Month: September 2019

Do you download the mobile applications of all companies that you are a customer of? Do you regularly use a chatbot? Have you ever seen Google Glass?

You can produce the most amazing solutions with the latest technologies, but the underlying needs are what determine the benefit potential of your solution. At the basis of human-oriented design lies the needs of the users and the issues that are experienced when trying to meet these needs. Moreover, the needs can last longer than the solution alternatives. For example, SalesForce meets the same need as wall paintings from ancient times: Data storage.

However, we cannot say that all the needs of today’s people have continued throughout the history of humanity and that we need to go back to the Cenozoic age to be able to determine our needs because as we well know by now, that new technologies create new needs. The need to track the time minute by minute did not exist until the invention of the steam engine, and also there was no need for portable power supply until a few years ago except for batteries of various sizes and capacities. The needs are variable, and each need may not be seen as a problem for all users, or the issues declared by users may categorically correspond to different needs. For example, the main reason why your users complain about the service cost may not be the pricing scheme of your product, but the lack of notification for that price in the relevant sections.

Therefore, need assessment, beyond listening to the complaints of your users, is to work actively to understand users, and it is a process that requires an accurate understanding of unspoken insights. In return for this effort to better understand your users, you can empathize with your users which enables you to uncover needs that were not exposed and identify your users who are pushing the limits of your product/service so that their practices can be implemented within the product/service.

Why do this anyway?

First of all, it is helpful to underline that answering user requests is not the same as producing need-based solutions. Your users aren’t product professionals and do not take into account the technological infrastructure or roadmap of your product when communicating their demands. They only convey their demands based on their needs (often without explaining their need level).

If there are enough users both in number and variety to represent the entire pool, you may have the opportunity to sit down with your team and identify the underlying needs of these demands by reverse engineering, but it would be too optimistic to think that this would be possible at any stage of your product/service. Therefore, to identify your users’ additional needs on top of the problems they have solved with your product, you should come together with them to get their views on your product as a critical component of your product development flow. You can do this by allocating a few hours a week to plan intensive research processes every few months, which should take 1-2 weeks. Moreover, you will not only get feedback about your product/service but also gain valuable information about your users.

How is it done?

Two main research methods are used for needs assessment: observation and interview. Regardless of the chosen research method, some subjects should be considered during the planning and implementation phase. To conduct a proper research process, a detailed (but stretch-resistant) research plan should be prepared, and appropriate methods and participants should be identified.

For example, in your research to improve a specific feature, you should include people who are users of your product or service as well as those who are not users. This way, you can prevent your findings from being limited to only the relevant feature or function, and on top of that, you can get a better idea of ​​the user needs that you have resolved as well as those you might not have.

After deciding the research method to be followed, a safe environment with no out of context, stimuli should be selected for this method. A healthy conversation cannot be made in a noisy or very hot atmosphere, and also objects such as an aquarium or a construction work nearby might distract the participant and may make it difficult for the participant to focus on the interview.

Similarly, special attention should be paid to the fact that the observation or interview does not influence or guide the behavior of the participant. For example, if the participants fix their hair in the mirror which conceals the hidden camera that you placed for the purpose of natural observation, we can no longer talk about an observation in a natural environment. Or if the person who is carrying out an interview on physical barriers is in a wheelchair, this will distort the answers of the participants. Finally, observations and interviews should be recorded with appropriate tools so that the insights gained are not limited to the memory.

Of course, not everyone has to be a professional researcher, but a research process that does not meet the above requirements cannot produce healthy results. Again, since not everyone has research experience, it is useful to share a few tips on how to conduct an observation and interview processes in addition to the above general principles.

How to conduct an interview?

The flow that should be followed to produce as many findings as possible is clear:

The interview starts with the interviewer introducing themselves to the participant and giving information about the subject and purpose of the interview. For the participant to stay within the context of the conversation, it is more appropriate if a bureaucratic agreement such as a confidentiality agreement or the sharing of personal information which might be seen as valuable, should be signed ahead of time and not right before the interview.

After the participant is informed about the context of the interview, the interview can move on with the initial questions. For the sake of giving sample questions, let’s assume that our product or service is a solution to the urban public transport challenge. Simple and general questions such as “Do you use public transport?” and “Do you like traveling?” should be asked.

After the start-up phase, the interviewer asks more personal questions to connect with the participant. Again, in the same context, the interviewer will ask questions such as “How did you get here? How was your journey? What is your preferred mode of urban transportation?”, while deepening the communication with a few consecutive questions which will be formed based on the participant’s responses so you will have more information about the participant’s profile.

After the participant warms up to the interviewer, and the context of the interview, answers that will enable the possible needs to come to light are sought. At this stage:

• “Could you tell us about the best (worst) travel experience you’ve ever had? What made that experience so good (bad)?”
• “How did this experience affect your transportation preferences?”
• “In your opinion, what would be the ideal transportation service?
• “What would you pay attention to if you were providing a transportation service?”

and similar questions should be asked to answer the needs of the participant.

To obtain as much valuable insight as possible from the interview, the interviewer should also observe the participant. The personal values ​​of the participant and the mood during the interview are the inputs that can play a role in the evaluation phase.

How to do an observation?

The most crucial point which should be considered during an observation reporting and evaluation process is that the researcher should put aside their personal opinions and evaluations throughout the process and focus on the participants’ statements and actions. However, in cases where there is a conflict between the statements and actions of the participants, the comments of the research team will be more valuable. The elimination of conditions that cause these contradictions will be possible through innovative perspectives and ideas.

In observations, detecting solutions developed by the participants by their own means gains importance. Assuming you have a customer database product, if your users get the Excel output to update the data they store on your application, then restore the file to your system, this indicates that your product’s data update feature has not been noticed or has been found inadequate or useless. Because, unlike the solutions you offer, there is a need behind the solutions invented by your users.

As I emphasized at the beginning of the article, the underlying needs determine the potential benefits. The basis of the product or service design that focuses on human beings is the needs of the users and the likely problems that arise while solving them. It is possible to shed light on these needs with user observations and interviews. Regardless of which method you choose, you do not have to be a professional researcher to carry out a successful research process. Just set aside everything you know about your product/service, and just spend some time and effort to focus on what your users do or say. The investment in the satisfaction rate your product or service creates for your current users will be reflected in both the reduction in customer loss and positive reflections on your acquisition indicators, making it easier to scale your product or service efficiently and adequately.

You left another year behind in the blink of an eye, and you entered 2019 with fresh ideas. Do you want to get to the physique you dream of with a gym membership and a planned regular training program? Or, quitting your job to which you feel increasingly estranged, and bring that business idea to life?

The characteristic feature of these two scenarios is the need to make certain investments or sacrifices to achieve the goal. Most simply, you have to pay six months or 1 year of a gym membership on the first day. 

To pursue your dream of entrepreneurship, the free time left over from your work hours most likely will not be enough, and you will have to resign from your work. Before you take these steps, wouldn’t it be nice to know if you can actually go to the gym regularly or whether your business idea has considerable potential?

Let’s look at the subject in the context of brands and products/services they offer to their customers. Suppose that an innovation competition was held in the company, and creative ideas emerged. Is the decision of the jury enough to determine which idea is worth investing? Alternatively, is it possible to proceed with a test and data-driven approach and determine the best idea for investment?

Yes, it is possible!

It all started with an innocent vote

In 1999, three youngsters put two large trash cans with the words Yes and No next to their smoothie booth at a UK music festival and asked the participants: Should we leave our job to make these smoothies? At the end of two days, the bucket that said yes was filled to the brim. This is how the story of Innocent, which has become the most successful smoothie brand of England and perhaps the world today, begun.

The test which was conducted by the trio of graduates of the University of Cambridge, Richard, Adam, and Jon can be described as “guerilla” testing. The guerrilla test method is a relatively low-cost method that allows you to get quick feedback on your product or prototype. The most classic example is to grab people who you think are involved in your target audience and get feedback from them.

If you are reasonably assertive or skeptical, the test result in the Innocent sample may not be enough for you to make the final decision. Rather than blindly embarking on the adventure, checking the pulse of your potential customers can benefit you in your decision making.

First verify the problem

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved”

Charles Kettering

Most of the monologues that start with the phrase ‘I have an excellent idea,’ directly address the solution without mentioning the problem. On the other hand, solutions are created and exist to solve a problem. Therefore, before verifying your opinion, it is necessary to test the problem that your solution aims to solve. 

What if the problem you wholeheartedly believe exists isn’t received well by your target audience?

Let’s look at an example. A bank whose motto is to make life easier has a new product idea. This product brings convenience to payment processes for real estate and car sales. This is done through a system integration, which triggers the transfer of money and the transfer of deed-license simultaneously. In this way, risks such as cash transport of large amounts and the possibility of deed transfer without the payment transfer no longer exist.

That sounds good, doesn’t it? However, what if we told you that a significant number of people who sell a house choose to do it in cash and declare a lower house value to receive a tax advantage? Or that when the bank loan is used, the loan amount is transferred to the seller automatically with the transfer of the deed? 

When you think that your target audience does not have a significant problem in this regard, doesn’t the solution begin to lose its appeal?

How to verify a solution

Let’s move on to a parallel universe and assume that the research results confirm the problem. The target audience really feels the risks we are talking about and is in search of a solution.

In this case, it is time to test how much demand there is by the target audience to the bank’s solution. The most significant benefit for running this test is that it offers a chance to verify (or kill) the solution without substantial investment.

How to test a product that doesn’t exist yet? By doing “as if”

This method, which is referred to as fake doors in English, is frequently used in idea verification processes. Imagine advertising on real estate sites as if the product is ready. The users who click on this advertisement will read this message: ‘Our product will be implemented very soon. Thank you very much for your attention and patience!’ Thus the first step of the test is completed. By analyzing the ad’s clickthrough rates, you get the chance to gain insight on current demand.

Finally, let’s emphasize that the following 3 points should be taken into consideration in the problem and idea verification studies:

1. Correct identification of target audience.
2. The correct design and implementation of the research.
3. The confidence interval of the research result is sufficient to make a decision.

Developing and testing a hypothesis

The concept of testing is a critical part of ‘design thinking,’ which is to consider the logic of the design, and it has gained much popularity recently. The cycle that constitutes this methodology consists of researching and defining the needs of the user, producing the solution corresponding to this need, testing the prototypes if possible, and bringing it to life after applying the changes from the feedback. Based on this cycle, we can say that the testing phase is the starting point of improvement.

In particular, brands operating in the digital environment use this methodology to improve the experience which they offer and increase the transformation of their digital assets.

Let’s say the product team of an e-commerce website that sells organic food products thinks that sharing positive customer comments on the home page will increase the rate of users viewing product category pages.

To test this hypothesis, first, determine the metric to be measured and check the current value for comparison. For the test result to be considered successful, the target percentage increase is determined. Then the test phase begins, and the alternative design with user comments starts to be shown to 50% of the traffic. 

After reaching a sufficient number of visits which can grant confidence, the results are compared, and it is decided whether to proceed with the current design or the new one. This setup is called the A / B test. It is also possible to test more than two variants at the same time, or even run multiple tests at the same time.

When the domain name Amazon.com is pronounced today, a single entity is revived in everyone’s mind. However, Amazon has simultaneously done so many tests that it is not possible to talk about a single Amazon.com.

To sum it all up

The test-driven approach allows you to make decisions based on data and reduce the risk you take instead of basing on your intuition, which is more than likely to mislead you.

Nowadays, especially with the decreasing cost of digital test methods and tools, the applicability of this approach has increased.

Internalizing the test logic and making this approach part of your thought processes, whether in business or your private life, will benefit you to the extent that you cannot imagine. Of course, do not quickly accept my hypothesis, test it first!

Further reading

• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/
• https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-run-experiments-for-idea-validation-1fb71d99ea06
• https://www.nngroup.com/articles/no-validate-in-ux/
• https://www.viima.com/blog/idea-validation

The cover image is actually a screenshot from our playbook in which we try to explain what it is like working with us, SHERPA. But before coming to “no meeting days”, we’d first like to focus on the base idea here: the culture that cultivates such rigid standards.

In SHERPA, we believe in productivity as if we believe in anything else – that’s why we build systems of effective working and challenge our frameworks every other day to make them even more optimized.

We build and document standards for each step of any process even if we think that we already know how to run it very well. That’s because of three reasons mainly:

1. When we start to write down a standards doc (simply explaining what we propose to do, why & when we do it, and what the side effects are, etc), we may notice some open issues that need to be addressed to set the standard right.
2. Some other SHERPA (a newcomer for instance) might not know the process as we do and a structured document could turn out be a guide to her when she needs it.
3. The palest ink is stronger than the sharpest memory. When we write things down, it instantly becomes official and we feel a strong will to apply that standard in the right place & time.

Now, you know why we set these kinds of standards and mention them everywhere.

So, you may still have this question on your mind: Why Monday & Friday are our no meeting days? In a world of meetings that run businesses, does this sound a little bit bold to you?

Think again. 

• How many times did you tell yourself or your colleagues that you cannot do business (produce anything) because of running from meeting to meeting?

• How many times did you survive a meeting that should have been an email?

• How many times did you find yourself in a meeting that you have nothing to say and question your existence in it (and in life as a whole)?

Let’s be honest.

Don’t you also think that you can get rid of some of the meetings in your calendar? What is the harm if you participate in fewer meetings in a week? 

In fact, we are not against meetings. We just think we can optimize them.

To us, meetings should have a well-defined purpose (agenda & objective), should be conducted with a sufficient number of people (participants) and shouldn’t last more than 40-60 minutes.

And another standard to add these rules is that we do not organize any meetings on Mondays and Fridays just to focus on production & internal sprint planning, just to make sure the meetings we run on the other days to be well-prepared and worth to spend time for every participant. 

Since we work with the “Design as a Service (DaaS)” principles, we allocate every project a certain amount of person/hours and at the end of each month, we provide highly detailed timesheets (based on person/task/minute spent). We respect the time of our project owners as much as we take responsibility for the efficiency of a project. This is also another reason why we want to optimize meetings.

After all of these, needless to say, “no meeting days” rule is not an arbitrary one but a SHERPA way of working to serve better, to let our project owners get the most of it with the expected quality. 

Do you still think that you should definitely run your next meeting today? If you say no, just drop us a line to work with a partner who takes the utmost care of your resources.

The first step in providing a better customer experience for your brand is undoubtedly listening to the voice of your customers. However, when it comes to digital platforms, it’s much more than having a (wish/complaint) suggestion box at your store in a traditional context. Waiting for customer feedback from the “contact us” button you’ve placed on your website or app — within the scope of digital transformation — is even out of date nowadays.

Today, where all interactions take place in micro-moments, we are able to receive all of your customers’ positive and negative feedback instantly, right on the place and on time. And it is critical to delivering a better customer experience and, consequently, to achieving higher conversion rates for your product or service. Therefore, it should be one of your strategic priorities to handle the feedback from your customers with a professional perspective and to develop your experience design based on this data.

Usabilla was founded in 2009 to provide data-oriented, professional solutions in the field of VoC (Voice of Customer) and has been serving leading global brands such as Vodafone, BMW, Samsung and IBM for ten years. With their offices located in New York, London, Berlin, Amsterdam and Sydney; Usabilla strengthens many major global and local companies with customer-oriented strategies and thus improves digital experiences.

As SHERPA, we are proud and happy to start working together with Usabilla, which we have been following and appreciating their works for a long time. To learn more about this significant collaboration that we focus on designing better customer experiences together and the benefits of the integration of Usabilla VoC (Voice of Customer) services into your digital platforms, feel free to contact us!

The world’s leading and Turkey’s largest sports clothing and equipment retailer Decathlon and SHERPA started to work together to improve the current customer experience in the online store to develop new customer experiences.

Founded in 1976 in France, Decathlon has become a favorite of Turkish sports enthusiasts of all ages and levels for nearly 10 years. In Turkey, being one of the leading brands, Decathlon aims to introduce people of all ages to sports and to provide sports equipment to athletes with the motto:

“Sports for everyone, everything for sports.”

As SHERPA, the successful optimization projects that we recently completed with e-commerce companies have greatly contributed to our proficiency in user behavior in the sports field too. Taking our know-how and experience to the next level by working with Decathlon, the brand which we love and shop frequently, is a pleasure and pride for us.

What we do? 

After our project kick-off meetings with Decathlon Team, we started running our optimization process, which began with a tight schedule of user research. We focused on improvements based on the hypotheses we have developed on the existing customer experience and associated A/B tests.

By observing the users’ behaviour in the online store, we identify the pain points that obstruct their journey to purchase, analyze the data obtained from the user interviews and the direct contributions of the Decathlon Team, and plan our production process by determining improvements that may be beneficial for all customers. 

After creating the content and interface sketches, we go into the design process and then integrate the variant interface modules into the existing pages and run A/B tests over different versions for certain periods of time.

We have already started to get the positive results of the A/B tests we have conducted so far. We will continue to boost Decathlon’s power with improved conversion rates as the result of better customer experience.

Do not miss a visit to our case studies to learn about our optimization oriented services and to review the similar work we do!