Users are People Too Adobe Max Presentation

Hello, Adobe Max!

Meagan Fisher @owltastic on Twitter

Previous “Clients”

“Be a valuable business in our community and inspire loyal

customer advocates.”

The Goal of Service Industry Companies

Trying to create that “Potato Patch” feeling

Create an environment where customers feel

welcomed, supported, & valued.

But… service is so annoying.

Software

✓ Consistent

✓ Streamlined

✓ Efficient

Software

✓ Consistent

✓ Streamlined

✓ Efficient

✓ Forgettable

✓ Inhumane

✓ Joyless

“Be a valuable business in our community and inspire loyal customer advocates.”

Online businesses

Create an environment where customers feel

welcomed, supported, & valued.

“We must be more than user-centered, we must be human-centered—to know people first as people, not as users or customers or clients. Our designs are conceived from a deep understanding of humanity and with the desire to help individuals accomplish their goals.”

https://www.ibm.com/design/language/framework

Putting the humanity back in software:

1. Have a welcoming personality.

2. Speak like a human being.

3. Get them to the “kick-ass zone.”

4. Design for reality.

1. Have a welcoming personality.

“Everything has a personality: everything sends an emotional signal… Even where this was not the intention of the designer, the people who view the website infer personalities and experience emotions… Horrible personalities instill horrid emotional states in their users, usually unwittingly.”

Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things

Accidentally Horrible vs. Beloved Personalities

“The major dimensions of personality are dominance and friendliness… positive emotions are associated with a friendly demeanor… while negative emotions are associated with unfriendliness.”

Dominant

Passive

Unfriendly Friendly

Dominant vs. Friendly

Angular Curved

LightHeavy

Aa High Contrast Aa Low Contrast

Dense Whitespace

Bold Regular

Uppercase Lowercase

abc abc

XYZ xyz

Yikes.

Let’s look at modern “travel agents.”

Dominant vs. Friendly

•Angular vs. curved

•Heavy vs. light

•High contrast vs. low

•Caps vs. lowercase

•Bold vs. regular

•Dense vs. whitespace

“Our main philosophy is that we want you to spend as little time on our site as possible with the least amount of pain.”

Steve Huffman, Hipmunk cofounder. via Forbes, “Why Hipmunk Is The World's Best Travel Site”

Hometeam Personality Characteristics

Solution Oriented

Modern

Innovative

Intelligent

Technology-driven

Transparent

Expert

Trustworthy

Mature

Direct

Compassionate

Understanding

Optimistic

Accessible

Human-centered

Solid

Self-assured

Confident

Leading

Visionary

Imagery is of things, not peopleBold, condensed font

skews dominant

Heavy lines and sharp angles skew dominant

Emphasis on tech

White text on bright colors is harsh, hard to read

Both Caregiver and care recipient are out of focus, not human-centered

High contrast throughout, skews dominant

“We understand that you have a busy life, and are devastated by your Mom’s dementia. You wish you could be there for her. We’re here to help so you can enjoy being her daughter again.”

Our current visuals do a great job of expressing:

✓ Confidence

✓ Energy

✓ Modernity

✓ “We’re different”

✓ Tech-powered

Solution Oriented

Transparent

Compassionate

Solid

✓ Empathy

✓ Maturity

✓ Trustworthiness

✓ Sensitivity

✓ Human-centered

We have the opportunity to better express:

Solution Oriented

Transparent

Compassionate

Solid

Does this design show dominance or friendliness? Is that what’s intended?

Does the design support or detract from your key message?

Consider your personality.

Put a face on your business.

“As we gaze at the world, we discover ourselves looking back… This instinct is guided by our primordial desire for emotional connection with others. We are hardwired to seek emotion in human faces. For this reason… photos of human faces in a design can profoundly influence an audience.”

Aarron Walter. “Designing for Emotion.”

twitter.com/facespics

Friendly faces signal

safety & belonging.

Cute mascots aren’t right for every business.

“We want people to think of Dropbox as a place to collaborate, and a big part of that is elevating the people you connect with. One way we're doing that is

thinking about places we can surface user's faces on the web.”

Daniel Eden, dribbble.com/shots/1972358-Faceholder

You can start small & keep it simple.

Sprout, the emotional little video.

2. Speak like a human being.

“How can we leverage our content to identify, target, and engage top innovative

pinfluencers?”

cipsum.com

sansbullshitsans.com

“Publishing content that is self-absorbed in substance or style alienates readers… you might not see the effects of narcissistic content right away, but someone will eventually come along and eat your lunch by offering the exact same thing in a user-centered way.”

Erin Kissane. “The Elements of Content Strategy.”

This could be any business to business service!

✓ Take control of your online channel

✓ Take advantage of enterprise-class features

✓ Scale and grow your business – now and into the future

✓ Flexibility to meet your unique needs

“Only NetSuite’s customer service software gives everyone that interfaces with the customer access to complete, key customer data in real time empowering them to better support your customers while driving upsell and cross-sell.”

what the hell.

“As you read aloud, pretend you’re talking to a real person and ask yourself ‘Would I say this to someone in real life?’ Sometimes our writing makes us sound stodgier or colder than we’d like.”

Kate Kiefer Lee of MailChimp

Believe in Something

“Words don’t always need to be pressed into service for functional needs; sometimes they can be used simply to satisfy our emotional needs. We’re emotional creatures… bringing a smile to your users’ faces can make a world of difference.”

dribbble.com/mariusz

http://dribbble.com/mariusz

dribbble.com/ LumenBigott

3. Get users to the kick-ass zone.

“How long do your users spend in the ‘I suck’ (or ‘this product sucks’) zone? Once they’ve crossed the suck threshold, how long does it take before they start to feel like they kick ass?” Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

I Love Vine Wine

Chardonnay, South Africa

“A spicy apple (pie?) scented wine. Dry with almost a creamy texture. The winemaker blasts classical music to his vines all day. Wonder if it helps…”

Make beginning home care easy & effective.

We can make this shorter!

I suck. I rule!

4. Design for reality.

“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.”

Dieter Rams

hu·mane – adjective: having or showing compassion or benevolence, inflicting

the minimum amount of pain.

In real life, we adapt for emotion. We empathize,

and connect.

“Delight”

“Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty” by Eric Meyer

“The design is for the ideal user, the happy, upbeat, good-life user. It doesn’t take other use cases into account. It may not be possible to reliably pre-detect whether a person wants to see their year in review, but it’s not at all hard to ask politely—empathetically—if it’s something they want.”

Eric Meyer

“For someone getting on with his life, and probably more than halfway through it, these seemed like a stretch for me… Perhaps the team in charge of this is very young (as tech companies can be) and these memories are not so distant.”

“Does Apple Hate Old People?”

“Perhaps if the titans of Silicon Valley hired more engineers of color, things like this wouldn't happen so often… Or, you know, ever.”

via “Google Photos labeled black people ‘gorillas’” – USA Today

“There’s really only a question. And the question is, do you want your work to re-inscribe sexism, or racism, or homophobia? Do you want your work to cause anxiety, or to trigger trauma, or to alienate people? Or do you want your work to make the world a little bit more welcoming, a little bit safer, a little less hostile?”

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Design for Real Life by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

& Eric Meyer

What can we do?

• Work with diverse teams

• Prioritize “stress cases”

• Appoint a “design dissenter”

• Get to know & represent all users

How do we avoid pain & provide

support?

“Make friends with reality. Cultivate a desire to be proven wrong as quickly as possible and for the lowest cost.”

Erika Hall, Just Enough Research

“Successful design teams have each team member spend a minimum of two hours every six weeks watching real users interacting with either their design or a competitor’s design.”

Jared Spool, “Exposure Hours Drive UX Innovation”

A few of the ways we can “make friends with reality”

1. In-person testing, interviewing, and observing

2. Remote testing and observing

3. Understanding analytics

4. Regular exposure to user communications

Ask questions to understand context.

Listen for goals and unmet needs.

Observe frustrations and successes.

Dispel your flawed assumptions.

Listen for goals & unmet needs.

Observe their frustrations & successes.

Dispel your flawed assumptions.

Get to know your users in person.

Meeting users in person achieves all of these goals.


Listen for unmet needs and goals.


Dispel your mistaken assumptions.

Watch them use your product or service.

Remote testing achieves some of these goals.





Observational tools achieve a few of these goals.





Analytics tools tell you what is happening, but not why.





Listen to what users are already telling you.

Be easy to reach.

Hi Mary,

Thank you for checking us out! My name is Courtney and I'm responsible for making sure your trial is a success.

What are you trying to achieve with our service? How are you defining success? With this information, I can point you in the direction of the features that will be most useful to you, recommend helpful documentation, and brainstorm with you about how to get the most out of our platform.

Shoot me a quick email, and I'll get right back to you.

Have a great day! Courtney

Make user communication a central part of your research.

• Read a random sample of support tickets for 15 minutes every morning

• Get notifications for tweets people are sending to your organization.

• Ask a sales or support representative if you can shadow a call once a week.

“Let’s think of our designs not as a facade for interaction, but as people with whom our audience can have an inspired conversation. Products are people too.”

Aaron Walter, “Designing for Emotion.”

Show people they are welcome, supported, & valued.

• Have a welcoming personality.

• Speak like a human being.

• Get users to the kick-ass zone.

• Connect with their reality.

Thanks! @owltastic on Twitter

[email protected] owltastic.com

Users are People Too Adobe Max Presentation

Design

Transcript of Users are People Too Adobe Max Presentation