Results by Design: UX Insights for Business Leaders

Introductory Episode: In the inaugural episode of our series, we dive into the realm of User Experience (UX) design and strategies, shedding light on how these essential components empower business leaders to steer their organizations toward unparalleled growth and success.

We cover:

• How “Results by Design” was born
• UX methods in delivering business outcomes
• The direct value of UX design
• How UX Design Gives You The Edge

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 everyone. I’m Craig.

Michael Woo:
And I’m Michael. And we are your host for the Results by Design podcast.

Craig Nishizaki:
For those of you that don’t know who we are or may not know us, I’m going to introduce Michael. We’re switching it up a little bit. So Michael’s the director of UX at UpTop. He’s been a designer for 20 plus years with experience in-House in marketing and product design, and then in consultancy across B two B and B two C Industries. I would say he’s a unique combination of visionary and integrator. For those of you that are familiar with EOS, definitely with the T-shaped experience, which lends a lot of value to us and to the clients. And I was thinking about in his role, Mike wears a lot of hats. He’s a director, a strategist, consultant, coach, mentor advisor, but outside of work, Mike’s a big time DIY-er, big sports fans, go Seahawks and a food lover, and he’s a husband and dad to three boys that keep ’em really busy. And genuinely, Mike’s one of my favorite people.

Michael Woo:
Hey, thanks Craig for the very kind words. So Craig is the head of business for up top, but he’s way more than that. He’s a great listener, a strategic thinker, and most of all a true leader to all of us on the team. These traits are accompanied by his extreme grace and humbleness if you know him well. But beyond work, I just love chatting up sports with him, sharing stories about our own DIY projects, but most of all above all else, training stories about our kids as he also has three but adorable girls, including twins. He is a true mentor and a friend to me. And for the past 10 years, I’ve been privileged to be working alongside him.

Craig Nishizaki:
Man, thanks for that kind intro, Mike. I’m going to have to share that with my girls so they know Daddy some kind of superhero. Well, Mike, why don’t you tell the audience what’s top of mind for you today?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, I’m really excited about our podcast, and I know you are as well.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, I’m excited. I think it has a cool title. I’m excited about the theme. So let’s jump on in.

Michael Woo:
Let’s start with that title, actually. So I know when we were coming up with some title options, the one we landed on, it just clicked with us. Could you describe to the audience why we chose the name of our podcast?

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, so Results by Design, this is actually the tagline of the agency that I worked for that UpTop acquired back in 2013, and that tagline always resonated with me and it felt like a perfect fit for this podcast, for our podcast. The backstory is when I got into the UX industry back in 2009, I was drawn to the idea that design, specifically UX design, could generate positive business results, identifying and reducing friction points, increasing conversion in revenue, increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. And that all really hit home because I wasn’t necessarily looking at it from an art perspective, but from a business perspective and how can UX design create value and results? It’s really from our perspective, if you look at organizations through the lens of a Venn diagram where the business is one circle, technology is the other circle of technical constraints, and then the brand and design is the other circle in our view. UX and UX strategy sits right at the center. And the more closely that you can align the three circles, the larger impact and greater value that UX leadership, UX strategy and execution can create. And then ultimately the objective of every design or digital project or digital transformation initiative is to sell more, sell faster, and be more profitable from the business’s perspective. So the type of work that we do, creating results by design in our eyes is what we get to do every day.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, those are great points. Last question about this. The podcast title itself could have easily said UX Insights for design leaders, but we specifically chose business leaders. You want to describe why

Craig Nishizaki:
There’s so much great content already out there for design leaders. If you just Google best podcasts for UX designers, you’ll see for yourself. And there’s the future with Chris Doe, which has got great video content, podcasts, frameworks, toolkits for agency leaders and solopreneurs, freelancers. And then there’s books out there like Creative Strategy and the Business of Design by Douglas Davis. That book is specifically for designers to learn the language and understand business so they could communicate better with business leaders. So we didn’t want to create content or be speaking in an echo chamber talking to design leaders about the value of UX or the impact of UX, kind of naval gazing, but kind of working backwards or looking backwards. Back in 2012, Gartner predicted that UX would be a key differentiator for businesses, and that’s proven to be true, but for a long time, for those of us in the UX space, there had been this disconnect between what business leaders believed UX designed to be and how best to leverage UX leadership and strategy to achieve their desired business outcomes. I mean, years ago, we don’t hear it as much now, and if we do, we run for the hills. But years ago, you’d have business leaders come up with mocked up ideas and then say, well just make it pop or add some sizzle to it, or we’d be reviewing wireframes with them to show the user flow and they’d say, well, can you add some wow to it? And those types of things. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you’ve probably heard that or you remember those things.

Michael Woo:
They still do, by the way.

Craig Nishizaki:
You still hear that every so often. Well, our goal, and you remember this back in 2013, 2014, was to get more involved in strategic work. And we’ve done this by being able to educate business leaders about the value of UX, incorporating design thinking and lean UX methods into solving complex business problems, identifying friction points into customer journey and reducing that friction by applying design and technology and using a structured process to gain executive buy-in and alignment on a vision. And so we want to share these insights with business leaders to help you explore innovative approaches to enhancing your products and services, optimize customer interactions, and ultimately drive success for your business or your organization. Over the past five years, what changes have you noticed in business leaders related to UX, their understanding of UX, the openness to UX? Is it seen as strategic or tactical? What do you think these changes can be attributed to?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, honestly, in the past five years, I think we’ve seen a lot of maturation of the industry as a whole. We’re at least 15 years into this now. Before I first heard the term UX being thrown around regularly. I mean back then it was web design was a common word. So I think there have been endless resources written, spoken about the topic as you said earlier. So the exposure has definitely helped with awareness. But one specific area to note has been research. I remember it used to be that clients wanted to jump straight into design solutions, and it was very difficult to sell research by convincing clients of its value and place in the design process. But now it’s not like that folks we talk to expect it to be part of the design process, which is great. That’s what we’ve been waiting for. And like I said, it’s really matured. I think business leaders, the true business leaders realize that the direct value that UX brings to their customers or users because of this, they have to integrate it into their product strategy in order to compete in today’s marketplace. It’s just so tough out there. So you have to find that competitive advantage. And as you said earlier, Craig, the more you pull together the business part of it, technology and design to really achieve that maximum UX in the middle, this equals results and it’s a proven formula for achieving business outcomes.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, those are great, great insights. Mike, I think you’ve hit on something that we can actually dive deeper on in another podcast about research. And looking forward to digging into that. How can business leaders tap UX methods leadership strategy design to help them accomplish their business objectives? I’ll ask you and then maybe I’ll chime in a little bit as well.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Something we’re always thinking about. So first off, I think that if they traditionally have been a user-centric organization, they need to trust the process. If they don’t truly believe in the process, the project or the initiative will fail before it even starts. Secondly, if they’re working with an external firm like UpTop, for example, you need to find a partner that has an approach that aligns with your organizational needs. So for example, we practice a lot of design thinking and lean UX principles that generate results and outcomes quickly, which our clients absolutely love. But often though, time is a constraint for our clients and they can’t spend months on out doing research without seeing actionable insights. So on the contrary, if an organization uses a resource from within, whether it’s hiring new or leveraging existing resources, making sure that the person or person has research and UX capabilities.

Now sometimes you see organizations turn to, like I said earlier, web designers or worse graphic designers. No offense, I used to be these folks, but you need to possess the right capabilities in order to be successful. And lastly, you need to start small finding a project that’s manageable in size so you can deliver quick wins if you could tie your efforts directly to results. This will give you and leadership the confidence and I think the proof that you need to scale UX to more initiatives across the organization. So what about you, Craig? Is there anything you want to add?

Craig Nishizaki:
I was thinking about this. I think I have a top four. First, I would say it’s nearly impossible to hire an army of one. And to your point about making sure that if you have one resource that you’ve brought in for budget, for headcount reasons, et cetera, it’s really challenging to find that one designer that has all the skills that you need in terms of research strategy design from a UX and a visual perspective, which all ties together the information architecture capabilities and all that. And so really thinking about what it is you need most and maybe evolving that construct of your team or working with an outside agency to get you to that spot to then pull in your in-house person. So that’d be the first one. I think. Secondly, from a leadership perspective or executive perspective, involve UX early to help shape the strategy for the product.

And also whether it’s an web app, a mobile app, SaaS application, it’s B two B or B two C or your website that you use to market and sell these things, they all need to be looked at as a product and their living, breathing, they need to be iterated upon and improved. And then third is sometimes you need to know that you got to slow down to speed up. And what I mean by that is a lot of times there’s a budget, there’s a goal, there’s a target, and you just start running toward it as an organization. And I, where we see big gaps a lot of times is in the requirements elicitation and definition, making sure that the business objectives, the technical constraints, the brand and the user’s requirements are all defined so that the product can then be built in the right way and using research as a scoping tool.

Because if you can do research upfront, you can reduce the number of features, functionality, et cetera, to hit the mark with that end user that you’re targeting to then become successful in that V one and then add to it with their feedback. And so I think trying to understand that you may have to slow down to speed up. And then the last thing is leverage UX designers methods leadership as an executive to help you gain alignment across silos. There’s so much power in stakeholder interviews. Designers by nature have empathy and are trying to tease out that empathy from those interviews and then coalesce all that information and do workshop, workshop it, cross-functionally to gain that alignment. So those are the four things I would add to what you said.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, those are good points.

Craig Nishizaki:
So Mike, tying back to our podcast title, results by Design, how can a results oriented approach to design enhance a company’s overall business strategy and performance?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, I think I’ve touched on this in a previous answer, but it goes back to what you were saying, Craig, about outcomes that we hope drive for our clients. That is, we hope businesses sell more, sell faster, be more profitable. Businesses want to minimize risk and delivering consistent results and solutions that have a positive effect on business KPIs and outcomes that you desire is foundational, I think, to executing your product strategy and vision. Let me ask you a question. So let’s try and put this in context for our audience. Can you share a success story that you can think of where a company’s emphasis on UX design directly led to significant business growth or improved customer satisfaction?

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, there’s a number that I can think of, but I’ll use this as the example. So we’ve been working with Amazon returns to redesign the return experience on amazon.com. And the challenge that they faced was as Amazon added new methods for someone to return a customer to return, new location options for dropping off or having the return picked up, et cetera, they presented those options in the legacy return experience or the current return experience, we’ll call it. The result of that was that they had a higher than desired number of customer contacts, people calling using chat, email, et cetera. And their goal was to reduce the number of customer contacts to customer support and then also improve the overall satisfaction with the return process. And so we worked with Amazon product management and UX leadership to design a centralized return experience that enabled customers to view, track, and manage their returns in a more streamlined and frictionless experience using key visuals and dynamic content, things like that.

Craig Nishizaki:
And then we took that and performed usability testing in 32 concepts in seven countries, in five languages, and then took the new post returns experience through Amazon’s CX bar raiser CX VR process for final approval. And based on the research and projected outcomes, or based on the research, their projected outcomes were they’re expecting a 7% increase in customer satisfaction over the existing experience, and then a 54% decrease in customer support contacts per year. And when they launch the new experience, the new experience has actually outperformed those projections, and that equals multiple millions of dollars in reduced operating costs. And increased customer satisfaction equals more sales because that customer satisfaction and trust in the return process for them drives more purchases by customers. So really it ends up being a triple win, that idea of sell more, sell faster, and be more profitable as the objective of a digital project or digital transformation.

Michael Woo:
Yeah, this is a great example in a case study in the making and a very exciting project I know for our team.

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Woo:
What are some key indicators or metrics, and you touched on some of ’em above in that story, but that business leader should consider when evaluating the impact of UX on their bottom line. How about you take that first and I’ll follow after with my thoughts.

Craig Nishizaki:
Okay. Well, I’m going to think about it through the entire customer journey, a B2B type example. So to sale some of the metrics might be the number of demos or trials that are booked or number of qualified leads and the quality of those leads that are generated, reducing the length of the sales cycle or the number of touches that the sales team makes before a sale converts. Then once a sale happens during onboarding, it’s looking at adoption usage satisfaction, and then churn how many people drop off or don’t use the product or the tool. And then for support, incorporating self-service and reducing the number of customer support contacts would be some of the ones that I would think of top of mind.

Michael Woo:
And I feel like with any one of these topics, we can do an entire podcast, like you said, right alone on it. I think you hit on a lot of those top level metrics. Some additional thoughts that I’d probably include, and it’s getting a little bit more granular, I think at this point is when we think about conversion rates, there are purchases, registrations, signups. You look at engagement, there’s number of pages viewed, time on page downloads, and then there’s things like time on task. So for example, how long it takes a user to, for example, file a claim or return a product, find the information they need, there’s customer satisfaction as an example, how positive or not a customer views the brand or the organization. There’s reviews and ratings, abandonment, et cetera. And finally, one metric that is often neglected, which is quality of operations. And what I mean by that is the employee experience or the internal efficiencies when your organization is operating, whether they’re operating smoothly and is churn minimized, are you able to deliver better quality to your customers? So that internal part of it is a huge piece of it that definitely impacts the external experience.

Craig Nishizaki:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Well, we covered a lot today. Like you said, Mike, some of these we could do an entire episode on, so we’ll have to do a deeper dive on those topics in the future episode. How’s that sound?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, for sure. Look forward to it.

Craig Nishizaki:
Alright. Okay then. Well, we hope you enjoyed our conversation today. I mean, I certainly did. And Mike, if people want to learn more about UpTop or connect with you, where should they go?

Michael Woo:
Yeah, so visit our website@uptopcorp.com. You can find our company page on LinkedIn. You can explore more content on our YouTube channel “UpTop UX”. And lastly, you can find both Craig and I on LinkedIn. Yeah,

Craig Nishizaki:
Yeah, we’d love to connect. And so that’s it for today’s show. Join us again as we explore innovative approaches to enhance your products and services, optimize 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.