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bjbj|:|: Thanks, Brandon. As Brandon mentioned, I - I m a manager at Vanguard, which as Brandon
also mentioned is mostly known for its low cost mutual funds. We have many lines of business;
I work in the retail, or consumer line of business, so that s the backdrop for what
I m going to be talking about today. Our user experience at Vanguard is fairly well established.
We ve been sending people pieces of paper and talking to them on the phone for many,
many years. We ve had a website of one form or another for about 15 years. And, it s very,
very important to us, especially the online aspects, because the online channel handles
most of our client interactions. And, because it s important to us we spend, even though
it s pretty good and done quite well for us over the last 15 years, we spend a lot of
time trying to improve it. That can very often feel a little bit like this, lots of projects
in flight at the same time, each trying to make their own improvements to the user experience,
sometimes sequentially to the same parts of the experience, sometimes even simultaneously
to the same parts of the experience. s continue the flight analogy for a second, and just
imagine that Vanguard turned its hand to aircraft design. Just let s pretend one of our teams
was asked to redesign this aircraft so it could carry more cargo, so they may well redesign
it, and turn it into something like this. Then maybe a little bit later another team
comes along and tries to redesign it to have more passengers. So, they might design it
something like this. Then another team comes along decides that speed is very important,
and so they redesign it something like this. Then, perhaps a little while later, moments
before a deadline, another crack team of information architects comes along, and perhaps they might
design it something like this. [Laughter] And, so on. Well, we have this problem at
Vanguard. Each of our projects gets so focused on their particular improvement that they
lose sight of the big picture, which is that any experience has to balance the needs, many
needs of users, and many needs of the business. But, prior to now we ve had no tool for having
this conversation about these balancing many needs, apart from arguing about the design.
So, we would show designs to our business sponsors, for example, and they would routinely
take it upon themselves to redesign them. They ll say, oh, no put that thing on the
right, or move that up the page, or set it on fire and make it spin round, or things
like this. They re really just trying to express their priorities for their project, which
results in the priorities for our experience changing over time and becoming very, very
schizophrenic. Unfortunately though, this isn t the only problem we have at Vanguard.
Is this a good webpage? How about this one, is this a good web experience? Is this a good
iPhone app? Is this a good drive-thru experience? Well, I can t tell you. Because, good needs
to be evaluated within the context of what the experience was trying to do in the first
place. And, I didn t design any of these experiences, so while I can hazard a guess at some of these,
I can t really tell you what they were set out to do. Well, what about this one? This
is a page from the Vanguard website; you d think I would be able to tell you if this
was a good experience, right? Unfortunately, we have this problem too; we measure lots
of stuff, but mostly because we can, not because they re effective measures of whether or not
the experience is good. Ten thousand people hit this page last month somebody will say
in a meeting at Vanguard. Well, great, was it good or bad? Did you want more people to
hit the page, or less people to hit the page? Were a hundred thousand people looking for
it, and only 10,000 found it? The 10,000 people that looked at it did they all go away upset,
or did they get what they needed from it? Did their behavior change as a result of looking
at this - at this page? We very rarely measure our user experience within the context of
the objectives that it set out to achieve. And, on the rare occasion we do, the rare
occasion that a project comes along and does define a - a goal, or a metric against the
objectives that they experience. The next project along defines a different metric.
We ve got no continuity of measure. Subsequently we don t really know whether or not we re
improving our experience over time. We can t learn from our successes, or more importantly,
as Jerrod said, from our failures. So, we have these two fairly fundamental problems,
you know, projects becoming very focused and no big picture thinking, and a lack of an
effective way of gauging success for our experiences. We had previously thought that we had a fairly
robust user experience process, and techniques and tools; this came as a little bit of as
a shock to us, as Brandon said, a bit of a mid-life crisis. And, as we started to think
about it, we started to realize that both of these problems shared a same, a similar
root cause. We didn t have any common language for describing the objectives of the experience
that we were trying to design to. Now, what we ve done is we ve spent a lot of time over
the last six months or so pulling together a lot of years worth of research, to try and
create a - a framework that can foster this type of big picture thinking while being able
to enable consistent and - and - and continuous measurement. The framework itself is easier
to show than talk about, so I m going to do that in a second, but just before I do, I
just wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of terms that we ll be using throughout. So,
we know that our users have goals. In our case, retire at 50, send my kids to college,
buy the extra beach house, things like that. And, we know that the business, Vanguard,
has goals. We want to keep costs down. We want to grow our assets. But, these goals
aren t that useful for us when we re designing experiences. They re too high level. They
are however realized through tasks. Users want to do stuff, so they can reach their
goals. Open accounts, look at their balances, see how much money they ve made, or lost in
recent times. And, we, Vanguard, want users to do certain things, so we can reach our
goals. We want them to turn off paper statement, for example, because they re expensive and
that way we can lower costs, and pass the savings along to the investors. We want them
to rollover their IRAs or 401(k)s to Vanguard, because that grows our assets and increases
economies of scale. And, it s these tasks then that are enabled and encouraged through
our experience. We break our experience up into smaller chunks, manageable chunks called
capabilities. But, it s these capabilities that then help investors do the things they
want to do, and encourage them to do the things that we would like them to do. And, they capabilities
are cross channel. m talking about a broader experience than just the web here. It s web,
it s phone, it s print, mobile, TV, radio, in person interactions if you re a brick and
mortar organization. And, it s these capabilities which projects then create and change over
time. So, let s take a look at how our framework is - is constructed. We mind all of our research,
as I say, we ve done lots of contextual inquiry, and observations, and focus groups, and studies
over the years, and we found 90 or so discrete user tasks that represented the entire lifecycle
of an investigator at Vanguard, from a prospect completely unaware of the existence of Vanguard
all the way through to a client, being a client for 20 years. And, we put them together and
we organized them into these eight high level categories. And, on the other side we did
the same thing for business driven task, things we want investors to do. We found about 45
or so that represented the full set, and we put them into these seven high level categories,
or groups. And, in the middle are all of our capabilities across channels, and we have
a lot. We have, as I said, a very mature experience. We have 635 and counting. We find new ones
everyday. They re web, phone, paper, each - we have a lot of forms, each form is trying
to satisfy certain tasks, each form is a capability, each webpage or cluster of webpages is a capabilities,
each type of phone call that we have is with our clients is a capability, each type of
phone call, not each phone call. This framework then allows us to create two distinct views
or tools that we found very, very useful. One, is focused on a single capability, and
is very - we call this the capability strategy sheet, and it s very useful for practitioners
and designers on projects, as they re designing these capabilities. The other is much, much
broader, and is more useful for managers or stakeholders, because it shows the entire
set of capabilities and how they satisfy user tasks, we call this the experience strategy
map. I ll go into both of these in a little bit of detail. s see how we use the framework
to create a capability strategy sheet. So, let s focus on a single capability, which
we ll call the rollover offer. It s a web capability; it s actually the screenshot from
Vanguard that I showed a minute ago. It s about five pages on our website that helps
somebody understand what a rollover is, why they should do one, why they should do one
at Vanguard, and helps them get that process started. What we do is we look through the
task model and extract out and identify all the tasks that we think this capability should
try and satisfy. So, one of our first - the first of the eight high level groups was find
an investment company. And there are four tasks within that: search for candidates,
find out about Vanguard s reputation, explore our projects and services, and find out about
Vanguard s fees. Now, this capability doesn t have to satisfy the task of searching for
candidates, because by the time you re looking at this you already found us. Neither does
it have to explore - help somebody explore our range of products or services, because
you re only caring about rollovers at this point. But, it does have to help the user
understand who we are and what we stand for, our reputation. And, it does have to help
the user understand what our fee structure is. In fact, the tasks in the framework are
written at the fairly generic level for a specific capability we often reword them,
so we would reword that last one to be, find out if there are any fees to do a rollover.
Once you identify these tasks throughout the framework you end up with between 5 and 20
tasks that this capability has to try and satisfy. It depends on the complexity of the
- of the capability. We typically do this exercise in a very collaborative fashion with
the project team. What we find works well is that each member of the project team spends
five minutes looking through the lists and circling the tasks they think apply, and then
we have a great collaborative discussion afterwards where, you know, well, I think this one, you
think that one, why do you think this one, and we - it get - generally it s a really
good conversation. Once we have these tasks, we then generally put them on stickies, put
them on the whiteboard and prioritize them. Had to tell you, that transitioning Power
Point took me about an hour to do, okay. [Laughter] s so good I want to show it again, I m sorry.
[Laughter] I could watch it all day. [Laughter] And, we prioritize them apparently 10 and
11 although on the slides, it s actually 1 through 11. We tried doing high, medium and
low, but everybody makes everything high, so that doesn t work, so we - we make - we
forced them into this ranking order. It doesn t really matter which one s number 7 and which
one s number 8, but what does matter is you have a discussion about which ones are most
important. You know, if you only had to do one of these two things in the capability,
which one would you - which one would you leave off? And, then you put that one beneath
that one, and you work your way through. Again, a great collaborative discussion, because
the different people in the room bring different perspectives, and data, somebody will say,
well this one s really important because it s a user driver task as opposed to a business
driven task and we care more about the users. Somebody will say, well this one s really
important because lots of people do this. Maybe this one s really important, because
perhaps it s the only place in the experience that you can actually perform this - this
task. So, we get them into priority order. And, then for each of these things - oh, and
in some cases when you re having that discussion some of these things drop off the bottom.
You say, well this is too many things for this single capability to do, let s get rid
of some of these so we can focus more. So, something they - they - they drop off the
bottom. And, then for each of these tasks we think about the emotional considerations
that the user might be feeling, a high level design approach and solution, and the success
criteria for all we ll know whether or not we re satisfying it well. ll pick on get information
about investments is the - is the one to go through as the example here. We thought it
was very important to bring the emotional aspect in at this stage, because this is very
task based model, but we know that people aren t just robots blindly performing tasks
on our experience. How they feel about the tasks that they re - that they re doing, really
effects how they approach it, and certainly effects how we approach the solution for it.
If somebody s checking their balance and they re worried that they re going to be able to
retire, then that worry can certainly affect, you know, the language and tone we use when
we re talking to them in our content and in our design choices. So, in order to make this
easier for us, we created this little set of emotions, and this isn t a full set of
all emotions in the world, it s just the ones that we think are pertinent to financial transactions.
We didn t put love and hate on here, although some people may feel that. So, in this particular
instance where we re talking about getting information about an investment so you can
pick which stock or fund to put your investments in, we said we might say that the confused-informed
dimension is an interesting one. Because, there s certainly this paradox of choice thing
going on here with the amount of information being overwhelming. Then we might put in a
couple of sentences about high level approach, if we re thinking of how we might solve this
particular task in this capability. In this case we may say, well we ll provide some summary
level of information about investments here in this rollover capability, but then we ll
contextually link people to the full area of the site where we let people dig in and
research investments until their heart s content, investment specific to rollovers And, then
most importantly I think, the success criteria, we need to know over time whether or not we
re satisfying this task well. We - we - this is taken us - this is probably one of the
most difficult things that we found when coming up with these capability sheets, is coming
up with specific relevant success metrics to decide whether or not when we re live with
this capability and production we re - we re satisfying it well. It s very much art
versus science. So, we may say in this case, if we re putting these contextual links into
the body of this capability, if somebody s going to go and look at our other investment
area, we want them to use those links versus the global navigation links, because the global
navigation links won t provide them investments specific to rollovers, the contextual ones
will. So, we may say, if someone s going to use those, or go that path go this way versus
that way. Now, this we do this for each of the ten tasks in the capability. And, that
basically is the capability sheet, which then enables you to do some interesting things
with it. Again, some of the numbers on the diagram are missing here, but I m going to
highlight them in a second, so you can put your priorities against your designs. This
is the screen we looked at earlier, which represents the actual production version of
this page or capability in - on our website. And, you can see that if I highlight, that
s four and five, it s the process and benefits of rollovers, and learn how we can help you
do a rollover, that s - that looks to be very much what this capability is out, there s
a lot - about. There s a lot of body copy about those two tasks. There s a couple of
navigational elements. The most important capability - the most important task, I m
sorry. The most important is task is way over on the right. The actually get started going
a rollover. There s a link and a - and a phone number over on the right there. Now, that
could be okay. All of us design professionals in the room know that you can t just design
your page to reflect the linear order of what s important, because people in this case aren
t ready to do a rollover yet. They want information, but this at least provides a framework for
rationalizing those decisions with stakeholders and sponsors, which we found very useful.
This one s interesting though. Get investment recommendations and get information about
investments. Vanguard is an investment company. We sell investments. People like to buy them
from us. They like information about them; they like to know why they re great. Yet,
and this is the second or third most important thing in this capability, yet in the screen
on the right it s buried in a single bullet in the middle of a page and one navigational
choice. It really doesn t speak about the investments we have at all. This is something
that as a result of this process is going to change in future versions of this - this
capability. And, this one, learn about the Vanguard story, the fact that we re client
owned, so all of the savings go back to the investors in the funds, isn t actually even
on this page at all. It s definitely going to fail at that one. So, these capability
strategy sheets we found a lot of value in three specific ways. The first is that it
really helps project teams understand the entire scope of what they have to do with
the capability, or if they re just focused on improving it in one particular way, what
not to mess up. It also helps sponsors stay focused on their responsibility, helping us
decide what the capability should do, and the priority order of them. Not telling us
whether or not they like blue versus green or pink, or whether they want it on the left,
or the right. And, the third thing is, it really supports controlled evolution of our
capabilities over time, because it gives us this stable platform of measurement. Here
s the thing these sheets are not project sheets, they re about the capability, because, projects
come and go, but the capabilities are always there. So, it supports this continuous evolution
over time. Now, the other view into the model will be familiar for anybody that s used or
read about the metamodeling technique that Patha and DeYoung have used over years. And,
that it puts the tasks of the experience across a very wide document. I m showing one of our
high level tasks groups here, monitor my investments. And, in our model this has about 20 tasks
within it. I m just going to show the first four here. I ll read them so people at the
back can see. Check my balance, find out how much I ve made, am I on track to reach my
goal, and check the status of transactions. Into the body of the experience strategy map,
the second view, we then put our different capability channels. So, I m showing three
here, Vanguard s map has a few more, TV, radio, things like that, web, print and phone. And,
into this we then map the capabilities against the tasks they satisfy. And, because as we
ve just seen in the capability sheet, it was trying to do ten tasks, the tasks will appear
multiple times here - the capabilities, I m sorry will appear multiple times in this
map. Statements, for example, not only tries to satisfy the task of checking my balance,
but also, if I can get it to click in, it helps you find out how much money I ve made.
And, many other things aside. And, because we have measures and success criteria from
the capability sheets, we can lay them in here too in terms of red, green and yellow
as how - how healthy each of those things is, how well it s satisfying that task. And,
you can see that while the statement may be really great at checking my balance, it might
suck at finding out how much money I ve made. So, this becomes very dashboard like, very
health check like. You can use it to see how well your experience is satisfying your client
task across capabilities, across channels. We think this has got two very useful benefits.
The first is that because it shows capabilities across channels, and how well we re satisfying
the tasks, we can use it to; for example, check that we re being consistent, as consistent
as we want to be handling the check my balance task across our different capabilities, for
example. But, really the biggest benefit, and the one that we think has the most potential
for this, is that because it shows the health of the entire experience, our sponsors and
stakeholders, and senior management can use it to determine where we should start to spend
money on improvements. It s obviously not the only thing that they use. What s the point
of fixing a poor capability if no one s using it? So, you need to take into account, you
know, volumes and how much it s going to cost to fix those things, and many other factors.
But, it is a critical factor in showing where the smoke in the experience. Now, we have
these two tools, how is this being received and this framework, how is this being received
in our organization I don t see too many glazed looks, but I d be lying if I told you that
we didn t sometimes get this kind of, holy ***, that is really, really complex reaction.
But, really when you look at - I m sorry I didn t warn you about the potty mouth thing
[Laughter]. When you look at the - this model framework by capability by capability, it
s actually surprisingly simple to use now that we have the framework. ve had project
teams with no prior knowledge of this model create capability strategy sheets in a matter
of a few hours, and get a lot of great conversation and discussion out of the process. And, that
s actually how we re rolling it out across our organization. We re - we re specifically
just targeting certain capabilities and project teams, working very closely with them, coaching
them through it so that they can organically spread - spread the message. And, it s not
just a tool for user experience professionals, our business colleagues are critical players
when determining which tasks a capability has to satisfy and the priority order of those
tasks, which is great for us, because we really need them to spread this idea throughout our
organization. I know I m going to get some flak when they see this slide, back at Vanguard.
re also trying to effect a bit of a more organizational cultural change. We re trying to help our
business sponsors to reframe the project briefs they write at the beginning of projects into
this language of tasks and capabilities and away from add this link to this page. We re
really trying to help them reverse engineer their design solutions out of the project
charters and tell us what task they re trying to improve, and then we can figure out which
capabilities might be the appropriate ones to - to address that task. d love for them
to be written that way in the first place, but obviously that s going to take a long
time. It s something we re slowly working our way towards. And, finally, although we
started off with two very discrete problems and the solution that we came up with this
framework let us produce these two tools to solve some of these problems we were having.
It s really done something much, much more, much more profound really. It s - it s really
helping our teams because it s removing barriers of communication. It s really fostering talking
between our team members of very different backgrounds, IT, business, user experience.
It allows them to come into rooms and collaborate more, and really act as the - the collaborative
teams they re suppose to be working towards shared goals. Now, will this work for your
organization? I m not sure. If your organization shares some of the same problems as ours does,
then maybe it will. Namely, you have a fairly mature and established user experience and
you know quite a lot about the tasks and capabilities that - that it comprises, and an organization
where a continuous, measurable improvement is important, then it might well work for
you. If you do decide to take it back to the - to the office and try it out, I d love
to - to hear from you. Thank you. [End of Audio] MX 2010 Richard Dalton, Dealing with
a UX Mid-Life Crisis Page PAGE of NUMPAGES www.verbalink.com Page PAGE of NUMPAGES h4D`
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