Results by Design: UX Insights for Business Leaders

Description: In this episode, hosts Craig Nishizaki and Michael Woo talk about their Top 5 list of the most high-value (and sometimes underrated) UX-related activities and strategies that could transform the way your company operates!

Learn About:

• The importance of Journey Mapping for understanding user pathways
• How Customer Interviews can unveil critical insights
• The value of Prototyping in making design concepts tangible
• Why conducting a UX Audit is crucial for identifying usability issues
• The role of Benchmarking in setting and achieving UX goals

Interview Participants:

• Craig Nishizaki, Head of Business @ UpTop
• Michael Woo, Director of UX @ UpTop

Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to Results by Design ux Insights for business leaders, the podcast that dives deep into the world of UX design, strategy, and insights. Tune in, take action, and design your way to success.

Craig Nishizaki:
Hi, I’m Craig.

Michael Woo:
And I’m Michael. And we are your hosts for the Results by Design podcast. Hey Craig, how are you doing today?

Craig Nishizaki:
I’m doing well, Mike, how are you doing?

Michael Woo:
I am doing great. It’s a beautiful day in Seattle. Can’t beat that.

Craig Nishizaki:
Can’t beat that.

Michael Woo:
Yeah. So let’s tell the listeners what we’re going to talk about today.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah. So today we’re going to talk about the five high value UX activities that most companies are not doing, and even adding one of these activities into the company’s culture or workflow could create lasting value. How’s that sound?

Michael Woo:
That sounds great. Let’s dive in. Well,

Craig Nishizaki:
We’re going to do things a little bit different. We’re going to change things up today. We’re going to play rock, paper, scissors to see who goes first. Winner says they’re top five first in order, and then the loser follows, and we’ll see what we have in common and what we have different on our list. How’s that

Michael Woo:
Sound? I’ll good at this game

Craig Nishizaki:
You Oh, oh. Watch out. Okay. Ready? Are you ready?

Michael Woo:
Did it

Craig Nishizaki:
Rock? Okay. Rock, paper, scissors. Shoot.

Michael Woo:
Do it again. Two scissors.

Craig Nishizaki:
Okay. Alright. Rock paper, scis. Paper, scissors. Shoot. Shoot. Oops, I did scissors again.

Michael Woo:
Do it again.

Craig Nishizaki:
Did you do okay? Ready? Rock, paper, scissors,

Michael Woo:
Shoot. All right. I win. Got to rock.

Craig Nishizaki:
Okay. Alright, cool. All right, well why don’t you go ahead and say your list first and then I’ll say mine. Yeah,

Michael Woo:
So my top five are journey mapping. It’s got to be number one, and that would be followed up by customer interviews or user interviews. And I’ll couch that one in a little bit, but the other one is prototyping and then followed by usability testing. Okay. That five, I think that’s five.

Craig Nishizaki:
I think that’s four.

Michael Woo:
That’s four. Okay.

Craig Nishizaki:
Journey mapping, customer interviews, prototyping, usability, testing.

Michael Woo:
I think benchmarking was my last one. Yes. Okay. Okay. Benchmarking. Cool. Sorry. Alright,

Craig Nishizaki:
Great. Okay, so here’s my five are UX audit, benchmarking, journey mapping, consumer insights, so the qualitative interviews and accessibility audit. And so those are my five. So let’s look at what, if we look at the top three for each of us, I think there’s some overlap and we’ll kind of dive into each of ’em. So when I look at the list journey mapping, both of us had that in our top three customer interviews you had. And then I had consumer insights a little further on my list, but we’ll do that as number two. Prototyping, we’ll say as number three, and then UX audit and then benchmarking. So why don’t we have you start with journey mapping just real quickly for folks that don’t know, maybe give a quick definition of that activity and then why you think it’s a high value activity that should be done.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, sure. So let’s get a little reminder. So journey mapping is really mapping the step-by-step process that a specific user takes to achieve a goal. So here’s an example. I’m a parent and I’m planning to sign my kids up for summer camp opportunities in the next couple of months. If you’re an organization and you offer summer camp opportunities, what would that experience be like for me? So I’ll most likely start at Google and then I’ll find your website, land on your website for information about the camp. I want to find dates, pricing, et cetera. At some point I’ll make a decision whether I go with you or some other camp, and when I do, I’ll get through a signup flow process. So it’s really looking at that end-to-end experience. And as I said, just mapping in it out, it’s really important to capture these steps or interactions with the user because recording it allows that organization to see how they’re doing at each point in respect to supporting the user’s goals. So just to remind everyone, why is this activity such high value? In my mind it, it’s a great tool at assessing the big picture visually and capturing again, the end-to-end experience. In doing so, it informs what you’re doing well and also not what you’re doing well at all by uncovering friction points in that experience, when we’ve seen a misalignment between internal stakeholders, journey mapping has been a really great tool for bringing these stakeholders together through cross-team collaboration and input to build out these maps. Wouldn’t you agree with that?

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, I agree. And then also riffing on your example of signing up for camps for your kids next year, those camps are going to want to see return campers perhaps. So they may want to journey map all the way through from the purchase, the evaluation and purchase part, signing up all the way through the delivery of their camp experience to see if there’s opportunities there, kind of like a service map to see if there’s opportunities to improve the overall experience that then has people give them rave reviews and refer friends and all those things that build on the next year, which kind of gets to down through this whole list. I think I’ll talk a little bit more about it later, but kind of doing today an assessment of today, but then also looking at how to improve the future. So yeah, I think journey mapping is critical. So yeah, I agree with you. That’s a top high value activity. Kind of a follow-up question on this. How often do you see companies do this activity? I mean, we don’t have a preview into a hundred percent of companies out there, but the ones that we do encounter, how common is it for them to do it on a regular basis? Or do you see one organization within the team or within the company do it more frequently or just observations from your perspective?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, it’s actually really rare that we see companies do journey maps. And my hunch is that they’re not familiar with them and its benefits. It does require skilled personnel with time to actually put them together. And that’s something a lot of organizations don’t have. It also requires collaboration across teams. And as we know, there’s a lot of silos that persist with an organization, so that makes it very difficult to do. And some other things are maps require research data to populate, which may not be available. And then executing on a journey map by digging into the opportunities for improvement and also be difficult. So that’s the identifying opportunities and ideating on those opportunities for improvement. So those require some follow-up research exercises that again, they just might not have the resources to do that or time. And lastly, just maintaining maps to keep them relevant could also be a chore for folks. Again, it takes time, it takes dedication, but those are some of the things I see. Is there anything that I might’ve missed that

Craig Nishizaki:
I think about it from the business side of things and as a business leader, you’re looking at anything that you invest in, you’re wanting to see, okay, what’s the actionable insight we could take from this? Can we take action on it? How will that impact our top line or bottom line? And I wonder sometimes this is the perception of how personas were built out in the past that were very heavy lifting kind of a long process to get to an end state that is just a profile of your ideal customer or a persona. And so they have this artifact, but they don’t have the recommendations of what to do next. And I wonder if that plays into the bias of not investing in journey maps because it becomes a artifact instead of a part of roadmap, if you will. What are your thoughts on that?

Michael Woo:
I totally agree. Journey maps are, they’re not the most common research tools that you would typically hear of. We listed customer interviews and usability testing and stuff like that. And those are common things that you hear of the journey that’s quite a little bit more complicated. And even if you look at it, I feel like there’s a lot that goes into it. So to your point, I think integrating something like that into your process of developing a product could be quite complex and it requires a lot of commitment to integrate it into your process, let alone keep feeding it as we were talking about. So it does take quite a bit of effort to do.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, the daily care and feeding, making sure that they don’t get stale. Exactly. But you know what? The type of company that we do see working on journey mapping, and it’s a key part of their process are companies that have a cx, strong CX program with a CX leader. And that’s because the table stakes are what you need to build out your CX program are the voice of the customer journeys and the personas. And so typically those enterprises that have a CX group may be further down the path of already doing this. Well, let’s jump into the next one because this is kind of a component, it can be of journey mapping, but customer interviews, and I’ll say consumer insights as well, but why do you think this activity is high value and then why do you think companies don’t do more of it?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, the customer interviews, I think it’s interchangeable. We use our interviews really depends on who you’re targeting, but everyone should know what customer interviews are. And you can argue that this is probably, it shouldn’t even be on the list, it’s so obvious. But we have seen a handful of situations where organizations are very reluctant to pull in customers during the research process. And there are reasons for it. Organizations say they don’t want to bother their customers or users because their time is precious or they don’t want the risk, the good relationships that they have with them. Personally, I feel that they haven’t developed a relationship with their customers because if they had, typically the customers that are most loyal to you would be more than willing to provide their input and if it meant that they could directly benefit from it. So really I think it’s a matter of developing that relationship over time and putting a really solid program in place so that they understand the clear benefits that they would get if they were participating in it. What are your thoughts there? I mean, have you experienced the same thing?

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, I think again, it depends on the type of business you’re, whether it’s B2C or B2B, but on the B2B side, what I’ve seen that create flaws sometimes in the customer interview pool or only pulling from your most loyal customers or not looking at new customers versus existing customers or perhaps not spending enough time talking to the customers that are having issues and things like that. And to your point, I feel like a lot of times companies rely on quantitative data to really look at gathering insights about the customers and what they’re experiencing, but having to talk to the person one-on-one really tells you more about the why of what’s going on with them. And I think that the other part of customer interviews is being clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to get directional feedback or validation? What’s the sample size really need to be?

And I’d argue that smaller tests to answer narrow questions could be more valuable than doing these larger, more extensive studies. And a great example that is a new product manager that we’ve been working with that’s a client that is working on a future vision for her company or her line of business, and she’s building out the three-year plan, incorporating how to incorporate AI and large language model into this customer experience. And she’s using consumer insights to test ideas and gather directional feedback as one of the ingredients to her plan. But she’s doing the heavy lifting of the big other research, the writing out the narrative and all those things, but she’s leveraging consumer insights to kind of add validation to the plan without it being a real heavy lift or heavy research project. So yeah. Any other thoughts you have, Mike on customer interviews and the value and challenges?

Michael Woo:
I just wanted to a hundred percent agree with you that you need to balance out qualitative insights with surveys. A lot of folks run surveys and that can only get you so far. But to your point, smaller sample sizes that I would add more frequent sessions with customers or users and getting fresh insights because behaviors, attitudes change frequently as well as markets change frequently. So really setting a cadence to stay in tuned is extremely important.

Craig Nishizaki:
Great. Alright, cool. Let’s jump over to prototyping then. Why don’t you frame prototyping from your perspective and then again why you think it’s high value activity and how often you see companies doing it?

Michael Woo:
So I had prototyping and usability I believe as my third and fourth. And I’m going to kind of put them almost together because I believe they’re joined at the hit honestly. But again, prototyping is when you take a design concept and then essentially simulate that design experience, whether it’s an app, a flow, an entire website before anything is coded up. And it’s a very high value exercise because it brings tangibility, and I think we mentioned this so many times in previous podcasts, but tangibility is very important because it gives you all sorts of insights and I believe to various parties including design, product development, leadership and users. So where usability testing comes in play is that usability testing is assessing the validity of the design experience by putting it in front of actual users. So these can include having them try to accomplish defined task, providing qualitative feedback at the same time, very similar to a customer interview. So thus when you have a prototype that you can put through usability testing, you’re getting very rich data that you can use to refine your product. And note I’m using the word product and design experience interchangeably, but again, very high value insights that you can get from the two of these exercises combined.

Craig Nishizaki:
What do you think? Yeah, I think one thing that you said that is a mindset is when you talk about a product, I think in some cases companies think about their website as a website and they don’t think about it like a product. Whereas companies that leverage their website to sell their product or support their product really look at the website as more of an application that is a product itself. And prototyping and testing in that environment seems to be more common, obviously, because it’s a tool that helps ’em sell more, sell faster, or be more profitable. And prototyping to me has many uses to your point about testing with end users, being able to validate the experience, get that feedback, which is huge insights. But as I’ve talked about many times, prototyping for the business internally is huge as well to cast the vision and get alignment on the vision because it’s tangible experience, not a static design.

So yeah, I think prototyping and what we’ve seen also in the last five years is prototyping has become kind of the defacto standard. It’s part of our process, it’s part of what we do. And if a client isn’t using that as part of their part, we introduce it to them. And I think also, and I’ll ask you this from your perspective since you’re the practitioner, I think also the tooling for prototyping has become lighter weight and more nimble. So it allows the prototype to be built in a more rapid manner and iterated upon versus how it was done before. So is that true, Mike, from a practitioner’s perspective, that the tooling’s making this prototyping a lot more accessible for companies?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, a hundred percent. It is so much easier than it just five years ago and it’s getting even better. And the advances of adding variables and stuff like that and Figma make it even look as if it was coded in a way it is coded with an actual built-in database to get that simulation. But yeah, tools and technology have really advanced. And I did want to add something that you had mentioned earlier about prototyping as a tool for leadership. What we’ve seen is it’s a great communication tool that has worked wonders with leadership in terms of getting the approvals needed to get early funding to advance specific initiatives within an organization because of that tangibility that we were talking about earlier. But then also you combine that with usability testing, the numbers that back up as evidence, the performance of designs, right? The potential performance of designs is exactly what leadership is looking for. They want to know is this new thing that we’re going to put out in the wild, is it going to work right before we even build it? And having the quantitative and qualitative data to show early on, it has been, again, a great tool for them to make decisions, business decisions.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, that’s great. Alright, cool. Well, let’s see. We’re on to number four. So number four is UX audit. I’ll jump in and provide my description of it and then have you follow on. But from our perspective at UX audit, many of the components of this companies are already doing. But what it is is a more structured approach to evaluating the user experience of your product, your website, your tool. And it starts with the persona or the user profile, defining who that is and what they’re doing, what they’re trying to accomplish in this digital experience. And then it’s reviewing analytics, looking at user behavior monitoring. And when we talk about user behavior monitoring, there’s tools like Full Story or Hotjar out there, and people oftentimes think about the heat maps that are available. And really the most valuable part of the user behavior monitoring is the session recording.

Because if you look at behavior on the session recording or session recordings that you can capture, it’s almost like looking at a time lapse photography where you see a picture of cars going down the highway, you see a blur of white lights going lonely in a blur of red lights going the other way. And then you see one or two vehicles taking this exit. And what session recording allows you to do is start thinking about, well, why did they do that? And then going back and then doing some research around the why of that. Next, in addition to the personas, the analytics, the user behavior monitoring, then it’s doing a UX evaluation or a heuristic evaluation with a set checklist. And so we use a 10 point checklist to look at different elements of usability as we’re doing that evaluation. And then to Mike’s point, it could also include usability testing to triangulate the data and understand the why of that human behavior.

And then it wraps up with UX recommendations. So turning that data into actionable insights, and we call it a UX audit. Other people may call it something differently, but the reason I say it’s high value is most companies have at least a good portion of this data. It’s just not coalesced, synthesized, and analyzed in a way that you can then get actionable insights from. And like I mentioned previously, business leaders, if they’re going to put money into a research project, they want to know that there’s some actionable insights that’ll produce outcomes. And again, those outcomes are to sell more, sell faster, and be more profitable. And so the audit, I think is high value because it’s a place to start for benchmarking, and it’s also a place to start for your plan, your roadmap, your recommendations. So Mike, what would you say about that?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, no, actually I have a question for you. So if the organization had a firm do a UX audit, how important do you think it is to have that same firm execute on the recommendations? Or is it something that you feel they can go to somebody else to execute on?

Craig Nishizaki:
That’s a great question. I think the audit and the output should be able to stand alone. If it’s high quality work, it should be able to standalone to where that can be handed off to another internal team, another external team, and give them guidelines with confidence that the research was sound, it was unbiased, the findings are relevant and the recommendations are clear or crisp. So if I was doing it and I was thinking, okay, I’m going to have an internal person take this on, what I might do is have the consultant that did the audit, retain them for a few hours or a month or however long it takes for our team to start ingesting all this information and then starting to work through the list of recommendations just for context and clarity in case there’s something that we have a question on. Go back to the researcher that did the work. But Mike, what are your thoughts?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think that if a UX audit is done well, it can and should standalone, the recommendation should be clear enough to be interpreted by anybody. You can go as far as putting some really rough visuals if necessary. Otherwise, my recommendation is just to describe clearly in words what the opportunities are and obviously allow whoever is executing it to take it from there. But I wanted to go back to something you were saying earlier about using a UX audit as a benchmark. And I think that it definitely, there’s definitely overlap there. A UX audit can very well be the initial benchmark for an experience. And I think that was on our list, I think it was fifth on my list. But it’s very important that organizations measure how an experience is doing, the current experience is doing compared to how it’s doing after they’ve implemented whatever improvements they’ve done.

Because you won’t know what the ROI is, what the metrics are of success. And for a lot of organizations, it’s super important. You think about organizations who are less mature from a UX standpoint, they’re wary sometimes of even embarking on anything UX related. They’re always hesitant, should we even do this? Is it even worth it? And so they’re looking for that confidence and you won’t get that confidence unless you benchmark something to figure out how well it’s done. Now on the far end of the spectrum where you have a very mature organization, they’ll benchmark, but they’ve been benchmark for different reasons, not because they need the confidence to do UX exercise, but more so the confidence in the experience that they’re actually implementing, right? Because very in tuned with the iteration process and improving and conducting these experiments, if you will. So again, nuanced in terms of motivation, but the through line is that benchmarking is critical for any organization to do.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, I agree. Sorry. It’s actually funny. I mean, that was a great segue when we look at our combined list, benchmarking was on our list. And the thing I think that’s so important about it is it implies that the activity isn’t a one and done activity. It’s systematic. There’s a rhythm to it, and there’s value in that learning from previous mistakes or learning from improvements or, yeah, we’ve already tried this and it didn’t work or it did work. Having that library of information accessible so that when the next group comes in to work on something internally, they’re not recreating the wheel.

A lot of companies are executing on design systems because they’re trying to create consistency across teams and across groups as they’re designing and building out components and elements of their site or their product. And this is kind of the other side of that. It’s okay, here’s what the experience is today, why is it that way? Have we tried these things? And benchmarking allows for those answers to already be in a repository or in a library. So that’s great. Thank you for saying that. As we go through this whole list of our top five or top three each, again, that benchmarking one was kind of a common one that was on our list. So what we’ve said today, and you’ve probably heard it from us before, is we think journey mapping, customer interviews, prototyping, UX audit, and benchmarking are the top UX activities that your company should be doing. And ask yourselves, is this something that we are doing? And if not, why?

Michael Woo:
Yeah. The only thing is, I understand it’s very difficult for organizations to do even one item on this list. We mentioned the different constraints of budget, time, resources, et cetera. But just like you were saying, Craig, just try to develop a rhythm and do what you can. That’s what I encourages, is do what you can instead of not doing anything, because I think any learnings is better than none, and the developing of a cadence is important because the longer you go, there’s just going to be bigger question marks, and so you’re just going to be farther detached from your customers and their needs and their expectations. So again, just get into a rhythm and do what you can.

Craig Nishizaki:
There you go. Good advice. Sage advice from Mike. Get into a rhythm, do what you can and be nimble. That’s what I would say. You don’t have to be perfect. You got to get the thing moving. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. Thanks for joining us. Join us again next time as we explore innovative approaches to enhance your products and services, optimize your customer interactions, and ultimately drive success for your organization. Tune in, take action and design your way to success. We’ll see you next time.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to Results by Design. If you liked this episode, be sure to share and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We are also playing on all your favorite audio streaming podcast platforms, so stay connected and join us for the next one. Results by Design is brought to you by UpTop. Our mission is to equip business leaders like you with the knowledge and tools needed to leverage UX methods and strategies to achieve tangible business outcomes and create lasting value. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or just starting to explore the world of UX, results by Design is your go-to resource for unlocking the potential of user experience to achieve remarkable results. Tune in, take action, and design your way to success.