How not to interview a customer/user!

InterviewingtechniquesOver the years I have had the opportunity to observe a lot of user interviews. Interviewing users is not easy and when done correctly it can provide the impetus to inform your ensuing actions. On the other hand a poor interview can leave me cringing! The following is a list of interview behaviors that make me cringe! I will start out with the most obvious of all but no harm repeating it… don’t lead the user!

Don’t ask a question and then immediately answer it. You are leading the interviewee. If they can’t answer then maybe use an example as a way to get them thinking. Don’t answer it with a or b answer as they will choose one just to please you. The answer becomes your answer. Don’t give away the answer you are looking for!

Don’t suggest answers if you are not sure what they just said. Just ask them to clarify or expand.

Don’t ask loaded questions such as “How difficult is it to move from Location A to Location B?” You are essentially telling the interviewee that it is difficult. The interviewee sees it as loaded. You are presupposing that he also thinks it is difficult?

If the user asks you a question… don’t try and answer
Ask her what she things the thing (link, button, tool) is for. What does she think it is for or should be?

Your silence may often prompt a user to offer a more detailed answer. However, your pregnant pause, followed by a slow “uh-huh” can also sound condescending… as if you can’t believe the user answered that way!

Don’t ask more than one question at a time.

Don’t ask two very different questions in the same sentence!

When a user expresses an opinion, don’t just accept it as is. Probe into the underlying attitudes. Ask what else?

If a user says something is important, helpful, preferable, thrilling, boring, scary, unfriendly, hard to use, etc then find out why. Try and understand the underlying motivation attitude that drives the behavior. Don’t just accept it at face value.

If you ask an a/b type question and the user answers “a” don’t just accept that as gospel. The value is in understanding why they chose “a”?

Don’t treat the user as if she is a designer!

Get the gist!? Feel free to suggest other annoying interview behaviors you have experienced!

Service Experience Innovation: Claiming Property Insurance

InsuranceServiceExperience

This past winter in New England was the coldest and snowiest I had ever experienced. My poor old house felt the same and when the pipes burst and flooded the kitchen and family room I had to take measures to repair the damage and get her ready for the summer. What I faced in order to claim my insurance coverage and receive payment was a much bleaker experience than the winter that preceded it. As a designer of product and service experiences I am keenly aware of the products and services I interact with on a daily basis. I celebrate the great experiences and am dismayed and disappointed with the ones that fail. The process of claiming property insurance to cover the repairs of a mortgaged house must be the single worst service experience of my life. There is an opportunity to make what is already a difficult time less painful by acting in a way that displays empathy for the customer and all that they are going through to renovate their home.

Without going into the details of my experience with my insurance company and mortgage provider let me instead highlight some of the potential attributes of great service experiences that were terribly missing from mine.

Transparency: Don’t make a process a mystery. Be clear about the steps required and help your customer understand those steps.

Consistency: Don’t change the process along the way. Don’t introduce new rules that suggest you don’t want to complete the originally understood process.

Communication: Keep your customer in the loop. Linked to transparency, don’t be afraid to explain what is happening and providing regular updates that can help keep your customer confident that he is doing all he needs to do and you are doing all you can to keep the process going.

Speed: Communicate progress and demonstrate that you are making all efforts to complete the service cycle in a speedy fashion. If there are factors that are delaying you let the customer know that you are doing your best to accelerate the service delivery.

Information: Make sure that all documents required to complete the process are clear and unequivocal and easy to understand. Make it easy to complete and supply documentation and once received be quick to reassure your customer that the documentation is correct and received.

Trust: Don’t treat every customer as if they are a felon trying to work an insurance scam. If your customer is credit-worthy, hasn’t made 20 insurance claims in the previous 5 years, has never been convicted of a crime, has paid every bill you ever sent them… begin by giving them the benefit of the doubt. As intermediaries check the insured’s claim and verify the truth of it increase your display of trust and accelerate the process.

Ease: It is obvious but in this case it is not redundant to shout it out loud… make it easier than it is.

The process through the property insurance claim service experience is a nightmare of hurdles and pitfalls all working to make it hard to receive what is rightfully yours. You’ve paid for insurance throughout your life and now you deserve to receive the benefit of your responsible behavior!

I am sure that there is an opportunity to innovate this service experience to remove all of the issues that currently make it so painful. However, my cynical side says that the insurance and lending industry does not believe that there is profit to be had in improving the process. On optimistic days I believe that someone is going to come along and bring the customer experience revolution to the industry, rocking the boats and ships of old-school companies, and bring a fresh, communicative, transparent, easy and painless quality to the experience. If you are an insurance or mortgage company executive reading this (yeah, right!) then get in touch… I think I can help you with this!

4 Conferences in 4 weeks!

4conferences

This past Fall I had the unique opportunity to attend 4 conferences in 4 weeks! Friends thought I was crazy but I was thrilled for the chance to hear from esteemed colleagues around the world about their latest thinking on the current state of design… at least within these 4 quite distinct communities. The four conferences were UX Strat in Boulder Colorado, where I had the honor of being one of the speakers; FutureM and DMI Annual Conference both held in Boston; and finally the Service Design Network’s annual conference in Stockholm, Sweden. I have added links to the conference sites below.

Survey Madness! Is there a better way to demonstrate that you care?

SurveyMadness

One of the tenets of great Customer Experience is to listen to your customers.

As more and more businesses recognize that they need to pay greater attention to the quality of the customer experience one of the inevitable tools in the CX quiver is the customer survey. The survey demonstrates that the brand is listening to its customers and keen to gather their feedback to improve the services they provide. The only problem these days is that every other brand that a consumer interacts with is seeking to capture the Voice of that Consumer and the poor consumer is suffering from survey overload. I know this because I am one of those consumers.

Good Reasons to Create Great Personas

GreatPersonas
Over the years I have been asked to explain the value of personas. After all, they are not cheap to create, especially when you do it right. When I say right, I mean supported at the very least by contextual research into the circumstances of the target audience followed by a thorough analysis of that context that results in great information design deliverables capturing the essence of the personas. This qualitative form of persona can also be enhanced by subsequent quantitative research, which may provide accurate insights into the relative size, value, and desires of personas, acting more as market segmentation and supporting business strategy. This balanced qualitative/quantitative approach

Shopping is Emotional! Service Design can help!

ServiceDesign&Shopping

Recent shopalongs with consumers starkly revealed the emotional rollercoaster ride that many embark on as they seek the perfect purchase. Shoppers are browsing, learning, buying, and engaging with both the brands they know and the ones they don’t in increasingly complex ways. The customer journey they take from identifying a need to considering a product, from using a new purchase to becoming a loyal customer is no longer a linear path but rather a series of parallel and intersecting lines and loops.

Once upon a time shopping was simple. Get in the car, hop on the bike, or simply walk to the store that holds the product you need…view the selection at hand, decide, and buy. Shopping is not simple anymore…as soon as you open yourself up to the possibilities presented through the amazing array of channels within which one can research, browse and purchase.