The EchoUser Experience

I had a great chat with Johannes over at IDEO last week. Johannes is in charge of bringing some quantitative flavor to IDEO’s magic, and he’s up to some interesting stuff. After our morning coffee conversation, though, a few ideas stuck with me:

1. User churn

Me and the team at EchoUser have been getting more involved with start ups of late, helping them with usability, general user experience and the like. General start up concerns revolve around reducing “user churn”, or in other words, “how to keep users interested and encourage ongoing usage of our product/service.” It turns out that this is a sticky problem, especially when it comes to balancing the needs of new users (who might get “churned”) and “habitual” users who already use the product on a regular basis.

Our work inevitable hunts for what we’ve come to call “the aha moment”, or that one particular experience that helps turn a casual/new user into a habitual one. Of course, we all know it’s probably not one single experience that does the trick, but the simplification is helpful nonetheless.

In talking with Johannes I drew out what usage paths look like for a given product:

user churn paths

Ideally, you want users to take the path going up and to the right, because this means they’ve had their “aha moment” and have now become habitual users.  And for start ups looking to raise funding from VCs, being able to say “our usability work has shown we can improve user churn by X% because we can guarantee an aha moment” is a very good thing.

2. Switching

Then it was Johannes’ turn to pick up the pen. He drew this, which deals with a marketing concept called “Switching”:

User switching

Basically, switching refers to the idea that many people, when trying out a product or service, will tend to switch between different ones - this is represented by their degree of “loyalty” to a given product.  The general point is to try to get users to either extreme, either 100% loyal to one product, or 100% to the other (to me this is a little simplistic, given that it’s a zero-sum outcome, but more on that another time).

It’s interesting to note that the Churn graph is a loose inversion of the Switching graph: users who have yet to experience their “Aha!” moment are less likely to become 100% loyal to a particular product - and therefore more likely to switch (as well as churn).

We’re finding more and more that startups have to balance design changes that appeal to both habitual users and new ones, changes that try to straddle the divide between 100% loyal and “I’m not so sure just yet”-loyal.  The balancing act is an interesting one to say the least, and we’re using our usability special sauce to make it that much easier. More to come.

One of the biggest gripes among usability professionals is that their client/boss waits until the end of a product or service’s development life cycle to start worrying about user experience.  This is like slapping a nice paint job on a jalopy, or building an entire stack of Jenga before checking to see if the table has a wobbly leg - in the long run it’ll bite you in the rear and all come crashing down (literally).

This is all very well when applied to a tangible product, a visible service, but what happens when it’s applied to something a little more fuzzy, say, like team building?

A friend was recently describing his attempts at building his team within a larger organization.  His goal, he explained, was to build out his team so he could then more effectively tackle larger organizational problems beyond his unit.  By hiring product managers, designers, marketers and the like, he was desperately hoping to buy himself the space - organizational and mental/emotional - to think about how to engage in larger scale change management.

To me, this seems like a dangerous game.  Sure, building out your team might buy you more time as you delegate to others, but with delegation comes responsibility, which itself takes time.  Indeed, much more time than we all initially think.  Furthermore, a bigger team makes for a bigger target within the organization, so there is the potential that any gains will be lost in the bigger organizational chess game.

My advice? Start with the connective tissue, the core usability and user experience. Don’t build out a team when the core is rotten, and risk creating a silo whose walls will need to be broken down anyway.  Start with the human-t0-human interactions that define the basis of the organization, no matter what size it becomes.  And don’t stop until you feel it in your gut.  Think you have it down? Tear it all down and start again, and again, and again.  Conversely, don’t drag it out for months - set the ball rolling and maintain momentum into the future.

Call it office “culture”, a philosophy, or whatever; slap guidelines into a pamphlet if you like, or conduct executive seminars during lunchtime; whatever it is, make sure you deal with the baseline usability and connective tissue first, and that you’re not just putting lipstick on a pig.