Entries from February 2009 ↓

Usability Can and Should be Applied Across the Entire Customer Experience (Not Just a Web Site)

Many years ago, while working at a large health insurance company I stumbled across a great usability truth. It wasn’t by design that I found this truth, just dumb luck really. What was that truth? That usability is not just about web sites or web applications, that is has the potential to help the entire customer experience.

At the time, I was busy trying to make a difference for our company by conducting web site usability improvement projects. All of my attention was on the sales and marketing aspect of our web sites, how to improve conversion, make easier and fast sign up forms, etc.

As part of my job I visited a physician group and talked to the Director of the group. He was very excited about my visit, and gushed all kinds of great ideas on how our companies could partner together to offer a better experience for his customers (health care patients) and our customers (insured people) through improved telecommunications with enhanced IVRs, more efficient service with web-based applications and information sharing and by using ID Card readers in multiple physician locations.

Unfortunately, the main purpose of my visit was not to enable a better customer experience across these customer touch-points, and I was unable to act on any of his ideas. But I was very excited and couldn’t wait to discuss this with my boss.

My visit got me thinking; here was a ripe opportunity to apply usability, design and customer experience improvements to make a better experience for my company, the physician group AND our shared customers! That’s a Win-Win-Win all the way around!My boss at the time, although interested, was not able to act on this bold idea and as sometimes happens in the corporate world, this usability and customer experience improvement opportunity faded away.

Customer Service vs Customer Experience

I was recently reminded of this after reading a post by customer experience guru Bruce Temkin. In his post, “Don’t Confuse Customer Service with Customer Experience,” the point is made that the customer experience extends to all segments of a business. Bruce has a nice chart that visually demonstrates how customer service is but one aspect of the customer experience. The customer experience extends to all customer touch-points including sales, marketing, customer service, tech support, accounting, etc.

Usability is the Customer Experience

If you as a usability advocate replace “customer experience” with “usability” in the chart, you quickly realize that there are many, many opportunities to apply usability and design improvements across a company, and that the web site is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunity to improve IVRs, web sites, customer service forms & communications, financial applications, etc. etc. etc. are almost endless. And any improvement you make on any of these touchpoints helps your company and your customers. These types of projects almost sell themselves!

Usability Can and Should be Applied Across the Customer Experience

Usability testing and enhancement techniques work quite well across all customer touch-points, including telecommunications, web sites, card readers or other technology devices and even locations like stores or offices.

For 2009, my suggestion is to make a determined effort to take advantage of usability testing and design enhancements beyond web sites, the improvement to the customer experience will be a win for you, your company and your customers.

Usability & Search Engine Optimization Share the Same Problem: How to Define Return On Investment

A recent post by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guru Bruce Clay discussed the difficulty of providing an estimate of SEO Return On Investment (ROI) for CFOs of companies. The issue is most CFO’s demand an ROI estimate for search engine optimization prior to an engagement, but as Bruce point’s out in his article this is actually not possible.

Usability ROI

As with SEO (which I consider a close-cousin to usability by the way) usability shares the exact same ROI problem. Although CFOs want and need ROI, it is not ethical or wise to provide a guaranteed ROI prior to the commencement of a project, simply because there is not enough information, or control, to accurately estimate the usability impact on ROI.

There are 4 reasons why an accurate ROI is not possible:

1. An assessment of the severity of the usability issues facing the web site or application must be conducted. This assessment IS the usability project, including understanding Personas, Critical Tasks, and conducting a Heuristic Evaluation, and much more. Without this information any usability company guaranteeing an ROI is just guessing.

2. The company that requests the usability study may not be able to do all the recommended usability changes. Often, due to business or technical issues not all of the usability recommendations needed to produce the ROI are able to be executed. This means money (or in this case ROI) is left on the table. Without the ability to have all recommendations made, it’s unlikely an expected usability ROI will be accomplished.
3. ROI is compromised if other critical departments that influence the customer experience are not involved. Most often, a usability project is requested by a particular division in a company. However, other divisions that directly impact the experience (thus ROI) are often not involved. Their inability or unwillingness to make changes will impact the anticipated ROI. As an example, think in this case of a Marketing department wanting web site usability improvements to increase sales. If however, the back-end sales systems that are controlled by a different department are not engaged, the full benefit of usability improvements to increase sales, and thus ROI, may not happen.
4. The online environment is constantly changing, and estimates based on historical data cannot forecast future ROI with accuracy. Consider the changes in the economy in the past year, would you be willing to estimate the ROI of improved sales from usability improvements for that same Marketing department I mentioned earlier if you knew their traffic, or the type of visitors to their web site would be severely changed?

For all of these reasons, and more, it’s unethical, and unwise, to provide a guaranteed ROI for usability improvements. The reality is usability improvements can and do significantly improve ROI for companies every day, it’s just that guaranteeing an ROI upfront prior to conducting usability audits is not possible, nor advisable.

So, what do you say to the CFO who’s asking about ROI?

First, provide the CFO with the above reasons why an ROI estimate is not possible prior to the commencement of the usability project. Be prepared, this may not be accepted, after all the CFO and most likely the rest of the company are held to very precise and unyielding goals in terms of numbers.

Next, talk about some examples of ROI that were accomplished from prior engagements. In the past, when I was consulting I would often mention specific examples of ROI gained, but without mentioning the name of the client (unless I had permission to use their name of course). Nothing sells like success, and mentioning other usability success stories can add weight to the argument that the usability project will be successful, but without a guaranteed ROI up-front.

I used to mention that doing nothing was the only guarantee, a guarantee of the same results. This is the same as the sage old advice that doing something over and over again, but expecting different results, is not logical. By conducting the usability project, change, and thus different (better) results are possible.

Finally, understand that CFO’s of a necessity must live by numbers, and ROI numbers are sometimes required prior to project approval. You may find that sometimes it’s necessary to walk away from the project, because ROI is a pass/fail and without it the CFO is unwilling to conduct the project.

If the CFO insists that an ROI is required, it may be tempting to start throwing out a range of ROI estimates that might be possible. Speaking from experience I can tell you this only opens the door for the CFO to start pinning exact numbers down. It’s a no-win situation if you start down this path. If you hope that the CFO won’t remember the ROI at the end of the project, or that unusual circumstances may result in the numbers being set aside, don’t count on it. The odds are whatever number you promised won’t be met, and thus you will not be trusted, and worse, bad word-of-mouth may start spreading at the executive level. Worse, your manager allies in the company may have a negative perception placed on them, causing them to be far less trustful of usability in the future, again generating bad word-of-mouth.

Conclusion: Don’t Estimate Usability ROI.

CFOs will want ROI, and sometimes a usability project will not be approved without it. My recommendation is to not try to guess at ROI. Instead, explain why ROI is almost impossible to guarantee, then use the opportunity to educate the CFO from examples of ROI gained from prior usability engagements.

Do you have favorite techniques for demonstrating the value of usability without a guaranteed ROI? If so, please share them in the comments!

Web Site Customer Satisfaction Surveys Can be Usability Early Warning Radar

A brief story about customer satisfaction and usability:

Joe Usability conducts usability testing for BigNameCompany.com. Joe conducts usability tests for new web site applications, as well as on his company’s existing web site. However, often Joe is asked to do usability testing on the web site only after a problem has been found, usually because the problem is causing lost sales. Joe tries to keep ahead, but he always feels like he’s in a reactive mode. His internal customers like usability, but they tell him they feel like usability testing is slow, and not quick enough to discover problems in a proactive manner.

Mary Usability (no relation) conducts usability testing for SmallNameCompany.com. Mary conducts usability testing just like Joe. However, Mary does one extra thing, Mary uses her company’s online web site customer satisfaction surveys to ask a couple of usability related questions. Mary reviews the responses to those questions weekly. She has found through those customer comments several issues that caused her to conduct additional specific usability tests on certain pages. Those tests resulted in finding usability issues that unknown to the business were causing lost sales. Mary’s internal customers like usability, and tell her they feel like usability testing is fast and quick, often identifying and fixing problems in a proactive manner.

Although this story is fictional, it does point out the advantage of using a customer satisfaction survey to gather usability feedback about a web site. If you work for a firm that uses web site customer satisfaction surveys, then you potentially have access to one of the best usability early warning systems available. Think of it as usability early warning radar. The idea is to include a question or two on the customer satisfaction survey that will alert you to possible issues well before they begin showing up on monthly sales or other transaction reports.

Why can usability questions on a web site customer satisfaction survey be helpful? Because if you work for a large corporation, then it’s possible that changes to your company’s web site can happen without usability being addressed. You may not even be aware that web site changes were made. Customers who are interacting with your web site however are fully aware of issues caused by changes, and will tell you about those issues if given a chance. No, they won’t be able to express in detail what the issue is, but by seeing the same type of comments over and over again, you’ll have an idea usually of where to start looking.

When changes happen that cause usability issues, the only way that most people usually become aware that there’s a problem is when they review their weekly or monthly reporting. “Sudden” decreases in numbers of interactions or conversion rates will occur, and warning bells will only then sound throughout the company. Subsequent usability testing may find the issue, but only after the damage has been done. For eCommerce sites, this damage is lost revenue, which is a very bad thing indeed.

Whether you have a large or small web site, it’s always a good idea to include a customer satisfaction survey for your visitors. Besides the obvious questions of overall satisfaction and whether a customer’s visit was productive or not, you can include a few usability questions you can monitor on a daily or weekly basis (assuming you have the ability to access your survey results).

There is always (and rightfully so) a concern from a survey team that too many questions on a survey will reduce response rate, so you may receive push-back if you make a request to add a question or two to an existing customer satisfaction survey. But by working with the survey team to help them understand your objective, and the benefit to the company, you can probably add just one or two questions that will provide you with enough information to alert you to potential usability issues.

Typical usability questions on a survey must by nature be rather broad. You won’t be receiving the same detailed information you normally receive when conducting 1-on-1 performance based testing, for example. In addition, your usability survey questions will vary based on the type of survey, the format of the questions and the scales used.

In general, I like to try to use 2 survey questions, the first being relatively simple, like:

“Did you have any difficulties while navigating or using this web site?”

This question has a Yes or No response.

For all who answer Yes an example of a follow-up question is;

“Please describe the difficulty you experienced.”

This question has a text entry box for the response, so survey respondents can write in more detail about their issues.

If however, you can only have one question on the satisfaction survey, then combine the above two questions into something such as; “Did you have any difficulties while navigating or using this web site? If so, please describe the difficulty,” with a Text Entry box response.

As an aside, some in Marketing or Advertising might wish to include an additional question asking the customer to tell them about positives of the web site, or of the product. These positive responses can be collected and used for testimonials. If this question is present, you can use it as well, for example to measure the ratio of positive to negative comments received after completing a usability improvement.

Assuming these usability questions, or questions like them are on the customer satisfaction survey on your web site, and assuming you have access to the daily or weekly reporting, you can now keep an eye on the usability responses in near real-time.

If you suddenly start seeing a spike in Yes, I had Issues answers, and complaints come in of a difficult to find page or web site function not working, you now have an instant warning of a potential problem which may be usability related. Further usability testing of that issue could be warranted. I would add here that you may often find technical issues being reported by your customers, which might be helpful if forwarded to the technical team.

So there you have it, you can be proactive in sleuthing potential web site usability issues by using a few well written usability questions in a web site customer satisfaction survey, and tracking responses on a frequent basis. The end result will be you using usability testing and improvements to enhance the experience well before other business units come to you with an emergency of conversion or sales on their hands, and isn’t it nice to be ahead of the curve?