Hello,
I am a UX designer. I am known by other names such as “the designer,” “the UI guy,” “the creative,” “the web designer,” and many more. Some of these other names are in the ballpark and some are flat out wrong. It’s confusing even to us in the industry. The names have evolved as the practice has evolved. Sometimes I can be both the UX guy and the creative guy. So it’s crazy to expect a client to know what to call me – let alone know what I do.
In its simplest form, our agency team would include:

• A UX Researcher – Researchers focus on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through user observation, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. They get into the user’s head.
• A UX Designer (yours truly) – We take the researcher’s analysis, along with personas, journey maps, and a plethora of other UX tools we create, and put pen to paper by creating wireframes (I’ll go into more detail on these later). We try to create the best user experience by exploring many different approaches to solve the end users’ problems.
• A Visual Designer – These folks aim to shape and improve the user experience by considering the effects of illustrations, photography, typography, space, layouts, and color on the usability of products and on their aesthetic appeal. You would be mostly correct if you referred to them as “the creatives,” although they may take offense at this – they’re the most sensitive members of the team.
• A Content Strategist – A content strategist helps plan, develop, and deliver clear, relevant content. They help decide what the content should be, where it should be, and how it should be organized. These folks generally are, IMHO, the most under-appreciated, yet crucial, of all the team members.
• A UI Developer – Eventually all the work above must be converted into something that a browser or platform can understand… code. A UI developer’s job is to convert design files into coding using HTML, CSS, JS languages, etc. These guys aren’t just code jockeys though. Their input on usability is just as important as anyone else’s on the team.

Why do I exist?

My mission is to keep the project focused on the users of your product. In other words, to make it user-friendly. To do this, I need to identify the types of users that use your product and get into their heads. I become an advocate for them. For instance, when your development team tells me we should cut corners on the UI because it’s easier to do from a development perspective, I will push back and refocus the conversation on the user. What would the user want? I don’t always win, but my argument will always be grounded in best practices and user research.

What do I make?

My deliverables typically include:

• Personas – A persona is a representation of a type of customer. Personas answer the question, “Who are we designing for?” and they help us align strategy and goals to specific user groups. Example
• Journey Maps – A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. Example
• Site Maps – Site maps give you a visual representation of the site’s organization and how different sections are linked together. Example
• Wireframes – Wireframes are simple, low-fidelity layouts that outline the placement and rough size of specific page elements, from conversion areas to site features. Wireframes ensure that each page has a purpose, achieve the goals set out in the client brief, and define a logical navigation for your website. Example

Source

• Prototypes – A prototype is a primitive representation or version of a product that a design team or front-end development team typically creates during the design process. The goal of a prototype is to test the flow of a design solution and gather feedback on it – from both internal and external parties – before constructing the final product. Example

What do I do?

• I interpret – I listen to all sides of the story and try to piece it together into a cohesive narrative. I do not always take what you say to me literally. Why? Because if I did, every element of your application would be in the top left corner of the screen. You see, every group wants something different out of the application or website. From their point of view, the stuff they want should be front and center (which in screen real estate means in the top left part of the screen or page – the most ‘valuable’ spot). Instead, I listen for and try to draw out the true underlying wants and needs of each group.
• I play devil’s advocate – I will challenge your thinking. You’ve been living with this product too long and you’re likely stuck in a certain train of thought. I am outside the box. I offer fresh perspective. I will often present ideas that will make you palm yourself in the forehead and say, “Why we didn’t we think of this before?” For the answer, please see the second sentence of this paragraph.

Source

• I ask a bunch of naïve questions – I don’t know your business like you do, but I have to learn quickly. I will stop you at every acronym and ask you to spell it out. So often, what is obvious to you is not to me. Therefore, you might skip over explaining the obvious machinations of your business and dive right down into the details, but I need the big picture stuff first. Explain it to me like a child or else deal with my naivete.
• I am a mediator – This can be misinterpreted to mean that I will somehow fix internal political disagreements at your company. No, I do not mean it that way, although sometimes I feel pulled into those situations (e.g., “Can you believe Bob thinks he owns this thing when it’s obvious that it’s my baby? The nerve of him. You understand me, right?”). Don’t do this to me, please. By mediator, I mean listening to each business group’s wants and needs, as well as the different wants and needs of each user segment, and finding common ground between all of them. But it is also important to remember that most of all ….
• I am an advocate for the user – Somebody has to be. When decisions impacting the usability and enjoyability of your product are being made within the confines of internal meeting rooms, you are doing it wrong. Listen to your users. Don’t shut them out of the process. Call me or one of my teammates and we will show you how difficult decisions can be made by simply asking, “What does the user want?”

Things to Know When Dealing With Me

• There are no – well, let’s be honest – rarely any stupid questions. Fire away.
• You can never give me too much information. Give me everything you’ve got.
• It helps if I know the history of how we (the product/project) got here – the good, the bad, the ugly. I don’t need you to name names – well, at least not until happy hour after the first day of Discovery.
• In that same vein, I cannot fix your company politics or internal disagreements. Some things need to be ironed out before I get there. If the intent is unclear, you might wind up with a project that looks like this:

Business in the front, party in the back. Don’t ‘mullet’ your project. *Full disclosure: The Author sported one of these circa 1987.

When the intent of the design is unclear to you, it will be unclear to me and we might wind up with an unsightly compromise.

Wanna be the UX guy’s best friend? Read more about what I do.

Further reading.

READY TO GROW YOUR UX CAREER?

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Funny Junk: ‘On Hold’

Ahhhhh, the soothing sounds of Muzak in my ear as I wait on yet another level of ‘automated’ phone service. All the while I’m wondering, did I choose the right selection? The lady at the beginning said I was supposed to listen closely because the selections might have changed. What if I wind up with Help Desk, when what I really want is Billing? Those Help Desk people can be so smug. I can hear them snickering to themselves when they realize they have to deal with another dope who can’t even figure out a phone menu. But it’s too late to go back now. It’s taken me 10 minutes to get here. Oh, please. Please be Billing, please be …WTH?! It just hung up on me.
According to a recent survey,

• 67% of respondents said they prefer to self-serve over speaking with a representative.
• 91% said they would use a company’s online knowledge base to meet their customer service needs.

Zendesk: “Customers want to help themselves?”

Customers want to help themselves. So, let them. They are more technically savvy than ever and have come to prefer the DIY approach to solving their issues and answering their own questions.
The constantly increasing technical savviness of your average Joe and Jane, combined with the DIY mentality that has taken over the nation leads to a generation of consumers who would much rather solve their own issues and answer their own questions than face the all-too familiar rabbit hole that customer service via phone can become.

“Mrs. Jones, can I get your name, address, and social security number?”
“You mean you want me to repeat the exact same information I just gave to the last three people I talked to?!!!!!”

I don’t mean to say that all customer service is bad or that you shouldn’t have your employees involved in the process. Your employees should take an active role. It shows that you are listening and care about the customer. As a company, you need to take a close look at all of your customer service touch points and determine which parts can be self-service and which need to be handled by a human. This is good for everyone.

• The customer can have their DIY experience, but still know that a real human is standing by if they need them.
• The CS rep doesn’t have to deal with repetitive, mundane tasks and can instead spend more time with customers who need deeper answers to more complex questions.
• The business owner (you) is not wasting money payin CS reps to answer questions like “where do I pay my bill?”

Why You Need Self-Service

• Saves time and money – Self-service tools reduce costs and increase efficiency by eliminating repetitive costs so agents can focus on more strategic tasks. They don’t need to paid and are willing to work 24/7. They don’t call in sick or go on vacation. Self-service tools can also record data, providing a resource for valuable customer analytics.
• Creates happy customers – Your customer have several avenues of finding simple answers to basic questions. Instead of waiting on hold or having to engage with a human (let’s admit it, sometimes you just don’t want to talk to a human).
• Strengthens your business – Self-service tools can help you grow your business community and build deeper connections between your company and customers.

What are these self-service tools of which I speak?

Here are a few examples:

FAQs

Frequently asked questions are dynamite for helping people get quick answers to common questions. They also tell your customer that you know them and pay attention to them. These should be very easy to find – in the header of your site most likely. Keep them short and sweet. Short in the sense of the size of your list – maybe 20 at the most – and also in the length of your answers – FAQs especially should be easily scannable. Anything more than a paragraph is probably too much. If there is more, provide a link to supporting information available on a different page.

Strong Product Descriptions

Skip the jargon here. You’ll be tempted to add marketing fluff – don’t. If your user is reading the product description, they’re like a fish getting ready to bite – you’ve already got them there. Show them the worm, not the hook. People are getting savvier by the day when it comes to researching what they want on the web. They may look at six other sites in addition to yours, so make sure your product information is the most accessible and helpful.

Amazon.com

Help-Focused Content

Textual help has been the standard in customer support. Compared to content like video, it’s easy to create (although, not all text is created equal). It’s also accessible and easy to update.
When writing content it’s important to empathize with the user and understand that they are struggling. Speak to them in friendly terms like:

• ‘We understand. It’s hard when …’
• ‘Lot’s of people have difficulty with …’
• ‘We have found that doing … is a great workaround’

A few pointers for writing good help content:

• Use captions and annotations when using magery to explain solutions to support the text
• Refer to real-life situations to help users relate
• Focus on common issues rather than fringe cases
• Make your articles search-friendly
• Make your articles scannable – don’t bore or intimidate your readers with a wall of text. Use subheadings, bulleted lists, and images to break up text, and keep sentences and paragraphs as short as possible. White space is your friend.

Documentation/Manuals

Allow your user to access product-specific manuals online. These can be in PDF format or, even better, have them available as HTML that can be searched. If you do have a library of PDFs, make sure you organize the library in a way that makes it easy to find the correct manual.

Tutorials

Tutorials tend to be more interactive and specific than ebooks or PDFs. They teach by example and help the user to complete a certain task step-by-step. Tutorials can take the form of a video (more on this in the next section), webinar, text document (usually heavy on imagery), or narrated screen recording. Tutorials can be broken up into modules and often include short review quizzes for the user.
Here’s a great example of a step-by-step tutorial that combines imagery, video and text:

wikiHow

Videos

Videos are a great complement to text and provide an engaging, visual experience. Edit your videos to keep them short and concise. A few minutes or less is ideal. Otherwise you might lose your viewer. Modern video players give users a lot of control, allowing them to tailor the experience to their preferences.

Imagery

Images allow users to feel emotions, grasp complex concepts, and be a part of an experience. And they create more interesting documents/pages by breaking up text and pulling users in.
Charts, graphs, and infographics are light on copy and help users understand large quantities of data easily. They help us remember the data presented by appealing to a different part of the brain than text does. They draw users into your content, expound on the copy, and provide a ‘rest stop’ from the rigors of reading paragraphs of text.
Photography and illustrations help users be part of the experience. They can help the content by conveying an emotion or simply allowing the user to see a concrete example of the subject matter.
This illustration uses color and contrast to draw attention to the key parts. Concise labels and explanations provide detail. You can also Use blow-out sections to allow users see a zoomed-in area of fine detail.

Fine Woodworking

Step-by-step storyboards allow user to visualize each stage of a process. By using clear images accompanied by brief explanatory text, they walk the user through a process, such as creating a group email in Outlook or replacing a lamp switch.

Visit wikiHow to see the full storyboard.

Search

Typically your search field should be ubiquitous, easy-to-find, and consistent in appearance and placement. There are some types of sites, such as a news site, that may de-emphasize search and focus more on browsing by newer content and subject matter. Regardless, search should always be available to users of any site.

“The prominence of the search bar should guide users toward the appropriate navigation style for the content.” – CareerFoundry

Using modern techniques such as autocomplete or predictive search can be powerful boosters to help your users find relevant content.

Google

Once your user lands on your search results page, make sure you allow them to refine their search with filters and sorting tools.

Online Community/Customer Forum

A community or customer forum is a place where your customers can communicate with each other and your employees while interacting with your brand. It helps users feel like they have a stake in your business. It’s also a place to where you can nurture customer relationships from casual to loyal.
One of the most important benefits is that you have a direct line to your customers. Instead of relying on third-party customer research, you can collect comments and questions straight from the source and understand the most common and pressing issues your customers are experiencing. The immediacy of the interaction allows you to address customer needs early and often.

Chat and Chatbots

According to Econsultancy, 79% of consumers say they prefer live chat functions to phone calls because they don’t have to wait on hold. They prefer to get their questions answered immediately.

Why is Live Chat so preferred?

• Questions are answered immediately
• It’s possible to multi-task while chatting
• More thorough and accurate information is obtained compared to sending an email to Customer Service
• Calling CS can involve many layers of menu selection and often results in getting the wrong department or a dropped call
• Customers feel more in control of the pace of conversation
• Chat can be conducted at the office or anywhere that silence or privacy is necessary

Source: Aquire

What ’bout the Bots?

A chatbot (or virtual assistant) is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with humans. They use Natural Language Processing – a process in which the computer is able to understand natural human speech. Chatbots are very efficient and useful for many reasons:

• They provide 24-hour customer service – they don’t sleep
• They allow humans to focus on more complex issues – they’re great at tackling mundane tasks quickly
• Bots can triage a situation and direct customers to the proper department or channel – they’re virtual traffic directors
• They are unaffected by the human condition (there are no bad days for a bot)
• Immediate response time; bots think at the speed of a computer
• Lower costs – train once, pay once
• They are constantly learning – bots learn from their contexts, previous chat history, and preferences

Read more about chatbots and how AI can improve your CX in my blog post, “Winning the Hearts of your Customers: Using AI to Improve CX.”
Investing in self-service tools is a win-win situation for both your business and your customers. You can start out slowly, employing an FAQ section or implementing more photography and illustration on your pages, then work your way up to videos and, eventually, chat and chatbots. It’s an investment that pays dividends in time and money saved. And, remember, if you’re not doing it, you can bet your competitors are.

The other day I was perusing the Insights section of the Perficient website, and I came across a guide that sparked my interest called Five Digital Marketing Trends That Will Impact Your Business in 2018. In it, the authors discuss how personalization will “shape the complexity and magnitude of content development.” This was particularly interesting to me. I started wondering how personalization works. My research took me to artificial intelligence (AI) – everyone’s favorite new buzzword. AI trends are rapidly transforming the customer experience through several means – one of which is personalization.

AI can help organizations understand what customers want, and predict what they will need in the future. It can help companies unlock customers desires, and tie together a seamless experience with one that is relevant to customers. – The future of CX: How artificial intelligence will humanize every customer journey

In addition to personalization, AI applications provide a robust foundation for other CX practices such as customer insight, security and privacy, appeal to emotion, and customer service. We’ll discuss these a bit later but first, let’s talk a little about what AI is.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning: Different, But the Same

The relationship between these practices is similar to that of concentric circles; artificial intelligence being the all-encompassing practice that includes machine learning, which includes deep learning. 

Artificial intelligence is the practice of machines learning to perform tasks that humans can perform, only faster and more accurately. Machine learning goes a level deeper, allowing the machine to learn from performing these tasks and apply this learning to future tasks. Deep learning takes a step closer into the spooky part of all this, where a machine can recognize objects, make decisions about these objects, and learn, all without the interference of those pesky humans.

Source

Of course, the idea is not for the machines to take over, but rather the machines will assist us in being better at what we do. In this case, what we’re doing is providing better customer experiences.

Applying AI to CX

Companies that can successfully use AI to drive better experiences at each interaction in the customer journey will find themselves winning the hearts and minds of their customers. By using technology to demonstrate empathy, provide serendipity, and respect privacy, these companies will create customer service experiences that are more human than ever before. – The future of CX: How artificial intelligence will humanize every customer journey

There are several areas of CX in which AI is making vast improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and overall customer satisfaction.

Personalization

Like it or not, the more each of us uses the internet, the more information about our personal lives we leave behind in the ether. A picture of who we are forms through the collection and analysis of our data. The growth of this ‘big’ data is exponential, and the storage capacity for it is nearly infinite. But it’s the processing of this data that leads to the growth in quality and its usefulness to CX.

Your computer’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), the heart and soul of your machine, uses a technique called “parallel processing,” which breaks down a process into parts that are executed upon simultaneously at blindingly fast speeds and is cheaper and more powerful than the old method. So, what does all this mean? This picture of who you are is now in high definition. Brands can utilize machine learning to gain a much deeper understanding of who their customers are – down to the freckle. 

When this technology is used wisely – and ethically – across all touch points, it can humanize the overall customer experience. It allows brands to empathize with their customers, fulfilling their emotional needs while also fulfilling their more practical, immediate needs. It appeals to their emotions, creating a more memorable experience. And it helps brands understand when to connect as well as when to ease off.

Customer Support – What’s it all a-bot?

A chatbot (or virtual assistant) is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with humans. They use natural language processing (NLP) – a process in which the computer can understand natural human speech. Chatbots are very efficient and useful for many reasons:

They provide 24-hour customer service

Running any kind of customer service center is costly, especially one that is available 24 hours. Chatbots don’t need sleep, food, or office space. They remain on call, allowing us humans to be human.

They allow humans to focus on more complex issues

Instead of having employees deal with such mundane tasks as resetting a password or checking to see if something is in stock, you can leave that to the chatbots. This frees up the humans to deal with those issues that need a human touch. This also helps customers who have no desire to wait online for 15 minutes for a human customer service rep to become available.

Bots can act as virtual traffic directors.

Bots can triage a situation and direct customers to the proper department or channel. This solves the problem of putting customers through the dreaded multi-department hand-off scenario where they get passed around from person to person and often get dropped.

They are unaffected by the human condition

The bot’s attitude is always sunny. There are no bad days for a bot.

Immediate response time

Bots think at the speed of a computer. Whether it’s directing a customer to the correct department or letting them know that those pants are available in lime green, the entire response time is milliseconds instead of minutes.

Lower costs

Train once, pay once.

Constant learning

A bot’s intelligence will help anticipate specific customer needs by learning from their contexts, previous chat history, and preferences.

Customer Insight

As I mentioned earlier, the amount of data collected on our customers and their habits has grown exponentially. AI-enabled analytics can wade through mountains of data quickly and uncover relationships that you might miss or may never have thought to look for. This allows humans to consume and prioritize these relationships instead of getting bogged down in data.

AI-enabled analytics can also make predictions based on these relationships, as well as understand the motivators and road blocks for the customer in the interactions with your business.

Security and Privacy

AI can be very useful in detecting patterns that indicate fraud. And it can help your business react quickly to threats. Additionally, because it is always learning, it can recognize newly constructed threats in an effort to stay ahead of the bad guys.

AI can also help you understand when is the best time or method to contact your customer allowing you to respect their privacy by not over-contacting someone.

Conclusion

As was the case with the mobile revolution, and the web before that, machine learning will cause us to rethink, restructure, and reconsider what’s possible in virtually every experience we build. –Google Design: The UX of AI

Artificial intelligence has gone from fantasy to reality in a short time. Right now, there is a perfect storm of events happening that is thrusting it into our daily lives at an ever-increasing pace – whether you are aware of it or not. AI has skipped right past the ‘nice-to-have’ stage to the ‘adapt-or-die’ stage. The successful company of tomorrow will be the company that gets all hands on the AI deck. 

I leave you with two statistics that illustrate my point.

1. 85% of the relationship between the enterprise and its customer will be handled without human interaction.
2. Between 2012 and 2015, the use of virtual agents increased by about 30%.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Perficient Digital has an award-winning AI practice?