Friday, March 3, 2017

Quiz: Do You Really Hate Comic Sans?

You’re a designer: you use Moleskine notebooks, the stickers on the back of your MacBook Pro are artfully arranged, there’s a motivational poster hung over your standing desk, and…you wear your hatred of Comic Sans like a badge of honor.

Forget the “no bad typeface” rule, Comic Sans offends your very being. The infuriatingly omnipresent font is used by everyone, from your grade school teacher, to your grandmother, and every time you see it, you die a little on the inside.

But do you really loath the world’s least-endorsed typeface? Or does seeing Vincent Connare’s magnus opus everywhere from gravestones to financial reports, give you a secret thrill?

Which of these pairs most offends your aesthetic senses, and is it Comic Sans?

Which sports branding uses Comic Sans?

Nike

or Nike

Which movie poster uses Comic Sans?

Jaws

or Jaws

Which Oscar winner uses Comic Sans?

Moonlight

or Moonlight

Which Obama uses Comic Sans?

Obama

or Obama

Which police warning uses Comic Sans?

Police Line

or Police Line

Which subway sign uses Comic Sans?

Downtown & Brooklyn

or Downtown & Brooklyn

Which magazine cover uses Comic Sans?

Vogue

or Vogue

Which iPhone microsite uses Comic Sans?

iPhone 7

or iPhone 7

Which error message uses Comic Sans?

Critical Error

or Critical Error

Which album cover uses Comic Sans?

The Velvet Underground & Nico

or The Velvet Underground & Nico

PLAY AGAIN !

Spotted a hidden gem in there? Alongside Comic Sans, the typefaces used were (in order): Comic Relief, Jollygood Sans, Architect’s Daughter, Comic Neue, Komica Text, Cartoonist Hand, Jollygood Sans (again), Suplexmentary Comic, Comic Neue Bold, Comic Relief (again).

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Stumped for Growth Ideas? Use Customer Support Data to Drive Revenue

Awful feeling, isn’t it?

You’re struggling to find new opportunities to increase growth this quarter.

But no worries. The solution to your problem is staring you in the face.

Customer support data holds the answer to earning more revenue. It’s an effective tool for identifying gaps in your customer service and uncovering when to upsell in the sales cycle.

“Every support team answers customers. Great support teams use data to discover trends, make the business case for fixing big problems, and improve the customer experience,” writes Simon Ouderkirk, support team lead and happiness engineer at WordPress.com.

Don’t stay in a growth rut. Here’s how customer support data helps the bottom line.

Learn More About Your Buyers

Analytics is useful for understanding your consumers’ behaviors and interests. And with support data, your team can learn what matters the most.

Support tickets reveal the inner thoughts of your customers. Based on their questions, you’ll grasp not only what they need, but also their expectations for your service.

For example, customer support data may show that buyers prefer finding a solution via a knowledge base rather than sending an email and waiting 24 hours for a response. And that’s likely, because 76% of US online adults used FAQs on a company’s website in 2014.

If a knowledge base improves customer success, your team must take action to provide consumers with quality answers to their questions. Create a step-by-step instructional guide or produce short video tutorials to walk them through the process.

Support emails also can tell you more about a customer’s level of frustration regarding a specific issue. In the email below, you’ll notice my direct tone. This message was my fourth interaction with the company in three weeks about the same problem.

Studying customers equips your team to aggressively cater to their needs. Happy customers are more likely to continue purchasing from your brand than disappointed buyers who never got their issues resolved.

Business growth happens when your team is vigilant about customer satisfaction. Using signature happiness ratings in emails is one way to gauge your audience.

Image Source

A happiness rating encourages immediate feedback to help you fine tune your service. Plus, it allows you to connect with customers on a human level.

Strive to learn more about your customers. Support data can lead to satisfied customers.

Identify Critical Issues

Customer support is a practical channel for spotting issues affecting your business systems. Without analyzing the data, you’ll remain stagnant and won’t know how to grow your internal processes.

For instance, how many conversations do you have with your customers every month? The total may indicate consumer growth and the need to hire new team members. Or it may highlight ongoing problems with your product.

Also, what’s your average response time? It’s important to know when customers are receiving replies from your team. A high response time may pinpoint gaps in your support staff’s efficiency. Or it may be an indicator of greater tech issues.

Support data offers relevant information to tweak product features and change your brand messaging. Collecting data helps your predict future behavior and notice shifts in consumer interests.

Analytics is powerful for anticipating when customers may need product assistance. It also gives you insight on when to contact future buyers before they even communicate with your team.

In-app messaging makes it easier for your brand to talk directly with customers. No more guessing how consumers think about your services. Instead, send them a message to gather their insights.

In the example above, the social promotion tool Quuu uses in-app messaging to ask customers questions about a possible change in their service. What’s great is that it doesn’t involve typing out a long answer. Rather, the customer can simply give a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Customer support data helps your staff detect internal challenges. Conduct your own analysis to improve your revenue growth.

Shape Your Content Resources

Content marketing continues to serve as a strategy to generate brand awareness and funnel qualified leads. However, failing to create the right content might stall potential revenue.

From customer questions and complaints, develop relevant content that addresses buyers’ concerns and offers a solution. It’s not enough to just post a generic blog post on your site, hoping that the audience gets value from it.

Create an editorial workflow that allows your customer success team to provide suggestions for future content. Do consumers need more details about a specific product feature? Are buyers struggling to understand how you compare to a particular competitor?

Content opens the doors to reducing buyers’ fears and quelling any hesitations hindering consumers from purchasing your product. Moreover, during the onboarding process, content reassures customers that they made the right decision.

Wista provides a catalog of resources for its customers. Their team offers video tutorials on everything about video marketing, from selecting the music to choosing a microphone.

Also, consider updating content that receives a steady flow of traffic. Observe what’s attracting customers to the resource and brainstorm how your team can optimize the experience.

“If you see that one help page is being accessed far more than others, you should strongly consider optimizing that content so that you’re effectively guiding a user through this certain experience or even break the content into additional sections to address more specific issues,” states Kelli Simpson, marketing manager at DataHero.

Data leads to better content, and better content steers the sales funnel in the right direction.

Connect With Customers

Diving deeper into support data is an opportunity to connect with customers. In today’s market, consumers demand brand relationships that aren’t superficial.

Customers desire to build authentic relationships with their favorite brands. And because products are extensions of a buyer’s lifestyle, consumers want to feel comfortable about supporting brands.

Support data exposes what type of relationships consumers prefer. Similar to a friendship, some will only want occasional updates, while others will make an effort to talk to you on a regular basis.

But it all boils down to treating your customer with respect. In the Facebook thread below, notice how the Zappos support agent responds to the customer. The company wants to delight the buyer despite the unfortunate circumstances.

Earn brand loyalty by using support data to develop personalized services. Customize the experience at every stage of the sales journey.

Segment your support tickets with specific tags to identify patterns. Then, incorporate that data into your services.

“A crucial part of customer service is being proactive and anticipating what people might need so they can use your product successfully. Would you rather have your customers think of you as a sommelier or a clerk at a quick mart?” says Jim Belosic, CEO and co-founder of ShortStack.

Build a bridge between your brand and the customer, and use data as a guide to strengthen the relationship.

Data to the Rescue

Growth is a priority for your business. To attain your sales goals, focus on customer support data as a solution.

Monitor customer interactions to learn their interests and needs. Use data to spot gaps in your sales cycle, and transform your content resources with customer insight.

Customer support isn’t just for the customer. Take advantage of data to grow your business.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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How to Use Tooltips as Microinteractions

Tooltips are potentially the best and most efficient approach to onboarding new users to any given app, software, program or user interface. They’re generally very helpful, clear-cut in their communication, and unobtrusive, so users can do what the tooltips suggest without running into any impediment.

Looked at in this way, your average tooltip is easily a micro interaction, as it helps users achieve a single task or helps users manipulate a process. A micro interaction is a subset of the user experience: It’s a dynamic process that’s initiated by a trigger, causes something to happen, provides feedback to the user, and then informs the user as to the next step.

Good tooltips are designed to be so discreet that, sometimes, you’d swear they were never there. That’s the indication of a great micro interaction, too: You only really miss them if they’re not there all of a sudden to help you achieve a task.

Let’s take an in-depth look at what tooltips should be used for, what matters in tooltip design, and what to include and what to avoid.

Use cases for tooltips

Tooltips exist to boost your site’s or app’s UX. That’s pretty much it. These micro interactions have to make life easier for your users in some way, shape or form. Although their purpose is straightforward, correctly and consistently implementing them in your platform may be a different story since it can get tricky to make the right call.

Unfamiliar Icons or Buttons

When your users encounter icons or buttons that are unfamiliar to them or are otherwise not labeled, then it’s a good idea to design some tooltips into the interface. Even if an icon or button is familiar-looking, but still needs a short explanation to onboard users quickly—say, in the case of a cogwheel on a dashboard—then including a tooltip makes all the sense in the world.

Additional (non essential) information

Here’s the key: not essential. A tooltip can provide extra information to users, so that the screen isn’t overly full of unnecessary text.

A great example of this is when you have tabs open in your browser: when you hover with your cursor over the tab, a tooltip will quickly appear, telling you the exact webpage title of where you are. Now, this extra info isn’t essential, but it’s nice to have when you want to make a note of exactly what page you’re visiting.

If the info is essential, a tooltip’s no good. The info should be included permanently right in your interface for user convenience and quick reference.

Tooltips aren’t ideal for everything

By the same token, tooltips can quickly become harmful to great UX on a device when they’re used incorrectly. Overdoing their use is a sure way to make your users sick and tired of what is otherwise a very helpful means of guiding your users through an interface you just designed.

Unintuitive design

Unintuitive design is when your design forces your users to keep relying on a tooltip to make it through your interface. In such a scenario, the best tooltip won’t help because, blatantly, something’s wrong in your design that keeps forcing your users to keep checking the tooltip too much. A tooltip should really only be used for onboarding users to a specific process, but, after that initial tutorial, users should be able to do things themselves.

Interaction with the tooltip’s content

Sometimes, it becomes necessary for users to actually interact with the content inside of the tooltip itself. For example, a tooltip’s content might include a call to action button, and the content may prompt users to click on the button. It could be anything from a signup button to login link.

However, it’s considered sub-par design to include such interactive elements inside your tooltips if they disappear when your users move their cursors to the tooltip…to follow the call to action. Just think of how frustrating that is to users—especially when your tooltip tells them how they can perform the action to begin with!

In such cases, just allow the calls to action to speak for themselves, designing them significantly enough so that they can get noticed all on their own.

Rules for awesome tooltip design

How you design your tooltips to provide micro interactions that guide users, and provide feedback, makes a great difference to their enjoyment of your interface. By spending a bit of extra time on how you design tooltips, you can provide a helpful experience to your users instead of one they get frustrated with.

Minimalism

As with so much else in web design, minimalism makes for a superior interface. There’s less chance of something not being as clear as it should to the user…and thereby ruining what should otherwise be a helpful micro interaction. Minimalism means basic colors, copy and language.

Sustainability

Your tooltip should be as helpful, unobtrusive and convenient to users the 100th time, as it was the very first time. Resist the temptation to go with questionable or clever design cues and go with tried, tested and true instead.

Noticeability

Tooltips should be easy to find and see without users having to resort to any detective work on the screen. One way to achieve this is by using very obvious visual or directional cues, such as arrows going from the tooltip to the element (button, icon, etc.).

Relevant and sensible information

When a tooltip appears, the info therein has to be easily understood by your users. This means short sentences with very clear language. Since the on-screen area for a tooltip is limited anyway, it’s necessary to be very concise. Nonetheless, you should also refrain from providing info that’s redundant since the info in a tooltip should only be a supplement to info that’s not immediately apparent in your interface.

This can’t be stressed enough: By thinking through how you design your tooltips, you can make them live up to their purpose and avoid the worst kind of tooltip, which is the one that hampers the task you want users to accomplish smoothly.

Tooltips: the epitome of microinteractions

In many ways, tooltips are the ultimate microinteractions. They help your users achieve a task or manipulate a process in an interface that you’ve designed. Depending on how you design them, you can save your users a lot of trouble or make life harder for them.

Unfortunately, it can be quite easy for designers to get a tooltip wrong—to the detriment of their users. To ensure stellar tooltip design each and every time, it helps to fully understand the true nature and reason of using tooltips in the first place, along with what works in tooltip design and what doesn’t.

Only then can you provide your users with the relevant information they need to efficiently understand your interface in a convenient and simple way.

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Conversion Optimization: How to reduce friction and anxiety in a checkout process you don’t control

Engaging in conversion optimization requires making a modification of some sort to improve conversion. But, what if there are steps in your customers’ buying journey that you can’t control?

For example, we often hear from marketers that they don’t really have the time or resources to change their shopping cart in significant ways to improve conversion. Or, if you’re in affiliate marketing, channel marketing, or simply have a go-to-market partner, you might control the beginning of the funnel but have no control over the final conversion. Perhaps you sell a product through third-party stores and distributors and have no control over that process.

I was recently in this boat myself. Not only am I a student in the University of Florida/MECLABS Institute Communicating Value and Web Conversion graduate certificate program, but I’ve been working on marketing it before the April 1st application deadline as well.

The Optimization Process

The first thing I did with the team was map out the customer journey — starting with not knowing anything about the program all the way to enrolling as a student in the program.

Now, here was the great irony. Session 2 of the MMC5436 Messaging Methodologies and the Practice of Conversion Optimization course in the program walks through the optimization process and the first, second and third steps you should take. The very first step is reducing friction and anxiety.

However, when we looked at the step in the customer buying journey with the most friction and anxiety, there was nothing we could do to reduce those elements because that step was the University of Florida application.

When friction is a good thing

The UF application necessarily has friction and anxiety, of course. After all, this isn’t a simple online training purchase; this is a real university application. It should have friction and anxiety. When you increase friction you increase quality as well. And when you have a complex process, it can induce anxiety. Unlike an online product purchase, where I assume the acceptance rate is 100% (as long as the credit card goes through), the University of Florida rejects more “customers” than it invites in, with an acceptance rate of only 46%.

When a process created for one purpose is used for another

However, our students wouldn’t be undergrads or MBA students trying to attain a complex and long degree. Since our program is a graduate certificate (essentially, an accelerated credential that only requires four master’s-level courses), we wouldn’t be using UF’s application to weed out students. Applicants only need a 3.0 undergraduate GPA and don’t have to take the GRE or GMAT, so no weeding out of students is necessary.

But, they would still be UF students, so we would still have to use the standard application. And, our audience would be working professionals in advertising, marketing and general business — so they are accustomed to a seamless customer experience.

Customer-First Marketing: Empowering customers to interact with your brand in the way that works best for them

In the previous semesters of this program, both UF and MECLABS offered, essentially, a concierge team to add the human touch to the application process to overcome this friction and anxiety.

This works well, but we wanted to add an ecommerce option for anyone who wanted to become a student without feeling like they were becoming a “lead” — these people were marketers after all.

For applicants who wanted the human touch, great. We still offer it.

But we didn’t want to force a complex “sale” for those who weren’t interested in being contacted; we wanted to empower them to apply on their own if they chose to do so.

We changed a few other things about the landing page as well to put the customer first and allow them to interact with us in the way they chose, not the way we forced them to. Originally there was an information packet behind a gate — a common and sensible practice to build a list for nurturing. We improved the packet and made it readily available for download. If you just want the information and don’t want emails from us, we don’t want your email address.

We also changed the opt-in form at the bottom of the page to be about content instead of as a squeeze page for general program information. Because if people do want to regularly receive emails from us with content inspired by the program, we want to give them that option as well.

Back to creating an ecommerce-type experience for visitors who want to apply on their own. Marketers usually think of removing elements of a process (form fields, steps, etc.) to reduce friction, but we couldn’t remove anything — everything on the application was required by the university. And we couldn’t change any wording to reduce anxiety because the application was hosted by the university. We had only one option left.

Adding copy and design to reduce friction and anxiety

We had to figure out a way to get more control over the final step of the funnel — the application —without actually getting control over it or changing anything about it. We couldn’t create our own version asking for the necessary information and sending it to UF through an API due to the university’s security requirements.

We ended up creating an Apply landing page that pulls the UF application into our landing page using an iframe.

Since the application is in an iframe, the information applicants enter into it goes directly to UF and is hosted on their server. However, by embedding the iframe on our landing page, we’ve been able to add copy and design that hopefully helps to reduce friction and anxiety in the process without the applicants ever needing to contact us.
At the top of the page, we include general copy to let potential students know what they need to apply.

And our application developer Christine Risberg created a Javascript slider that walks the user step-by-step through the UF application. This is directly above the application iframe, and the applicant just needs to click forward on the slider each time he or she progresses in the application.

Unlike most of our case studies and experiments, this is something we’re literally working on right now, so I don’t have specific results yet. But feel free to take a look at the application page and the entire landing page, and let me know what you think.

Could an approach like this work for a sales process you don’t have total control over? If you can’t remove or change elements from a conversion process you don’t control (whether your own shopping cart or through an affiliate process, etc.), are there ways you can add copy and design to help reduce the friction and anxiety in the process? Could you also use an iframe? Or perhaps you have a better approach?

Remember, there’s more to reducing friction than removing things. When that option is off the table, see if there’s anything you can add. When using copy and design to reduce friction, sometimes more is less.

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.

You might also like:

Learn more about friction, anxiety and the MECLABS Conversion Sequence heuristic here

The Difference Between Marketing and Advertising (and Why It Matters)

How to Make Yourself More Valuable in Your Profession

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Thursday, March 2, 2017

3 Months with Figma: Why it Changes Design Forever

Like most designers, I started with Photoshop, using it for over half a decade. From there, Sketch burst onto the scene and did not take long to announce itself as the go-to tool for designers. For the last three months, I have been using Figma each and every day, integrating it into my workflow and exercising its features across a broad spectrum of projects. The results have been overwhelmingly positive and as such I have selected a number of key features of Figma which I found to be extremely useful and often innovative.

Sketch is a highly competent and all-around excellent piece of software. Adobe is another piece of software which I was just getting used to using. So when I first began testing Figma, I was somewhat reluctant and skeptical as to its place in what is now a very competitive market. In this article I’m going to discuss why Figma is now my primary tool for design, why I believe it changes how we design, and why I believe it will become the next industry-standard tool.

Accessibility

Figma is extremely accessible. It’s available on Mac, Windows, and through modern browsers (unlike Sketch which is confined to the Mac). This instantly makes it more inclusive, and allows for collaboration not just with other designers, but developers, copywriters, and more. It’s universal and as a result makes the design process something which is far more collaborative and complete.

Your files are accessible anywhere. No download, no syncing. You could be at a public computer, a colleagues computer, or even on a Chromebook, yet your designs remain accessible to view and edit.

The accessibility ties in closely with its key feature, collaboration. By intertwining the two, collaboration becomes something quite extraordinary. You could have a use case where a designer is working in real-time with other designers, developers and copywriters. The possibilities are unique and exciting. I think as more designers and teams explore using Figma as a primary tool, more and more interesting ways of implementing the technology into a workflow will become apparent.

Lightweight

Figma is very lightweight. You don’t even need to have the application installed. Simply open a browser tab and you are set. At the same time, you don’t need to install any fonts, plugins, color palettes, or resources. It’s all readily accessible at the click of a button. For me, the way it implements Google fonts is particularly useful when working on multiple machines—we all know how tricky it can be to keep and maintain fonts in sync across multiple devices, and the impossibility of doing so on a public, or colleague’s computer.

Version History

The version history is a key feature in combination with the collaboration technology. The last situation you want is to come back to your design and see somebody has made changes that cannot be easily undone or restored. Sketch also has this technology, but at the expense of masses of disk space. Many of us have experienced this issue, and seen first hand just how enormous the backups can become when working in large files each and every day. Figma stores all these backups in the cloud. First and foremost, that means they are safe if you lose your computer, or you encounter a technical issue. Secondly, it’s not going to fill your computer with version backups like Sketch.

Pen Tool

The pen tool is something to behold. It’s so easy to use and puts other software to shame. It’s important to try it to appreciate its benefits, but it certainly makes it hard to go back to using Sketch or Adobe.

Constraints

Constraints allow you to produce responsive designs with ease. By constraining elements, a simple resize of the frame allows you to visualise the design at multiple widths and heights—something where previously you had to produce multiple mockups and wait until the development phase to see just quite how it would work in reality.

Components

Components do away with symbols (in Sketch), and a separate page to house them all in. They provide something far more intuitive and lightweight. Effectively, a component acts as the symbol, and then all copies of the component are called instances. One particular use case that I use time and time again, is to produce multiple color variations of the same design. Then, any changes I make to the original component are instantly reflected in the instances, while keeping color changes intact. Of course, the possibilities are endless and and there are so many ways to implement this feature into your designs.

Support

The support in Figma is impeccable. From the documentation, to the live chat within the application, it has it all. The chat is particularly useful for asking questions and reporting any issues. The staff are responsive, helpful, and genuine, and this has certainly helped me cement Figma as my go-to design tool.

Conclusion

Figma still has its deficiencies—it’s not yet a perfect tool by any means. The Sketch import is often buggy and sometimes inaccurate. The lack of shared styles is one key aspect I miss from Sketch. That being said, it’s an extremely exciting tool. It’s rethinking every aspect of the design process from the ground up, and innovating in ways we haven’t seen since the inception of Sketch. The team are quick to push updates and as such it’s now at the point where I can comfortably remove Sketch from my dock, and move forward with a highly-capable and innovative tool for designing.

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017

The New Customer Service Trend that’s Shaking Up the Marketing Industry (In a Good Way!)

When it comes to customer service trends, most marketers and customer support teams groan and shake their head. Here’s another glimpse into supposedly “what customers want” that’s supposed to make them beat a path to our doors.

Except it rarely works out that way – and customer service suffers as a result of it.

But now, a new trend is catching on that could change all of that. And calling it a trend is really doing a disservice to the notion at all. What it should be called is “the way service should always have been done”.

It’s called customer-first marketing – and it’s changing everything you think you know about how your prospects think, act and react. Let’s take a closer look:

What is Customer-First Marketing?

First, let me ask you a question – as a marketer, how would you describe customer-first marketing if you weren’t sure what it was?

Many will say, “well, we need to build a marketing and sales strategy around convincing users to try our product or service and become customers. Once they’re in the funnel, we advertise to them based on where they are in the buying stage and hope to grow repeat business.”

This is a solid marketing strategy, but it’s not customer-first marketing. When you start with “We need to build…” you’re already discounting the customer and their needs. If anything, they’re more of an after-thought – a mindless object that only comes into play once the funnels are built and the strategies executed.

Let’s take a look at another example. Let’s say a client wants to meet with you to explore your solution further. Your sales people march in like an army under strict orders and pressures to sell. After all, they’ve got quotas to meet!

Customer-first marketing turns both of these examples on their heads. It involves a lot of discussion and back-and-forth with the customer to discover a solution that truly works for both parties. It’s a method where sales are the secondary focus.

Now, don’t panic.

Because although you’re conducting a lot of research and having a lot of discussion and making a lot of choices and getting feedback, all of this may seem like a huge lead weight on the actual marketing process, but in fact with customer-first marketing, it’s the most crucial piece.

What is the Difference Between Customer-Centric Marketing and Customer-First Marketing?

Now, you may hear the phrase “customer-first marketing” and think it’s just another spin on the often-cited “customer-centric marketing” strategy. But here is the main difference:

Customer-centric marketing aims strategies AT the customer. You are looking at the customer as an end-goal. Customer-first marketing revolves AROUND the customer. You are making them an integral part of your marketing, research and development.

In December of 2016, MarketingSherpa released a comprehensive study detailing what measures contributed the most to customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is one of the highest notches to strive for on the customer-first marketing barometer, and these insights demonstrate a very revealing path toward the end goal.

The Big Question: What Do Satisfied Customers Feel versus Unsatisfied Customers?

According to the study, over half of satisfied customers reported having a “good experience” with the company. But what constitutes a good experience? Namely, it makes the customer feel like they are important to, and have a relationship with the company. Perhaps most insightful was answer number 9 on the list: “It puts my needs above their own business goals”.

Contrast that with the number one reason for unsatisfied customers (with over a third of the responses) and you get “The company does not put my needs and wants above their own business goals.”

If you want to see just how vital this idea is to separating the satisfied from the unsatisfied customers, take a closer look at this question:

But simply putting one’s customers ahead of one’s business goals does much more than let businesses give themselves a pat on the back. When customers are genuinely satisfied and feel like their needs are being met, they’ll not only continue to purchase from the company, but also highly recommend it to others, as noted in the chart below:

Making the Shift to Customer-First

So if you get to enjoy all of these benefits when putting a customer-first plan into action, why aren’t more companies doing it? According to Jamie Beckland, VP of Product and Marketing at Janrain, the answer is simple:

“So if it’s generally agreed upon that customer-first marketing is essential to survival, let alone growth, why do companies struggle with it so much? Marketing benchmarks are difficult for many executives to reset. It’s difficult to justify not sending fewer, more targeted emails, and risk programs not delivering against quarterly targets. Unfortunately, the long-term damage caused by this approach is likely to outweigh any short-term gains. Once you forgo tailoring an experience to the customer, you can expect them to cut off communication, or worse, take their money somewhere else.”

So what are some things you can do to help promote more customer-first moments, to gradually but solidly show progress in moving to this new kind of thinking? Here are a few ideas:

Walk Them Through the Process

There’s nothing quite so overwhelming as signing up for a new product or service, only to have a handful of emails (or one really long email) dumped in your lap on how to use it. Instead, take the time to walk them through the process. Offer a free getting started webinar, or let them schedule a date/time to learn the basics of how to use your product or service. Check in with them often to see how they’re progressing and what questions they may have.

Highlight Their Achievements

Have your customers done something awesome with your product or service? Why not work with them to share it with the world! Or simply highlight something about your customers – recognition makes everyone feel great about him or herself.

Some companies even go so far as to hand-write notes to their customers, thanking them for their feedback and providing them with a little something – a t-shirt, a gift card or some other token of appreciation that says “I value what you have to say – and here is something to thank you for taking the time to tell me about it.”

Be Proactive

Not just about support and resolving their issue, but about keeping them up-to-date with news, changes and other things they’d find relevant. Let them reach out to you through multiple, fully-staffed channels using whatever method is most convenient to them. Customer-first marketing involves a great deal of feedback and discussion. Take the time to get to know your customers and work with them, rather than giving them a number and a ticket and hoping for the best.

As you can see, when it comes to putting the customer first in your marketing, it’s surprisingly not that difficult. The hardest part will be to justify the returns in the long run. But not matter how you choose to do it, making the customer your priority, and living up to that statement in everything your company does, will pay off not just in terms of revenues, but happier employees, more loyal customers, and higher recommendations.

And that’s something every business can agree on!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

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How do you know when a design fails a usability test?

A handy technique I learned from the wrong job…

Years ago, I spent an awkward patch of my career as an instructional designer, creating courses for online learning. It was a bad fit and I moved on happily, but one part of that job has made me a better UX designer: learning objectives.

Learning objectives are simply what you want the student to learn by the end of the training. If there’s a test, the test questions should be based on those objectives — otherwise, what’s the point of the test?

The same approach comes in handy for figuring out whether a design has passed or failed a usability test. Just remember: it’s the design that’s being tested, not the participants.

What does the test participant need to do or say for you to feel confident that the design has succeeded? Do they need to track three hours of time for a particular project? Generate an invoice to a client based on that tracked time? Send the invoice? That’s your test criteria.

Of course usability testing is about observing how users complete tasks, but what will you get them to do, exactly? The beauty of these criteria is that they steer you away from vague testing goals like, “understand how time tracking works.” How will you know they’ve understood it? You get them to describe it. And once they’ve described it accurately, you can say that aspect of the design was successful.

Success criteria help you twice over: they clarify whether your design is really successful, and they make it easier to share those results.

Verbs are magical

The book that taught me about learning objectives, George Piskurich’s Rapid Instructional Design, offers a handy list of behaviours to start your success criteria.

For example, the objectives for comprehension might be “describe” or “demonstrate”. Again, “understand” is no good — you need them to say (that is, describe) or do (that is, demonstrate) something that proves to you that they’ve understood.

And then, at a higher degree of difficulty, a participant might “explain” or “organize”; at a higher level still, they might “create” or “evaluate”.

Whatever verb you choose to start your success criteria, the point is that you can observe whether or not a user has actually said or done whatever constitutes task success.

“By the end of this session…”

So, when you’re planning your next usability test, and you’re working on tasks, start by asking, “What should a user be able to do with (or say about) this design?”

Then, you might write something like this:

By the end of the session, the participant should be able to:

track three hours of time for a particular project;
generate an invoice to a client based on that tracked time;
describe the difference between tracking time and logging time.

Now you have three success criteria and, based on those, you’ve also got a pretty clear sense of what tasks you’ll need to give the participants.

One caveat: success criteria aren’t quite the same as tasks. Tasks have more context; they’re written to be read to the participant, and might include some context about the task, particularly if you’re steering them to find something in your prototype. For example:

Success criteria: Generate an invoice to a client based on that tracked time

Task: “Now that you’ve tracked three hours on the Atlas project, show me how you would invoice Acme Products for your time.”

Pretty similar, obviously, but success criteria are for you and your team; the task is for the participant in the context of the usability session.

And you’ll notice that one of the success criteria above is about describing something, rather than completing a task. It might be a follow-up question to a task. These are handy for validating whether your design’s mental model is clear to users. I’ve seen users find their way through a task, but then describe to me a mental model of the app which is at odds with how it was designed. That’s task success for one participant, but more importantly there’s an underlying problem with matching that participant’s mental model.

So, start with your success criteria, then write your tasks and follow-up questions based on your criteria.

Stakeholders love success criteria

Stakeholders don’t necessarily care about your process, but they really care about the results. And if your presentation of the results is vague, they will be rightfully irritated.

“The user managed to track a few hours, but we weren’t sure whether she understood that tracking time isn’t the same as logging it against a client…” Well, why aren’t you sure? Isn’t it your job to figure this out? You’re wasting their time, and not giving them clear direction on how to fix the UX problems — which is also your job, right?

Success criteria help you twice over: they clarify whether your design is really successful, and they make it easier to share those results.

We’ve had some success tracking success criteria in a simple table, and colour-coding the results. Like so:

We whip up a colour-coded table of results (green = success, red = failure) on our wiki. In the top row, we list participants; in the left column, we list our success criteria. It’s ugly, but quick and useful.

This is easy to scan, shows pretty clearly where the problems are, and grounds the results in the experiences of actual participants. We also list a bullet-point summary of results and a list of usability problems and recommendations just beneath it. We’ll zero in on those problems and iterate until we believe they’re solved. Your process might be a little different — maybe you’re a consultant handing over a report to a client, for example — but the benefits are the same.

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