dancingmango

Me-too brochureware banking

Take a look at this template.  Header and navigation at the top, large hero to the left, with three product panels beneath.   Log-in to account is on the right with information on security and help beneath.  If you want to be an information architect for a bank, it would appear this is all you need.  This is your cookie cutter to success.

Don’t believe me?  Start with Lloyds TSB.

Yep, that seems to fit.  how about Halifax.  Almost the same grid being used there.

Can’t be coincidence can it?  Let’s look at HSBC… There’s the hero again. And the three content boxes. And internet banking on the right.

This is getting a bit repetitive.  What about Santander?

There’s a pattern going on here. Looks like they are all at it! Does any other industry segment from such ‘me-too’ism? If it was the right model to be using it wouldn’t be so bad, but their consistency is around consistency of what they do. No-one is really thinking about the customer and what they want. Barclays gets close, but there’s little in the way of understanding customer needs and goals. Little to support customer journeys. It’s all about the Bank, with Products and Services. And Access your accounts on-line! (And ‘We’re so complicated we need help on our home page’). And if everyone else does it obviously we are doing The Right Thing. Does this matter? Isn’t there a better way to design a bank’s brochureware pages?  I’m looking for examples.  I fear I’ll be looking for a while.

Usability and the $1 trillion mistake

Is this a case of fat fingers, a usability flaw or poor design that enabled a Citigroup trader to have placed an order to sell $16 billion, instead of $16 million? P&G shares plunged by 23% because of this individual erroneous trade. What followed was the algorithms kicked in and automated trading saw the Dow loose a tenth of its value in less than half an hour. (And Accenture dropped to 4 cents down from $42!)

Before we go blaming human error, questions should be asked why that error occurred. How can someone make such a simple mistake so easily? Was it a case of entering two many 0s? (Don’t stop to look or think, answer the question as soon as you’ve read it – how many zeros are there in this number? 160000000. Same thing again, how many zeros are in this number 12,000,000. That’s a bit easier isn’t it. Only an ‘N’ separates the B from the M on a qwerty keyboard, in a hurry, easily mistaken?)

I’d start by looking at human factors and experience design, and question why (assumption here) the IT team who implemented the system didn’t have before a UX designer on the team to think about the human factors. Could this be the most costly example of poor design?

Article: Big drop, was it all a mistake?

Where would your customers stick yours?

Opposite me on the train sits a man woking on his Lenevo lap top.  The Lenevo logo is small, on the top right handside of the lid.  Taking pride of place, in the middle of his lap top lid is a large Apple icon.  I’ve seen this before, people with Dells sticking the Apple sticker on the back or by the mousepad.  Genius thinking by Apple, to include their logo sticker in product boxes, getting customers to promote their brand on competitors products.  Enabling people to make a statement; I’d rather have an Apple, but work gave me this lousy windows machine.

If you gave your customers your brand logo, where would they stick it?

Follow fast

I’ll pick on a random industry. Let’s say you are an airline. Part of your digital strategy includes a refresh to your website (maybe you were inspired by this presentation I did a while ago on digital for airlines!). You’ve built a business case and secured funding for the project.  First things first, you get a design agency in and set them to work.

Some sort of competitor analysis is performed that proabably includes features and functions that “we like”, (for example ‘the tactile sliders in kayak.com. We like!  And an iPhone-like coverflow, got to have one of those…)

The information architect takes these ideas away and starts building wireframes and the creative team produce designs that bring these wires to life.  The team come up with lots of new, innovative ideas.  This is after all a ‘refresh’, and ‘innovation’ was probably one of the words in the brief.  The creative is fresh and ‘of the moment’, the IA has developed some new interaction models that are unique and compelling.  The business is sold on a new, innovative way of interacting with their customers, something that no one else does and will blow all their competitors away.

I’ve been bouncing ideas around with Luke Barrett (and because he doesn’t blog, I’ll write them down for him) around this approach; specifically the value of innovation against ‘follow fast’.

Luke reminded me of a project we worked on together many years ago. Before we started designing webpages we did usability testing. We did usability testing of the competitors, and of sites that were getting a lot of press as ‘innovative’.  This was at a time that boo.com had just started and the client were talking about how cool an avatar would be on their site, just like boo. We put people in front of boo.com and watched them suffer. Clearly the avatar was an idea good on paper, terrible on execution.  So we killed it.  Not on our site.

We observed what worked and what didn’t on a multitude of sites with real users. Then, like magpies, we took what was good and worked. Nothing particularly innovative, (let other people do that), we took the best of what existed and delivered on that.

So back to our airline. How about a different approach where they start by usability testing their competitors. Ask participants to book tickets on competitor websites. Understand what interaction elements work, what don’t.

Those kayak sliders, cool for geeks (maybe), but how about the target audience that flies and buys online with you?  It may not be cutting edge design, but Does a drop down work better?

The coverflow may be cool on your iPhone, but how successful is it for people seeking a holiday?  A static list has worked for websites till now (and it wasn’t so long ago that horizontal scrolling was the Great Taboo), just because Apple do something that looks cool for a particular purpose on their products, doesn’t mean you have to follow by scrapping your navigation.

There are no prizies for (design) innovation (other than for some award that the design agency may covet). The only metric that counts is conversion rates and the ability of the website to deliver the business case. Leave others to do the crazy innovation stuff, let others go through the dip when they launch new features, make sure you have got the platform and expertise right and be ready to follow fast.

Who would turn off the wrong engine?

In designing user interfaces there’s a lot we can learn from systems where failure to consider human factors has resulted in terrible consequences.

On 8th January 1989 British Midland Flight 92 crashed whilst attempting an emergency landing. There had been a fire on one of the engines which led to its malfunction. The captain reacted by shutting down the engine.  Only he shut down the wrong engine. With no power, approaching East Midlands airport the captain manged to glide the Boeing 737-400 to avoid Kegworth village but crashed short of the runway.  47 people died.

The investigation into the Kegworth air disaster identified engine malfunction (the engine used in the aircraft was an upgrade of an existing engine and had not been field-tested) as causal factor, however the report concentrated upon the failure of the flight crew to respond accurately to the malfunction.  Human error was the primary cause.

The truth is a little more complicated than that.  Why does a captain with over 13,000 hours flying experience and a first officer with over 3,000 hours experience shut down the wrong engine?

A number of human factors contributed to the disaster including organisational issues (refer to this paper for discussion of the role of managerial failures in disasters) and cognitive overload.  But of equal importance (and indeed buried in the appendices of the Investigation Report appendices) is the issue of design. Around 50% of accidents and incidents in the aircraft and nuclear industries have a root cause in design (source).

Take a look at the cockpit controls (taken from the investigation report). The left image is for the earlier 300 series and the right for the 400 series aircraft on which the captain had only 23 hours experience after a one day training course.

The actual cause of the engine malfunction was a broken turbine, itself the result of metal fatigue caused by excessive vibration (source).  Had the Captain noticed the Vibration Warning display he probably would not have made the wrong decision.

The Vibration Warning display on the new 400 series was in a different place to the 300 series, but more critically it was designed to be significantly smaller “the dial on the vibration meter was no bigger than a 20 pence piece and the LED needle went around the outside of the dial as opposed to the inside of the dial as in the previous 737 series aircraft” (Source: Wikipedia).  Take a look at the arrow on the left hand image, the display dials on the 300 series use mechanical pointers. On the 400 series they were redesigned with short LEDs rotating around the numbers. These, as the investigation report noted “are much less conspicuous than mechanical pointers, acting more as scale markers, and providing less immediate directional information).

The report criticised the layout of the instrumentation and helpfully suggested an improved layout.  The layout was (and as far as I can tell, remains in 737s) split into primary instruments and secondary instruments.  The issue with this layout is that the dials are not spatially aligned with their associated power levers.  If the pilot is focussing upon the primary instrumentation, the secondary instrumentation is in peripheral view.  This layout will lead to attention based around specific instruments rather than engines.

Compare this to an alternative design that the report provides where the dials are aligned to their associated power levers.  The report recognises the design trade-offs here but concludes that to break the left-right mental association with the engine position was probably not the most optimal solution.

This paper describes the issue well:

The 737 involved in the East Midlands crash had flight deck engine information that lead to confusion under mental pressure. Placing the secondary information sets for both engines to the right of the primary set broke the implied rule set by all the other engine information, that the left engine had left hand controls and indicators (and vice versa). If one assumes that the optimum positioning of indicators is the one that requires the least mental processing then a simple symmetry about the aircraft centre line seems appropriate. The actual positions required a mental spatial transposition of one set of dials to the other side… The readability of the indicators had been reduced by the substitution of electro-mechanical readouts with electronic readouts, but which simulated the old design. Possibly the redesign to electronic readouts should have taken the opportunity to use a rather different layout, possibly with linear indicators rather than rotary ones.

OK, so lots of words, but what is the point of this to what I usaully blog about?  The issue is one of design and layout and who’s responsibility is it.  In designing user interfaces UCD is often seen as a luxury, developers believe that they can design a GUI as well as anyone, and stakeholders (especially on internal projects) will question the value that a UCD person can bring to the project.  Does a developer or an engineer by training and instinct stop to ponder the human factor and the human consequences of the GUI layout? What are the consequences of this?  As can be seen from Kegworth, seemingly minor changes to the control layout can have a signficant impact on the safety of a complex system.

Put some fun back into your business

Litter bins on the street aren’t the most interesting of objects.  The design is pretty standard, with variations on a couple of themes – cylindrical or rectangle and colour being the primary tool of differentiation.

“To throw rubbish in the bin instead of onto the floor shouldn’t really be so hard. Many people still fail to do so. Can we get more people to throw rubbish into the bin, rather than onto the ground”

One answer is to make it more fun.  Check out The FunTheory for other ways of improving mundane products by making them fun.

Now think about that mundane product of yours.  Maybe it is your on-line retail bank.  It is getting tired and it is time for a technology refresh.  You’re going through a process of capturing requirements.  How about playing an innovation game, but base it on the concept of fun.  What could you introduce to your product that would make people smile?  What would make people laugh?  OK, so after a while the bin would no longer be fun.  What makes it fun is the element of surprise.  Again, what could you drop into the product that would surprise people.  What would a ‘fun’ internet bank look like?  Focus on fun and surprise and you might uncover a nugget of inspiration that will make the final product.

Do customers want to customise your site?

Have you ever added a custom tool bar on your office set up?  Have your non-techy friends and family changed the background image on their desktop or changed their screen saver.  Is there a demand for customisation?

So here’s the question.  Do people really want to make your homepage look the way they want it to?  Is there a demand for iGoogle and netvibes customisation?  They look cool and are attractive to the geeks in us, but do they have mass market appeal? Is there any research out there on the take up of user customisation?

“…back when Windows 95 was released, users could easily change My computer to something more personal. Apple users had been able to do this for many years, and many of them did name their computers. But few Windows users took the opportunity to do this, suggesting that they saw the computer as more of a tool than something with which they wanted to have a personalized relationship.” (David Malouf)

Just because we can doesn’t mean that we should.  When you log into your bank account it could look like netvibes, complete with BBC news feeds and YouTube videos (you decide what you want).  But should it?

Why should your customers see your website as something to have a personalized relationship with, especially if you don’t engage them with a personal relationship throguh your other channels?

Customer value proposition model

There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market for the niche?

How do you create a successful proposition?  If the answer was obvious there wouldn’t be so many failures out there in the market place.

It is easy to commence on a journey of product development with a hunch and clearly there is no substitute for validating ideas in the flesh.  That something at ThoughtWorks we do; helping clients test and learn, rapidly building ideas into tangibles that can be piloted at low cost and low risk before investing in significant build and spend.  However, sometimes a little more rigour is required before you commit to commencing a project in earnest.

That rigour needs to be focused.  What often happens is this rigour turns into a research phase that turns into a project itself.  It need not be this way.  There are certain things you can do, certain questions to ask as you set out on the journey of creating a new, compelling customer proposition.  What follows then is a strawman model to help test potential propositions before moving forward with them.  There are three components to the model, the customer, the environmental context and the organisation or company.

All too often propositions are rooted in the organisation.  They make assumptions about the demand or usage. This model attempts to broaden the analysis and focus upon the customer and the why the proposition will be attractive to them.  The model supports questions that may be asked to help shape thinking, test hypotheses and validate thinking.

I do not propose that this should become a major research exercise  (for example market sizing is a huge effort in itself), rather a tool for asking the right questions, and if the answers are hard to come by, maybe that suggests more thought is required in refining the proposition.

So here goes, a model that provides a framework for considering new customer value propositions.  It’s just an initial idea and I’d welcome feedback and suggestions.

Customer

Before you get too carried away with the proposition, a good starting point would be the customer.  Who are they and what do they do.  Let’s remember that your customer is not everybody.  Your proposition in unlikely to be appealing 24/7.  The challenge is to segment your target market and identify the triggers for action.

The persona: Who do?

Personas are a useful tool for bringing the customer to life.  Much has been written about them, but they are a useful tool for extracting broad data into specific stories that describe individuals. Realise that it is unlikely you will design for everybody. Start with the market that you are targeting, how large is it and what is its propensity to spend? Then within that target market segment the target customer base into different profile customers (personas). You need to understand which persona, which customer profile is most important – prioritise them and focus on the highest value.  This may mean deciding between high volume, low margin mass market and low volume, high margin niche appeal.  This decision needs to be made as early as possible to ensure the proposition remains focused and doesn’t try to be all things to all people, satisfying none.

Values, needs, wants and desires

People are not empty vessels waiting to consume and be filled with your proposition.  Their behaviour is driven by their values, needs, wants and desire.  These may be fundamentally rational (to satisfy a basic human goal) or emotional (to demonstrate status). They are cultural and time based.  Thinking in these terms helps you understand how the proposition will appeal to the customer at different levels.  Let’s take an example of this; a new mobile phone.

Before we think about what the product must do, what are the values that the persona associates with the phone. Is our target market a technophile or a technophobe? Jan Chipchase who works for Nokia includes ethnography in his research to understand how people use their phones; women carry them in their handbags, men in their pockets or their belts.

The basic need that the phone must meet to satisfy the customer, she must be able to make and receive calls.  If the product is unable to meet these needs it is not fit for purpose and the phone proposition will inevitably fail.

Just making phone calls meets the need but there are additional wants that should be satisfied for the product to be more compelling.  It’s a hassle to remember the number of every person she rings, the customer wants to be able to store numbers and see the number of the person who is calling.

Having the ability to see a photograph of her daughter as a screen saver on her phone is neither a need not a want.  The phone is useful and usable without that.  But the customer desires to personalise her phone by having a picture of her daughter on it.  Desirability is the key differentiator of the iPhone.  It doesn’t need to compete on features, it is a cool device that people talk about.  And here is a key decision you need to make on your proposition journey.  Are you looking to compete on parity or whether you want to make a difference.

Questions

• What is the basic need that the proposition is trying to fulfil?
• What counts as hygiene?
• What does the customer need to be satisfied?
• What does the customer want in addition to being just satisfied
• What do other competive products do to maintain feature parity (if you feel you really need to compete on features alone – bad move!)
• Few people would argue they don’t want simplicity and clarity in their interactions with products.  How could your product to make life easier for the customer?
• What will make the customer feel good in themselves about owning the product?
• What other products are “cool” or desirable to your target market.  How can you leverage the essence of those products?

Context

So now we are beginning to understand who the customer is, it is time to nest the proposition in terms of their context.  The old maxim that a half drunk bottle of water in a desert is worth its weight in gold, but on the streets of a city is worthless trash, should be remembered.  Even the best of propositions will deliver little value if they not only consider the customer, but also the context in which they apply: time, demand and usage.

Trigger

So the next step in the model is to ask why, when and how will the customer be attracted to the proposition. What is the trigger that drives the customer to move from awareness (assuming you have that) to action?  There is no point in a financial services company trying to sell me a car loan if I am wealthy enough to own my own car, or I do not drive.  Understand what triggers the customer to be interested in the proposition, when and why this happens.  How can your proposition be at front of mind when the trigger is set.

Questions

• What lifestyle / lifestage events will trigger?
• Internal events personal to the customer; leaving school, getting a first job, getting married, moving house, retiring etc
• External events that they have no control over (think about sports sponsorship and tying a proposition to that sport, or tying a proposition to a celebrity e.g. Michael Jackson..)

Environment

It is very unlikely that the proposition will be wholly unique.  What is the competitive landscape, what noise will it need to be heard above to capture the consumers attention.  Whilst you may review the immediate competitors to see where threats and opportunities lie, what can you learn from other, unrelated products or domains?  How can you fuse together concepts from outside your immediate focus to bring new innovation to your product?  Scenario planning may come in useful, playing out different outcomes for different timelines other than that which you plan for.

Questions

• What is the competitive landscape?
• What can you learn about similar but unrelated propositions?
• Have you considered the political, environmental social and technical influences using the old PEST analysis?
• Have you considered different scenarios and how your proposition would play out under them; what unplanned disruptors could get in the way, or how could your proposition done differently disrupt the market?

The experience engine

Enough of the customer and externalities, what will the proposition look like and why will the target customer go with it? There are three engines within the organisation that drive the proposition, the experience, delivery and value engines.  So…

Utility

To be any good, the product has got to offer basic utility.  It has to do what it says it is going to do.  Sadly, too many products and customer propositions end there.  A utility product will match the consumers needs.  This is where most enterprise software sits…

• What are the key customer needs that the proposition must fulfil?
• What is the basic core functionality that must be met, what are the features that must be offered to gain traction in the market place?
• What features that are typical on competitor products that we could do without?

Quality

I could call this next box usability (as this follows the UXD model) but I think it goes beyond just usability.  What is the quality of not only the immediate interface, but also with the supporting functions?  For example, if you have a call centre to back up the proposition, how many layers of IVR are you forced through?

• Have you considered usability?
• Is the packaging aesthetically pleasing?
• The “happy path” customer journey may be well framed, but what about the “sad path”?  What about when things go wrong, what about when customers don’t act in the way you expect of predict them to act?

Brand

It is easy to get carried away with a new idea before thinking about what it means to the brand.  Typically there will be a strategic roadmap and whilst the proposition may be attractive it may not fit into where the brand is going.

• Is the proposition complementary to the overall brand direction or does it require a new brand and identity?
• Does the proposition support / leverage the brand?
• Does the brand already ‘do it’ under another guise (are you reinventing a wheel that has already been tried somewhere, sometime in the organisation’s history?)
• How will it be marketed?

Community

Finally, what is the ‘buzz’ that the proposition will create, what will get people talking and sharing it and how will you create this buzz.

• Is there a social network component built in that gets people talking and connected?  How will it get people talking in external networks?
• What will cause people to recommend it to others?
• How can customers become part of its evolution?
• What of the proposition will get people passionate, what will drive them away?

Delivery engine

People

A successful proposition needs not only a talented, passionate and committed team to deliver it to market, it also needs a similar team to run it and support it when it is live.  It is a common failing for a rogue “skunkworks” team to emerge in an organisation and develop what appears a compelling proposition, only to have it knocked back and closed down by the “Business as Usual” processes inherent in the organisation

• Who do you need to make the proposition successful?  What is the team?
• Who will create the proposition and who will lead it?  Is it IT led or business led?
• What are the cross-organisational boundaries that the proposition crosses and how will these be eliminated?
• Who will take ownership of the proposition once it crosses over into the market?

Process

• What are the processes that will be required to sustain the proposition?
• If the proposition will require changes to the organisation, how will they be managed, communicated and rolled out?
• How will the proposition be supported once it is let loose in the market?
• How will it be communicated to customers?
• How will you create new sales – sales force.

Technology

• What is the technology that will underpin the proposition?
• Is it possible to test the ideas using rapid languages such as Ruby on Rails before committing it to the enterprise Java stack?
• What integration is really necessary and what can be worked around?
• How can you deliver a beta version in the shortest period of time?
• How will you avoid heavyweight frameworks and develop incrementally to deliver value early and often?
• How performant and scalable must the innovation be?

Value Engine

At its most simplistic, how much will the proposition cost and how much revenue will it generate?  Does it offer cost saving opportunities?  Are there intangible benefits that will be accrued?  Ultimately is it a viable proposition that is worth pursuing, or will the cost to develop and run outweigh the value it will add?  Building out a financial model can take time, in the first instance this should be a napkin analysis, a wake-up call to make sure there is value in the proposition before too much time is invested in it.

Cost

Every day someone is working on the proposition it is costing you money.  The quicker you can get something to market the faster you will start seeing a return on your investment, similarly the sooner you can “get something out there”, “test and learn” the sooner you can kill a proposition that does not fulfill its promise.

• How quickly can you get a beta to market?
• How many people, how many days?
• What will the cost be to develop the infrastructure?
• Do you have the skills in house or will you need to go external?

Benefit / Revenue

At its most crude, how will the proposition make money, but there may be more to what we wish to achieve.  Is the proposition actually going to cut costs, a result of regulatory pressures or a CSR initiative?
What are the benefits that will be accrued – both tangible (e.g. financial) and intangible (e.g. social, environmental etc)

• If you are selling units are you going for high volume low margin or low volume high margin?
• If it an on-line proposition “advertising” is often seen as the source of revenue.

There are two additional components to the model…

Implementation

Having a compelling proposition is one thing, it is another to successfully communicate it and roll it out to target customers.

• In a crowded market place, how will the proposition stand out?
• What are the brand values it will communicate?
• What is the story that customers will hear and how will they hear that story?
• How will customers interact with the proposition, what channels will you use to take it to market?
• What is the roll out strategy?

Retain and grow

Winning customers is only the first step.  A successful proposition will maintain a long-term relationship with its profitable customers, maintaining the warmth they have to the original proposition and cross-selling and up-selling new ones.

• How will you retain them and turn them into repeat customers and passionate advocates of the proposition?
• How will the proposition grow lifetime customer value?
• What can be cross-sold or up-sold?
• What can you bundle?
• How will the proposition deal with churn?

OK, so it’s not a perfect model and by no means complete.  There’s some duplication in the thinking and many questions missing, but as any model it can be used to guide and prompt thinking and ensure there are no elephants left in the room when the first line of code gets cut.  I’d welcome any comments on its usefulness, utility and direction.

Using stories to sell products

Dolls are girls stuff.   I don’t count Action Man (Which I had a few of as a youngster) dolls.  But being a Daddy of two girls, dolls start to be part of my world.  Wandering down Michigan avenue in Chicago on Saturday I stumbled across American Girl. Not only have they have elevated the doll beyond a product and into an experience, they have created an experience around the buying and owning of their dolls.  The product, the doll, is almost secondary to the narrative.  Every doll has a back story,  indeed they come with a paperback to describe this story.  Books build on this story, as do DVDs computer games as well as the dolls clothes, furniture and accessories all extending the product experience.

Wandering around the store I passed the doll hair salon (dolls sitting on doll-sized hairdressers chairs with their hair being plaited, braided, styled, blow dried…), the hospital (fixing broken dolls, returned to the owner wearing a hospital gown and discharge certificate), the historical doll museum (dolls representing children from different eras)… Walking into the American Girl I had no intention of spending any money there.  I ended up buying two dolls and clothes, I bought into the experience and took home to my girls not just presents from Daddy’s worldwide travels but also a story to tell.

Dolls are a product that it is (arguably) easy to create stories, narrative and experience around.  It is easy to provide this as a case study, but harder for a completely unrelated industry (such as financial services) to learn anything from it.  Harder, but not impossible.  Look at comparethemarket and the way they are building a story with Aleksandr around what is a pretty dull product.  As you develop a new product or application, can you build a narrative that supports the product?  Once you start telling a story, what new insights come to mind? How can you build an experience beyond the immediate product?

Design vision

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you don’t need to do any design when you adopt Agile.  Agile development strives to deliver business value early and often, focusing on getting working software to market as soon as possible rather than dwelling in documentation and ‘analysis paralysis’.  But let’s be clear, “business value” and “working software” are not the same thing.  You can quite easily get something into production that fails to generate revenue, decrease costs or whatever other yardstick you use for ‘value’.  What differentiates the two of them is design.  I don’t mean big up front design that details all the features and provides a concrete spec, I mean a design vision that articulates what the product goals are and a roadmap for getting there.  And what is a design vision?  A short statement of intent is a good place to start, and soon after a user interface mocked up in pen and ink.  It is cheap and easy and helps bridge the path from idea to execution.