Every web app needs someone talking to the customers regularly. It’s their job to know exactly what’s going with all types of customers, new, old, free, paying. What excites them, bothers them, how often they’re using the product, is the feature getting usage, if not why not.
It’s their job to answer “What-Ifs” and “I wonders” from the product team. This is how you spot issues before they cost you hard-earned customers. Metrics junkies are obsessed with details like Cost Per Acquisition, it’s worth remembering that it’s investing in customer loyalty and retention can be far more valuable. Buckets fill up far quicker than sieves.
You should be able to talk to your customer:
- Frequently – the more they talk with you, the more loyal they become
- Easily – If it’s easy to do, chances are it’ll get done more often
- Openly – let it be clear to your customers that they can complain or questions decisions, as their opinion is what matters
- In Context – Talk to users as they use your app, not outside of it. The difference in what they say is remarkable.
There’s nothing worse than sitting in meetings and hearing the words “I think” and “Let’s just get a bunch of people in a room and come up with features” when developing a product.
You have to talk to customers to understand the context of their environments, to learn what the challenges they face and how they solve them. This isn’t market research, this is understanding your customer. For example, there’s this fallacy that Apple doesn’t talk to their customers to discover new markets. They don’t do market research, which is different. They do leak information and create opportunities (i.e. allow jailbreaking of phones) to see how the market will innovate.
Because you’re not Apple and you are likely not selling a similar set of products, you must do research to understand the customer. And, while I’m sure Jobs says he doesn’t do research, it’s pretty clear that his team goes out to thoroughly study behaviors and interests of those they think will be their early adopters. Call it talking to friends and family; but, honestly, you know that these guys live by immersing themselves in the hip culture of music, video, mobile, and computing.
The point is not to go ask your customers what they want. If you ask that question in the formative stages, then you’re doing it wrong. The point is to go immerse yourself in their environment and ask lots of “why” questions until you have thoroughly explored the ins and outs of their decision making, needs, wants, and problems. At that point, you should be able to break their needs and the opportunities down into a few simple statements of truth.
And, in a lot of ways, Apple employees are their own customers. They are designing products they would buy, because they are the target audience. They buy the products, and use them.
So, have you tried talking to your customers? Have you tried using your product?
Sent to me by Job Fox over at UberMedia.
Turns out there is this whole other profession, born, it seems, mostly from the marketing discipline, who have an active interest in orchestrating company wide good experience for their customers. They are experienced in making strong, financially driven business cases to management at the highest level, getting decent budgets and then investing in infrastructure that enables an organisation to deliver good customer experience.
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Reading some of their books (I particularly enjoyed this one) it strikes me that they have a much more mature and structured way to approaching company wide good experience than we User Experience people (generally) do.Similarly, in reading what they write about, it is disturbing how little reference Customer Experience people make to User Experience people. I’ve come across several references to human factors and usability, but you’ll almost never find Customer Experience and User Experience in the same book/article/room.
We should be working together, but I think we don’t because a) it’s in Customer Experience’s best interest to drive to conversation and have User Experience types under them (probably as they should), and b) CX types have done a better jobs defining the value proposition, especially in defining their title (what’s more important than the customer?).
Most Customer Experience professionals understand sales, marketing and customer support better (all touchpoints essential in Customer Experience), so they have a better grasp on how the business provides value. We tend to be siloed in our experience.
The post talks about User Experience folks have done a poor job explaining how to provide value, other than saying, “it’s part of the process.” We have to show real world examples other Apple. That’s our challenge for 2012.
I look at a lot of resumes…
…and not just for people that I interview. I’ve seen a couple hundred in the last year, mostly because I work at Jobvite, I figure out how they parse and look at better ways of displaying them. Resumes are the first things most recruiters and hiring managers look at to see if you are qualified for a job (I tend to look at a portfolio first).
Because of my day job and my constant banter with recruiters I talk to during job interviews, I do a lot of research about the hiring process. Now is a good time to start looking (new budgets, improving economy and cool start-ups on the Jobvite Facebook application).
I can’t speak to everyone’s preferences but in this post I’ll describe some of the patterns I see over and over again regarding what recruiters want and a few tips to avoid the pitfalls of getting the wrong job interviews. This stuff isn’t rocket science and getting a job shouldn’t be. First and foremost, make sure that your resume and LinkedIn profile are in tip top shape.
Your odds go up exponentially if there’s a way to contact you.
Even the SAT test awards you 200 points for writing your name correctly. Consider the basics as an extra bonus point. The following items are required at the very top of your resume:
Optionally, I would include a Twitter Feed and Blog addresses, if you have them. They should be work related (i.e. not 35 photos of you getting drunk in Tijuana).
Including only an email address is annoying when I have to get a quick clarification on your background. Picking up the phone is still the best way of reaching people (sorry, millennials). Most hiring managers use the phone as a primary means of communication.
This information should be a standard format (periods between numbers in a phone number don’t parse well). Applicant tracking systems that parse email addresses and phone numbers are looking for patterns, not creativity.
Also, make sure hyperlinks go to the right place. I sent my resume format to a friend, and I was getting her emails because one of the systems parsed out my email address in a hyperlink and used it as her primary email address.
Just because you can design an infographic doesn’t mean it belongs in a resume.
Most companies use applicant tracking systems, which keep track of candidates in the interview process. These systems are parsing your resume so they are searchable, so if you upload the resume with tons of graphics, it’s not going to parse. The wackier the layout, the worse the text is going to appear in the system. Combine that with how PDFs can be structured (or not, if a designer uses a PNG that can’t be parsed at all), and you get the idea.
My resume has a very top down approach that’s similar to the inverted pyramid: the most important information is listed at the top, next the positions and then other relevant information. Inverted pyramids work well for the web (ask Jakob, take a drink). They also parse well and are great for search engine optimization (SEO).
Do not include any wacky graphics or some over-designed timeline that is a hopeless copy of Facebook’s timeline. When I interview people, I might want to see a gracefully designed infographic if you’re a visual designer. However, unless you’re Nicholas Felton, you probably don’t have the skills to come up with something that’s going to wow them. Leave that to your portfolio.
In a pinch, I would have a resume formatted in plain text so it looks good even in a plain text email.
I list Previous Clients and my Skill Set before the position so recruiters and hiring managers don’t have to read further down the resume. That’s an instant winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Most people don’t really understand what User Experience is. At all.
Here’s what they equate it to: Wireframes, Usability Testing and Personas. Throw in some HTML/CSS prototyping, and viola, you’re a user experience designer.
If you have the skills at the very top of your resume, the recruiter will know exactly what you can do. They will copy and paste that list into an email straight to the hiring manager. The person viewing your resume might look at a couple of the most recent positions, but they have to know that your skill-set matches something that the hiring manager has told them. The very best recruiters will understand.
Frankly, it will also help you avoid jobs you don’t want, like if they’re looking for someone who can also code Java (Drink).
Even better, list some of the brands you’ve worked with at the very top because it works. When recruiters and hiring managers have to ask who you’ve worked with and what projects you’ve been on because they can’t find it, your resume has failed.
I summarize who I’ve worked with as a consultant and use a bullet point for previous client I want to focus on. Brief and to the point.
User experience designers tend to have a lot of contract gigs, which make for very long resumes.
One of my favorites is Karl Smith in the United Kingdom, because I use him as an extreme use case for Jobvite. He tends to work a lot of short stints because he’s a high level consultant, and it’s important to his clients that they see the breadth of his experience.
If you aren’t Karl, that can work against you, especially if you’re under five years of experience.
I compress the contract gigs that I’ve worked at under “being a consultant” because that was what I was: brought in to work on very specific projects with a contained time frame to achieve a specific result. I list what I did in condensed format, and what I accomplished. It gives the recruiters and hiring managers a good overview of your experience without overwhelming them with information.
Going forward, It’s also best to work on projects that launch. When you’re choosing your contracts, you’ll have to use your spidey sense (we all have it), if the founders are nuts or if the idea will result only in poor execution. There’s nothing worse than having a resume full of projects that fail (I interviewed someone that was on three failed projects in a row) because that reflects directly on your skills.
The first thing I want to do is see your work. I can only do that if I have URLs.
Sometimes that’s not possible, because you’re working at Cisco on an internal project, or the project was killed either before or after launch (I have a couple of Move.com projects that went by the wayside). But it’s always interesting to compare the wireframes and user research to the final product.
This is also really effective if you’ve worked at the same company a long time (defined as over three years in my mind) and need to show more than one or two positions on your resume. You can also list the projects as separate entries under the same job position to show breadth of experience.
Each position highlights my responsibilities and the real numbers behind them.
The best thing about this job is when we’re done, we should have something to show.
Wireframes, research and other artifacts — most of those play well in Peoria with hiring managers. The next best thing is that if you are able to do a great job, you’ll be able to say, “Hey, resume went up 300 percent because of my changes.” If you have numbers, use them. That’s the best way to back up you know what you’re doing.
Because our field is so new, there are a lot of snake oil salespeople that don’t have the skills to back up what they say. If you have something to back up your work, it’s awesome. I list what my responsibilities were, and how it translated into real results.
User experience design is a very small field, and there’s a good chance you’re going to run into someone. It’s even better not to lie, because someone will call you on it.
True story: one place I worked at, I was interviewing a candidate. During the interview, I figured out that a previous hiring manager was someone that worked with me, and we “made the introduction.” We didn’t hire the candidate.
And then their significant other submitted the same portfolio.
Another true story: Two separate project managers I was considering managed the same project at the same time. There’s no possible way I could interview either of them.
Be honest about your impact on projects. It’s fine to say you were on a team, but don’t tell people you are the lead if you aren’t.
They’re inexpensive for what the return on investment is — $200 for two hours when you’re applying for positions that could be well into the six figures. There’s no excuse not to, especially since that’s our occupation. Why wouldn’t you do it for the resume?
Send me a note, of course, after you tweet this post :). I’ll send you one that works well.
Great post. Sounds like what I do during user interviews:
I told them that my secret to getting people to talk boils down to three words: “tell me more”. Sometimes I’ll provide additional directions, like “tell me more about what happens after the email arrives”, but the basic concept is still the same. It’s a short prompt to get someone to add in more details or to give clarification. Then I can use this additional information to ask additional questions, get feedback from others, or be able to ensure that what I think that I’ve heard is complete and correct.
Great researchers use short phrases or silence during a conversation to get more information out of end users. If find this to be my favorite part of the conversation. The key is listening, not talking.
This is a Chrome extension I worked on with a developer, Dean Sofer.
Find My Bookmarks is a Chrome Extension that locates all your bookmarks for the current domain. If bookmarks are found, the icon appears and you can just click on it to get a list. It’s super-beta, but try it out and give feedback on what you think it should be.
Features:
Only took 15 years to figure this one out. From Microsoft:
Everyone benefits from an up-to-date browser.
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The Web overall is better – and safer – when more people run the most up-to-date browser. Our goal is to make sure that Windows customers have the most up-to-date and safest browsing experience possible, with the best protections against malicious software such as malware.
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Peter Clarke, Chief Technology Officer for the Isle of Man government, recently talked about the importance of approach in moving the Web forward, while respecting customer choice:
“Getting people to use the latest browser version has many benefits, chief among them is that newer browsers have better security features and keep users safer. The Internet Explorer team’s balanced approach to helping people move to the latest version is a good idea. Not only does it help individual users, it also takes into consideration the needs of enterprises.”
As we move to more SaaS based services and on demand software, version numbers should matter less and less. It benefits everyone (from customer support to end users to product managers) when software releases are more gradual.
There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting a year for a set of features that should be released over time. More updates that are smaller also mean happier customers.
Why did it take so long to figure this out?
This blog post makes me smile – a lot:
Startups are being bought for their design talent. While I was traveling I heard news that Facebook acquired Gowalla and I had to smile. This is an obvious design talent acquisition…Gowalla has one of the most talented groups of designers around and while their service was successful, it was seen to have lost to Foursquare and was looking to reinvent itself. Now, it doesn’t have to.
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Couple this with Facebook’s acquisition of Push Pop Press,Sofa, and Daytum, and you see a clear trend here — they’re pulling in as much design talent as they can.
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I’ve talked to friends at both Twitter and Zynga and the message is the same…they are 100% focused on design and investing heavily in it (and have been for a couple years now). I’ve even been asked if I know world-class design teams or agencies who want something new. Not because these companies want to work with them but because they want to buy them, because they can’t get design talent fast enough by recruiting individuals. Seriously.
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I remember not too many years ago that designers lamented of not having a “seat at the table”. Well, folks, your time has come. Not only do you have a seat at the table…you’ve got a starring role. There is no better time to be a designer than right now.
Hiring is a huge challenge right now in Silicon Valley, and I think it’s starting to show in the quality of startups. Some of them look like 1999 all over again. Companies with viable ideas and solid revenue streams (like where I work) are competing for talent with startups that pivot multiple times so they can find something that sticks, which is stupid product development.
Very few of these ideas are sustainable for the long term. I think it’s criminal to a certain point because they’re gambling with other people’s money, some of whom shouldn’t be angel investors.
There’s nothing wrong with working for a company that has a great business model, viable revenue stream, and is either close to profitability or very profitable. Especially if it’s an idea that actually provides a valuable service to end users (one of the reasons I like working at Jobvite).
Not everyone’s going to hit a home run. Most strike out — that’s the reality. Making sure you’re taking good swings is what counts.
Sean Parker made some interesting comments at a conference this week. Some of his comments:
A lot of the best talent in a particular domain is not necessarily the correct talent to be starting a company. So there’s a lot of fantastic engineers who really shouldn’t be product people, really shouldn’t be founders, and there’s a lot of founder product people who really shouldn’t be engineers.
Understanding your place in the ecosystem and the value you’re able to bring gets lost and distorted when there’s so much money sloshing around, and everyone you know is pushing you to go and start a company.
There’s a sense of entitlement that I’ve never seen before in Silicon Valley among people who work for a big company for a while and make a lot of money. They think the next step for them is to start a company. That’s often exactly the wrong thing for them to do. They will likely squander their own fortune or waste someone else’s money.
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Any great engineer these days, who has a good pedigree, can go and get a $250,000 or $500,000 check and start a business and they’re probably not qualified to do so.
They think they’re going to build a prototype and that’s enough. They need to be focused on building a team, and it doesn’t have to be a team of seasoned execs. It needs to be team of people who can perform all the functions necessary to run a business. I learned that the hard way–by starting companies that didn’t necessarily have a complete team.
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I think that the lesson in all this is that while this can sometimes work, it much more closely resembles gambling than it does investing. The result is going to be a lot of lost capital, but the most deleterious affects is the dispersion of human talent, human capital. The dispersion of human talent to a huge number of startups–none of which is executing with the right product or have the right team members to really succeed.
And the good businesses find themselves competing not just against Facebook and Google and Dropbox and Groupon for talent. They’re competing against literally thousands of startups, most of which will never succeed.
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Google bought 27 companies last quarter and a lot of them are talent acquisitions, in some cases paying $1 million an engineer. That can’t last forever. There’s way more startups getting founded now than there are companies than Google and Facebook want to buy.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
If you're a UX Designer in San Francisco, ping me at Twitter. I want to add you to a list I have there.
