How to better incorporate customer feedback into your engineering driven product.

Limina is often faced with products that have been in the market for years with little to no professional user centered and UI design methodology applied. It’s typically apparent in the interface before delving into the history of development through issues including but, not limited to the following examples:

• inconsistent UI patterning
• obtuse, or in many cases, non-existent workflows where users are either left to their own devices to develop their own approach to the system or spend time in manuals or training
• random color and graphic treatments with little or no usage rationale
• core features and functions hidden in right click menus with no alternative access
• extensive use of dialogs and workspace changes to complete primary tasks
• random and inconsistent screen layout
• chop-shop iconography, cut and pasted from other applications

Most of these issues can be attributed to an engineering driven culture where usability has not been a core part of the methodology. Sure, the code is clean, the feature works, QA and Unit Tests have passed with flying colors… but is it usable or useful from an end to end experience?

A typical engineering approach to incorporating customer feedback
As a stop-gap to implementing user centered design practices, we’ve heard: “We’re meeting with our customers regularly to hear what they need and we keep them happy by feeding these requirements directly to the engineers to implement.”

First of all, we applaud you for going directly to the users with your product and taking back their requests into the design… but this is a slippery slope.

Although you may know your users and even have some working for you, how well are you capturing their needs? Are you asking the right questions? Are your users able to articulate what they need? You may have voluminous user feedback, support call logs, or error log reports on file, but have you put the user data into a framework that generates an actionable set of UI enhancements?

Equally important; when you have captured their feedback, how do you use it? Without a clear definition or roadmap for incorporating the user feedback, your product is at risk of losing competitive ground. When a company has to spend additional revenue in extensive training sessions, help documentation, call centers and product revisions, the margin of return on investment can take a massive beating.

Here are some activities to help you to incorporate user feedback into your agile development practice:

1) Give the feedback some context – What were users doing or attempting to do when they encountered the issue, and what are their roles? Usability specialists conduct a set of contextual inquiries to interview and observe users as they are performing various tasks in the context of their workplace to determine both system and non-system based activities, documents, and tools that are used to complete their tasks.

2) Quantify and qualify the user data – Where do you see common issues reaching a critical mass? Which are the exceptions and how do you prioritize them? What issues constitute a completely new set of features and possibly a new product?

3) Organize it – Once you have synthesized and prioritized the issues, determine their relationship not only to the system, but also to each other. Which comments are related and which ones are specific to a given task or feature?

The result is a set of researched usability issues that can be organized into enhancements prioritized by issue, prevalence, technical complexity, business, and user benefit.

Such a framework should be employed when embarking on a product definition or enhancement process. It allows parties from marketing, product management, and engineering to uncover the root of software design issues that challenge usability, and ultimately to gain a deeper understanding of their users. Product managers and engineers who gather and process user feedback assist their company by developing the right products and tools for their customers.

This post includes an excerpt from Limina’s white paper “Nine Ways to Improve Software Usability and Increase Market Share“.

Skipping this step leads to an iterative path of organically distorting the original design of the system and frankin-hacking patches and appendages to the product to the point where rebuilding from scratch is easier than overhauling the UI when your users start running to your competitors.

There are a great many development teams using agile methods, SCRUMing it out, getting the features out the door to see what sticks. In many ways, this is a helpful model to beat the first-to-market and innovation clocks, but if the net result is revisiting the feature again and again or playing “pass the trouble ticket” from developer to developer as the feature enhancement is punted to the next iterations for months… something isn’t working.

We are all for engineering driven product teams. In most cases, massive leaps in technical innovation are paved by developer teams and individuals unhindered by business and user requirements. But we’re talking about products in the market that have ROI, user adoption, marketability, competitiveness and other business considerations to name a few.

There’s something to be said for dealing with the cost up-front; for taking the time to build a sustainable product whether in its initial incarnation or when producing the next generation of its kind, because the hidden cost of maintenance, marketing and training can work against you in the long run.

Give us your thoughts and share your experiences with us and our readers!

If you’ve gone shopping for orange juice anytime in 2009, you’ve been privy to one of the biggest branding blunders since New Coke. Pepsico released it’s new Tropicana brand to the market in January 2009 and shortly after, the public unleashed a firestorm of criticism over the new design.  On February 23rd, just under 2 months later, Pepsi announced they will be reverting back to the original branding.

While, for Pepsi, this has been an unfortunate loss of marketing spend and brand equity, there are some excellent lessons to take away from the experiment.

Lesson 1) Know thy consumer

At Limina we often tout the benefits of conducting user research and usability tests before, during and after the design phase of any project.  As we now know, this applies not only to pure user interfaces and product design, but to something as seemingly minor as a branding exercise.  Focus groups, as opposed to usability studies tend to remove the product and the user from context of use, and has the tendency to lose out on the rich data collection opportunities users will encounter in a live scenario.  Had the brand design team tested the new packaging in a grocery store and observed product selection behavior  of consumers with the new brand against a control study (of the original brand), they would have learned an incredible amount of qualitative and quantitative data about the impact of the new design.

My own personal observations and experience with the new design at the point of purchase consisted of stalled out consumers standing in front of the tropicana selections, heads tilted slightly  trying to figure out which one they used to buy.  On my first encounter with the new brand, I must have  spent 3 minutes crouched in front of the juice rack looking over the new and drastically reduced information based labeling of:  Some Pulp, No Pulp, Lots of Pulp, etc. etc. before grabbing the carton of choice.  Surely a brand manager would have noted this as indication of “missing the mark” and hit the drawing board for another pass before going into full blown package manufacturing.

Take Away: Test early, test often.  Context Matters

Lesson 2) Detailed  Design vs. Gestalt

The Gestalt notion,  “The whole is other than the sum of it’s parts”, could not have rung more truth in this event.
It’s one thing to look at the design of the new Tropicana carton as it sits on the table and admire some of the aesthetic choices of typography, pantones and graphics.

It’s truly another thing to put all of the variations of over a dozen cartons on the table and ask you to make a decision based on the design.  If you say you identified your preferred  household carton of choice without having to scan the selection more than once…  you’re either lying or you worked on the the brand strategy for this campaign.
Either way, running the same visual scan with the original branding is a far simpler task.  Here’s why:  The original branding had large color blocks as part of their information design system to color code a family of very similar products.  On the original design, the color coding  takes up nearly 1/4 of the visual field.  So, whether you’re a pulp, no pulp, some pulp consumer…  you knew which one was made just for you.  Looking at the new designs, the color coding system fails as it’s reduced to less than 10% of the visual field and while they added some redundant labels in case you missed the color coding, colored text on colored juice graphics don’t quite pop the way white text on color does.

Take Away: Avoid designing in a vacuum, think of how a single change ripples through the whole.

Lesson 3) Usability is for everyone

Most people who know me, but are unfamiliar with the usability field, often begin to glaze over when I start to break down what Limina does.  So I love a great anecdote that’s accessible enough for me to put people in the shoes of a frustrated user and get bobble-head nods back.  The Tropicana story is great because it’s not that they should have never touched the brand…  it’s more that they lacked an understanding of how to modify the brand without negatively impacting the information design system which worked so well.

I’ve even heard our clients say “we have a designer for that we only need you for the usability piece” or “we’d like you to run a usability study and give us the results, we can take it from there.”  It’s really not enough to see the poor ratings on a score card run with it or to take a wireframe and go nuts on the visual design.  It’s critical to see usability and information design as a holistic end-to-end process, any loss in translation of user requirements not only results in sunk cost on design/development/manufacturing, but potentially failure to take flight.  Tropicana is fortunate enough to have enough capital to absorb the blow and correct their course.

Take Away: If you’re not sure if usability applies to your product or software…  ask someone who knows something about it.

Lesson 4) Leveraging social tools

It’s no secret…  social networking tools are extremely effective in marketing feedback.  Great product managers have had their ears to the ground in social network response mechanisms for some time.  Good examples of consumer feedback mechanisms are Dell’s ideastorm.com and Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea.com, but more recently we’re seeing the strength of  Twitter and Facbook as focus group and user feedback mechanisms.  While you’re not going to get fine granularity of complex usability issues resolved in these forums, you can definitely gain perspective on broad stroke issues that ail your product.

Take Away: Word of Mouth marketing is a two way street, sure, you can promote yourself all over the social web, but take time to listen to what they’re saying in response.

Lesson 5) If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Needs no explanation.  Taking a page from Sony/Aiwa, Nissan/Infinity, Toyota/Lexux/Scion – if you want to test something new, create a test market or spin off a sub-brand.

I’ve heard rumors that this was a stunt to get consumer buzz.  I’m not sure I’m buying that, afterall..  they didn’t change their juice formula,  just the box design.  Whatever the case, this has been a great example of how not to mess with a good thing.

-Jon