a shower between 3:00 and 4:00 so that frustrates but the thing is this you can fix the frustration but you can never make anyone happy because the best you can do is neutral satisfaction no one's going around saying wow that toilet in the in my hotel room it's amazing you only have to flush it once right no-one says these things when it doesn't work we talk about it when it works we ignore it it's invisible so we can only screw up that's the thing about basic expectations we have to get them right but we only find out when we get them wrong so we constantly have to do research to understand what are the basic that are being set that we have set that others have set and how do we bring that through so this is our journey map and as you can see it's got peaks and valleys things we did well and things we didn't do some well but what if we took the team and we did a little exercise where we just said what would the customers experience be like if we took all the valleys and made them equal to the peaks basically make it all delightful this is basically what we need to do with excitement generators we push up past the frustration point that's meeting the basic expectations then we go and make things delightful it turns out that one of the people who spoke here earlier today Danish is now figured out that there were if you didn't go to her talk this morning it was absolutely amazing you should have been there she figured out that there are three approaches to delight she calls them pleasure flow and meaning so let's take apart Dana's little model here and start with pleasure there's two guys at the University of Michigan who did this interesting project called the significant objects project and what they did was they went out to ebay and they bought junk like this little statue of some Russian dude on a piece of wood fortunately being that they're professors they didn't have to spend a lot of their salary on it cost them three bucks what they did next was the interesting part they went out and found friends who were writers and asked them to write stories about the objects that they created for example one of their writer friends created this story about the figurine of Saint vaak Lemire and went on to describe how this was a family heirloom that the current owner who was on eBay had in their possession that was given to them by their grandmother who was given to them by their grandmother that was completely convinced that this was a good-luck charm because it had saved their grandmother's village from burning down during the pogroms and the story just went on and on about all the good luck things that happened to them because they had this little statue and all the bad things that happened to their neighbors because they didn't have the statue and went on to describe all of this wonderful stuff fantastic story the professor's took their friends story and took the figurine and put them both back up on eBay to try and sell it as if the story was true and it worked and they sold it for a hundred and ninety three dollars and fifty cents now the only difference between the statue they bought and what they sold was the story the story makes all the difference well it turns out that this happens a lot we do studies of how people shop online and we watch people shop for things like cameras and the way that we watch people shop for things like cameras is we find people who need cameras and we bring them into our labs and we actually give them the money to buy the cameras and what's fascinating about this is that we've noticed some patterns about the way the companies that sell the things like camera sell them for example walmart.com they have a product description for every camera but the product description is completely different from camera to camera because all the Walmart comm people do is they copy and paste whatever the manufacturer gives them it makes sense right if you're going to sell thousands of items you're not going to spend a lot of time crafting anything for it instead the manufacturer has already done all the hard work you just take what they said and you put there they know their product better than you put it out there but one of the sites we studied was a little different at sites called Crutchfield and Crutchfield sells the same cameras that walmart sells but they don't copy and paste the manufacturers description in fact they completely ignore the manufacturers description instead what they do is they hire people in their customer service department who love the products they use they hire photographers and they hire audio files and they hire people who just love those products and they bring them in to work in customer service and then instead of using the manufacturers description they give the product they're thinking of buy of selling to those employees and those employees do things like make videos about what they love about the product and what they don't like about the product and they write these massive database tables that allows them to actually list everything that every camera does so you can compare one camera to another easily and they create these long-long product research dockets that have every little detail about what the camera can and can't do including what comes in the box every detail is there and what they've done is they've added all that in now in our studies the way they work is we find people who need to buy a product they're ready to buy it and we actually give them as their payment for the study the money to make the purchase we figure out how much the product they want to buy is and we give them that much money plus a little bit just to just as a budget and that's what they have they can buy the product they can not buy the product and it turns out that when people buy things at a site like Walmart they and about 89% of the money that we give them but when they were at Crutchfield they spent more than that not only did they spend a hundred percent of the money we gave them they spent an additional hundred and thirty seven percent of their own money to buy the product and the only difference between the Crutchfield product and the Walmart product was the story the story provided delight and it was actually at very low expense for a very high return so it turns out that that's the pleasure part of this model let's talk about flow in the United States you can buy automobile insurance this is this pays for you in case of an accident and traditionally online automobile insurance folks when they first came out they stuck with their call center models so they would ask you lots of questions it would take on average 20 minutes to fill out a form to be able to actually apply for insurance only to discover at the end of the 20 minutes that you weren't qualified to get it and this was a very frustrating thing and main reason that you were not qualified that you was that you did not live someplace where they offered the insurance so when progressives started offering online they decided they were going to do it differently so the first thing they do is they ask you for your postal code and immediately tell you whether they sell in that postal code or not seems like a brain-dead simple thing nobody else had thought to do this before them but they took it further the next thing they do is they ask you for your name and your mailing address and your date of birth and that's pretty much it because at that point they can now go look up in the registry of Motor Vehicles they can look up your data and figure out what cars you have so unlike the other insurance companies which make you put in all sorts of information about the cars they just ask you to pick which cars of that you already own you want to insure and since they know the make and model of those cars they can automatically fill out all the equipment that it has something that the other insurance companies always asked you for and what they were able to do was in six screens and less than five minutes give you a complete quote and that turns out to be delightful being able to get a complete quote in less than five minutes with only six screens of interaction and that's flow the last piece of this is meaning a meeting is a little bit more complicated to get your head around a car rental agency started in the United States called zip car and zip car is absolutely amazing because instead of renting cars by the day you rent them by the hour you fill out an application you get it approved you put your card information in and now you can just get a card for when you need to go to a doctor's appointment for when you need to go pick up some heavy things at a store you can you can get the car just for the time you need it you don't have to own a car they pay for the gas they pay for the insurance they pay for everything the cars are often parked within blocks of where you live and that's the key thing because they're parked within blocks from where you live and you just go and pick it up you drive it when you're done with it if the gas is a little low it's your responsibility fill it up for the next person hopefully the last person filled it up for you and they've created these communities around the cars Zipcar has neighborhood parties and everybody who rents the cars come to those parties and get to meet each other and on their badges at the party not only do they have their name but they have the name of the car they rent so you can meet all the people who also love your car and now you know the people who leave it a little dirty or don't fill up the gas like they're supposed to and guess what you're more likely to put the gas in the car but they do other things like at Christmas time they'll let you rent the car for free if you'll deliver toys to families that normally would not be able to afford those things or on Election Day you can rent the car at half price if you'll pick somebody up and take them to vote who can't get to the polls otherwise so they're creating all of this community-based elements to their program and this resonates with their customers and people tell us that they love Zipcar because of that now creating meaning is hard it's the most expensive most difficult thing you can do and it's really complicated because you have to work really really hard to make this this all be functional the thing about creating meaning is you have to believe it and the customer has to believe it United for example it's an airline of the United States that tries very hard to piss every passenger off as much as they can the effort they go to is is mind-blowing but every so often they'll try to convince you that they actually are doing the right thing and the way they do that is they'll run an advertisement that talks about how they are taking care of the Olympic athletes flying them across and that's that's their idea of meaning the customers don't buy it because the customers see the EPIK athletes getting this great treatment in their little ads but they don't see themselves getting that great treatment it's not authentic they're not treating their customers authentically so meaning has to be authentic so this is Dana's model this idea of pleasure flow and meaning that is critical to success this is the hardest part getting the excitement generators right if you can do that you you will succeed but you have to get the basic expectations you have to get the the features right then you can start to work on delight that was the problem that the CEO of Hyatt had it wasn't that people didn't want to get the occasional bar tab paid for they needed the water to be hot in the shower and the toilet to work and they're not to be glass on the floor that's what they needed and the thing about excitement generator is the thing about des lighters is that things that are delightful today will be basic expectations tomorrow six seven years ago if I were to go to a hotel and it had Wi-Fi that was amazing if I go to a hotel in it and it doesn't have Wi-Fi today that's not acceptable it's gotten to the point that I want Wi-Fi on every flight I want I take for some reason when I'm in the clouds I need to get to all my things in the cloud so I need to have Wi-Fi on the flight that's a basic expectation it came out of nowhere it came in Western a few years that it's now a basic expectation and it needs to not be crazy-ass expensive it has to be cheap or free you I already paid a lot of money for this service so that's the basic expectations they go from des lighters to basic expectations and you have to be careful about that so I want to talk about one more thing because it's this word that everybody keeps using here I don't think it means what you think it means it's innovation we can map the current experience of the customer we can figure out what we want the experience to be what we would call our aspirational experience what we aspire to be the space between that current experience and that aspirational experience that is where innovation comes from that is where we innovate and the way we innovate is best by taking those most frustrating bits and improving them so the United States taxes are a fairly complex thing nobody looks forward to it but a company named Intuit came up with a solution called snap tax which is very simple you take a picture of a form the form that your employer gives you and it scans the picture of the form all the information that goes into your taxes if you don't have very complicated taxes all that information is actually on that form if you have multiple employers which people in those income brackets that use this thing do you can scan each one of those forms they'll scan it add it up show you your tax form filled out ask you if you agree that everything is correct and then if you say yes it will actually file it electronically for you and get your refund for the 48% of Americans for which all the information they need is actually on their forms taxes are done in under 15 minutes that's delightful and that's innovative but here's the thing about innovation every conference I go to talks about innovation and the thing is is that people think that innovation is about inventing new things coming up with something that nobody had before but here's the thing Intuit did not invent the camera they did not invent optical scanning they did not invent electronic filing they did not invent any aspect of that app all they did was take things that already existed in the world put them together and added value because they added value to some thing that didn't exist before that's real innovation so innovation is about adding value so if we want to be innovative we need to focus on the basic expectations that our customers and users have and start to explore where we can add pleasure flow and meaning to be able to bring value out to them that's what I came to talk to you about thank you very much

Channel: USI Events

Views: 66,469

Rating: 4.9354839 out of 5

Keywords: user interface, USI Events, Kano model, innovation, ux strategy, ux design, USI, USIEvents, OCTO, dmaic, kano modell, six sigma, the kano model, kano analysis, jared spool, user experience design, licorne, utilisateur

Id: Hr1rN3jibIk

Length: 47min 49sec (2869 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2015