Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Every month brings new features promising “deeper thinking” and “agentic processes.” Tech titans are locked in trillion-dollar battles. Headlines scream about business, economic, and societal concerns. Skim the news and you’re left excited and terrified!

Here’s the thing: we’re still human – virtues, flaws, quirks, and all. We’ve always had our agency, collectively shaping our future. Even now, while embracing AI, we need to keep building for us.

We Fear What We Do Not Know

“AI this… AI that…” Even tech leaders admit they don’t fully understand it. Sci-fi stories warn us with cautionary tales. News cycles fuel anxiety about job loss, disconnected human relationships, and cognitive decline.

Luckily, this round of innovation is surprisingly transparent. You can read the Attention is All You Need paper (2017) that started it all. You can even build your own AI if you want! This isn’t locked behind a walled garden. That’s a good thing.

What the Past Can Tell Us

I like to look at the past to gauge what we can expect from the future. Humans have feared every major invention and technological breakthrough. We expect the worst, but most have proven to improve life.

We’ve always had distractions from books, movies, games, to TikTok brain-rot. Some get addicted and go too deep, while others thrive. People favor entertainment and leisure activities – this is nothing new – so I don’t feel like cognitive decline is anything to worry about. Humanity has overcome all of it before and will continue to do so.

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Humans are Simple (and Complicated) Creatures

We look for simplicity and speed. Easy to understand, easy to look at, easy to interact with, easy to buy from. We skim read, we skip video segments, we miss that big red CTA button. The TL;DR culture rules. Even so, I don’t think we’re at risk of the future from Idiocracy (2006).

That’s not to say that we don’t overcomplicate things. The Gods Must Be Crazy movie (1980) has a line that resonates, “The more [we] improved [our] surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated [we] made it.” We bury our users (our customers) in detail when they just want to skim, skip, and bounce.

Building for Computers

The computer revolution (1950s-1980s) started with machines serving humans. Then came automation. And eventually, systems talking to systems.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, where marketers gamed the algorithms to win at SEO, SEM, and social networking. Content was created for computers, not humans. Now we have the dead internet theory. We were building without humans in mind.

We will still have to build for systems to talk to systems. That won’t change. APIs are more important than ever, and agentic AI relies on them. Because of this, it is crucial to make sure what you are building “plays well with others”. But AIs and APIs are tools, not the audience.

Building for Humans

Google used to tell us all to build what people want, as opposed to gaming their systems. I love that advice. However, at first it felt unrealistic…gaming the system worked. Then after many updates, for a short bit, it felt like Google was getting there! Then it got worse and feels like pay-to-play recently.

Now AI is reshaping search and everything else. You can notice the gap between search results and AI recommendations. They don’t match. AI assistants aim to please humans, which is great, until it inevitably changes.

Digital teams must build for AI ingestion, but if you neglect the human aspect and the end user experience, then you will only see short-term wins.

Examples of Building for Humans

• Make it intuitive and easy. Simple for end users means a lot of work for builders, but it is worth it! Reduce their cognitive load.
• Build with empathy. Appeal to real people, not just personas and bots. Include feedback loops so they can feel heard.
• Get to the point. Don’t overwhelm users, instead help them take action! Delight your customers by saving them time.
• Add humor when appropriate. Don’t be afraid to be funny, weird, or real…it connects on a human level.
• Consider human bias. Unlike bots and crawlers, humans aren’t always logical. Design for human biases.
• Watch your users. Focus groups or digital tracking tools are great for observing. Learn from real users and iterate.

Conclusion

Building for humans never goes out of style. Whatever comes after AI will still need to serve people. So as tech evolves, let’s keep honing systems that work with and around our human nature.

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If you are looking for that extra human touch (built with AI), reach out to your Perficient account manager or use our contact form to begin a conversation.

Synonyms: Customer Research, User Research

From a definition standpoint, when we talk about Voice of the Customer (VoC) we are describing the process or program of soliciting your customer’s feedback about their experiences with your product (aka site/portal/app).

Why do we care about VoC?

Oh man – where do I even begin? We care about VoC because we (us marketers and strategists) care about our customers. Establishing a VoC program will help you ensure that you are meeting customer needs and expectations. It is a way to solicit customer feedback in order to improve the product/service you are delivering. VoC is imperative for key business functions like customer success, product development and iteration cycles.

How do I initiate a VoC program?

The first and most important thing to note about Initiating and developing a VoC program should be directly tied to your overall customer experience strategy. Having this alignment upfront will ensure the experience you deliver aligns with your CX goals. Now that that is out of the way, a good framework to follow is: Define, Design, Implement, Analyze, Act and Iterate. Following this framework will allow you to establish an initial program and also expand on a VoC program throughout your organization.

If you think you will have a hard time formalizing a VoC program, don’t let that deter you. Go ahead and start getting your hands on any data that you can. Focusing on omni-channel data and feedback is a great place to start getting some answers and seeing where to apply efforts to solicit more customer feedback.

If you want to chat more about customer research or implementing a VoC program, fill out the contact form or HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.

Stay thirsty, friends!

Delivering seamless, consistent, and engaging experiences starts with a customer-centered digital strategy. This ongoing series explores the characteristics that make up a great digital strategy and how to deliver powerful brand moments that solidify customer loyalty and drive differentiation for your organization.

Earlier in this series, we revealed the importance of organizational alignment for your digital strategy. My colleague, David Stallsmith, summed it up nicely: “It is the core of your strategy, the backbone of your business, and an accelerator of what you hope to achieve.” But getting your teams and departments focused on the customer and digital mission is just the beginning. Once you have them rowing in the right direction, there is more to consider to get them working together to max out their digital potential.
Organizational alignment paves the way for lean transformation. Furthermore, lean transformation is uniquely important and relevant for driving customer centricity. To deliver customer-focused innovations, it’s important to understand the elements of lean transformation and how to overcome the foreseeable challenges.

What Is Lean Transformation? 

Lean methodology originated in manufacturing during the mid-twentieth century. It was the innovative idea that revolutionized Toyota’s production system, and modernized manufacturing and ultimately operational capabilities around the globe in every industry. The methodology defines value from the customer’s viewpoint, focuses on improving processes while eliminating waste, and ultimately boosts innovation.
Lean transformation builds on this methodology to lay out a blueprint of organizational tools and approaches. Fusing Design Thinking with Agile, we define lean transformation as an organizational change to how we design, build, and run digital, customer-centric systems.

Perficient Digital’s Design Thinking Methodology

Why Embrace Lean Transformation? 

There are a few good reasons to embrace Lean principles in your organization, regardless of whether or not you’re motivated by digital, or customer experience, or another reason to build operational excellence into your organization. But digital customer experience is an ideal place to adopt lean transformation for a couple of key reasons. 
First, digital projects focused on customers thrive when teams tap into the human elements that make digital solutions more useful, usable, and impactful. Technology projects have historically attempted to incorporate user requirements in various formats (and with typically painful outcomes). Lean organizations address this by incorporating customer empathy and a range of stakeholder inputs from a holistic team with diverse perspectives. 
Second, the expectations of IT and the CIO’s role in the organization have shifted. For years, IT teams have built and managed systems for scale and predictability. But in today’s customer-centered world, it’s not enough to keep the lights on. CIOs are now entrusted with helping their companies meet customers’ changing needs and react to competitive threats with the same systems (and funding) they’ve always had. Customer-centered organizations have adopted lean principles to augment scale and predictability with agility and speed.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”Customer centricity is the permanent result of technology disrupting the relationship between consumers and brands.”[/perfectpullquote]

Six Elements of Lean Transformation (and Why They Matter)

1. Iterative delivery

Waterfall, big-bang efforts are fundamentally flawed because none of the risk is confirmed until the very end. Your team may wonder: “Are these the right features? Will this technology even work?” When the proverbial veil is lifted, it’s too late to make significant changes. 
Iterative projects solve many of these flaws. You create an environment to test and re-evaluate all aspects of the project early and often. Doing so allows you to expose the risks sooner, giving you time to react and adjust. Then, you can focus your limited time and budget on what matters most.

2. Continuous testing

Well-intended iterative projects simply turn into incremental projects when testing is not built into each iteration. Our best client projects have proven that testing different aspects – from the customer journey and basic user experience to tricky system integrations and the final, working solution – is the most effective way to derive feedback and uncover the right solution. 
Being test-driven goes beyond scheduling ample time for testing activities. You also must consider testing tools, data, content, methods, and participants.

3. Research-based decisions  

Customer centricity is the permanent result of technology disrupting the relationship between consumers and brands. The first rule of customer centricity is knowing your customers – who they are, what they want and need, and why they choose you. Observation, studies, and behavioral analytics are key tools for researching and understanding your customers. 
At the broadest, contextual level, basic customer insights are table stakes for a design thinking approach. If you have this insight, then large-scale research isn’t needed for every project. 
In a typical project where the customer is well known, user research still happens, but it’s essentially reduced to feedback and the results of your testing. When the problem domain is new or particularly unique, then smaller amounts of focused research may be necessary to lay the groundwork.

4. Prototyping

At the heart of Agile, iterative methodologies are the ability to test your work and run experiments so we can use those results and feedback to drive the product. But long before the product takes form, we use prototyping to create something to run our tests and experiments against. Simple, low-fidelity, pencil-and-paper prototypes are amazingly effective early in projects, and more comprehensive, high-fidelity prototyping tools (e.g., Adobe XD and InVision) are now more economical than ever. 
Strong design thinking teams think about prototyping tools and strategies at the start of their projects. Think outside the box with prototyping. Storyboards, animation, and video are also extremely effective ways to communicate the breadth of your project. More advanced product teams invest in platform stubs and virtualization to extend prototyping even further.

5. Cross-functional teams

Digital ecosystems can be complex with many interdependencies. At the same time, customers can be unpredictable and inconsistent. Combine these challenges, and your business faces compounded risk and uncertainty. 
That’s why strong digital teams should consist of holistic, cross-functional team members. You’ll want a team that brings a complete skillset but also a variety of perspectives, experiences, and objectives to balance the risk and complexity of digital projects. This includes customer-centered design, versatile engineering, and strong business input. We call this concept the Minimum Viable Team (MVT). When coupled with its product counterpart, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), these are two strong moves to adapt digital and non-digital teams.

6. Product-oriented development

In some organizations, a product-oriented approach to design, engineering, and servicing systems as distinct products can simplify the overall complexity. This approach also establishes focus for your business so that you organize processes and teams chartered with delivering these products. 
Product orientation encourages multiple teams to work independently and helps govern interdependencies and priorities through coordinated, release-driven planning. This approach requires advance thinking about an overall product architecture – usually defined by customer segments, channels, and features – and thinking through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) among product teams and constituents.

Conquering Obstacles for Lean Transformation

Organizational inertia

One of the toughest obstacles to becoming Lean is the simple resistance to change. We encourage small steps with adequate training, education, and leadership mandates to gain cooperation and buy-in across your organization. But most of all, you must prove that these elements will work for your organization. 
Overcoming this mindset can be addressed with an organizational change management (OCM) strategy adapted for your digital program. OCM should also be considered for ongoing governance and oversight activities. 
Another option is to create a Digital Center of Excellence (COE) or similar model to provide support, education, and shared services. With a design thinking team that’s starting from scratch, you’ll have to create a design system that enables a variety of tools – personas, customer journeys, low- or high-fidelity prototyping, or simulation tools. Your team will also have to build customer empathy and develop design standards. This pre-work must be done to lay the groundwork for lean transformation.

Scheduling woes

Scheduling and managing distributed resources from multiple teams can be nearly impossible, particularly when those resources are shared among other projects. The most effective response is to construct dedicated product teams, ideally in a co-located workspace dedicated to the product mission.
Establish a MVT that consists of a product owner, business owner, engineers, testers, and designers. Pulling them together and dedicating them to the project brings the combination of holistic perspectives, the chance to bond as a team, and the dedicated time to make progress. 
However, this solution may be radical for some organizations because it alters career planning, challenges centralized controls, and can appear expensive for part-time commitments. Rest assured, the payoff is much improved teamwork and communication with the lack of distractions and minimal wait times.

Maintaining diversity of thought

Diverse perspectives bring real value to designing digital products. Diversity encompasses individuals from different demographics or socioeconomic backgrounds, but it also includes bringing in resources from different industry categories, skill areas, or teams. 
Diversity of thought makes it possible to break the organizational inertia and build empathy with different audiences. Consider the airline industry for a moment and the apps developed for passengers. Do any of them stand out? There’s little differentiation between them. This exemplifies the need for diversity among a design thinking team. When you have a group of people with similar traits and backgrounds writing the software, the end result is undifferentiated products.

Lean Transformation Bolsters Innovation

Innovation happens across a wide spectrum, from the truly disruptive to the quietly sustainable. 
Sustaining innovations tend to be internally focused, helping you work faster, exploit existing strengths, and build operational excellence. At the other end of the spectrum, disruptive innovations focus on growth, explore new territory, and tend to enhance the customer experience.
Disruption gets the attention, but sustainable innovations can be equally valuable in terms of competitive advantage. We’ve found that Lean teams bring the most balanced, holistic perspective to finding the right balance of innovation.

Start small, fail fast, prove success

The best innovative approaches embrace failure as a core value. While that may sound counterintuitive, the premise is really this: what can you learn from failure?
Creating an environment for continuous testing and learning is among the primary traits of highly-effective and innovative companies. Experimentation, testing, and learning are key to reducing risk and taking full advantage of the insights gained as you innovate. 
You can prove success by starting with a small project, run by a capable team that is committed to the process. Once you prove success with these methodologies, others in your company will want to do the same.

The Key Takeaway 

Why should your organization be Lean? Because change is the only constant. Customers and their preferences continue to evolve. The technology continues to change, and therefore, businesses must always be ready for change. By incorporating the elements of lean transformation, your business – the teams and technologies – can quickly adapt and respond to these realities.

Creating stand-out digital customer experiences that attract, engage, and retain customers is a tall order. Perhaps you’ve already done some of the foundational work, and you need help with the next step.

When working with clients, we help make sure you know your customers and understand their journeys. Through design-thinking tools, industry research, and pragmatic ideation to execute from end-to-end, you will have what it takes to deliver experiences that surprise and delight your customers.
Ready to get started with your digital strategy? Dive in for more resources.

Synonyms (this is a bit of a stretch but…): interviews, focus groups, usability testing

From a definition standpoint, qualitative research is a scientific method of observation that gathers non-numerical data and that focuses on ‘why’ someone does something as opposed to ‘what’ someone does.

Why do we care about qualitative research?

In the process of website design and development, we care about qualitative research for a few reasons. First, unlike performance and quantitative data, qualitative research allows us to answer strategic questions that we have. Second, qualitative research helps us mitigate assumptions that we make throughout the process. Through qualitative research efforts such as a usability study, we can evaluate how well visitors can navigate a site, find information, and accomplish key tasks.

How do we get started with qualitative research?

One thing that I want to stress is that it is always a good time to do qualitative research. It is often assumed that qualitative research needs to be done at the beginning of a project, but you can execute qualitative research at any point in a project lifecycle and post-launch. To get started with qualitative research,  you want to develop a good research question or hypothesis. Your research question should be specific, manageable and should explore why people exhibit specific behaviors on your site. From there, you need to determine the appropriate research methods to gather information, determine sample size, collect data, etc.

If you want to chat more about conducting qualitative research, fill out the contact form or HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.

Stay thirsty, friends!

If you have worked in a marketing-like capacity and used Sitecore as your content management system(CMS), chances are the words Profile, Profile Key, Profile Card, Pattern Card or Persona have been tossed around. As personalization is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of an expectation, marketers are looking for ways to increase conversions, lower bounce rates and provide users the content they want more easily. These P words are like the soul stone of infinity stones for digital marketers (I am still speechless over Avengers: Endgame!).

When I started working with Sitecore’s marketing functionality and after going to the Sitecore Marketer training, the concept of profiles, profile cards and so on was still a bit of a mystery to me. The setup of the profile and then the relationship between the keys and the profile cards and pattern cards just seemed extremely complex and made my head spin. Over time and giving trainings on the topic, how each is defined, the use and the relationship between these different Sitecore items, things became clearer.

So to help someone else who might be struggling with this area of the Sitecore Marketing Control Panel and to test my own knowledge, let’s explore the in’s and out’s of Sitecore profiling!

The What

To begin, defining all the pieces seems like a logical first step! This seemed pretty easy to grasp but to err on the side of caution, we will go over each with my own personal definitions.

Profile – The overarching category folder. When trying to determine the categories for a profile, start with basic categories. If you’re an IT company, a potential profile could be products, another could be functionality or pain points. The profile item within Sitecore itself is just for categorization so if it is named one way and after building out the subitems, things seem off, the name can be changed!

Profile Key – A characteristic or attribute that can be used to describe a part or the whole of the content or user on your site. These characteristics could be adjectives like “tech-savvy” or “numbers-focused”.

Profile Card – An item created made up of Profile Keys used to tag pages within the content tree. A profile card has a score associated to it and as users consume content that is tagged with a profile card ,they start to accumulate points towards that card as something they are interested in  

Pattern Card – An item created made up of Profile Keys used to match or segment visitors. With pattern cards, you set a threshold in values and as site visitors consume content tagged with profile cards, once they match the defined threshold, they have now matched a pattern you can personalize to.

Below is a visual example to put this all together. We have a Profile of Users and then use characteristics as Profile Keys to describe both the content (Profile Cards) and the users (Pattern Cards) who frequent the site. For the “Jo the Strategist” Pattern Card, Profile Keys associated are Automation, Numbers Focused and Tech-Savvy. While other patterns may share the same Profile Keys, the values are different. More on this in “The How”!

It’s like a Profile/Persona rainbow! Disclaimer: These are not the best options ever for Profile Keys, Cards and so on but it’s not using the “cars” example (wink wink to seasoned Sitecore marketers) and is just to provide an idea of how this could be set up!

Does that clear up all the questions you have about this topic? Probably not… but defining these terms is essential to understanding the next part.

The How

Firstly, one choice that needs to be made is “Will this be a 1-to-1 relationship or a 1-to-many relationship?”.

What I mean by 1-to-1 relationship versus a 1-to-many relationship is how the Profile Keys are used in relation to Profile Cards and Pattern Cards since both are, as we defined above, made up of Profile Keys or more specifically their values.

When creating a Profile Key, a name as well as a minimum and maximum value is required. The value can be 0-2, 0-10, 1-10, whatever range you feel has enough statistical variation for the profile being created, the content being tagged and the visitors coming to your site. Once a minimum and maximum value is set and profile and pattern cards are being created, a card value needs to be set.

Both Profile and Pattern Cards have fields for a value which shows a spider web-like graphic with all of the different Profile Keys created and a dropdown scale to set a value within the Profile Key min/max range.

So now back to relationships:

1-to-1 relationship – If your segments are narrow then the characteristics created for your profile keys might be exactly what would be used to describe your content and users. In this case, a profile key could be “Young Adults” and if there is content specifically targeted to this group, the profile card could be “Young Adults” or “Young Adult Focused” and then the pattern or persona for the audience might be “Young Adults”.

1-to-many relationship – Where your segments of users and content are broad meaning there are multiple characteristics to classify your content and users. An example could be a profile key for “Technical” documentation, a profile card of “Development” and one pattern card/persona to match “Dylan the Developer” and a different profile card of “Analytics” with a pattern card for “Brian the Web Analytics Master”. Both are positions where technical skills are potentially characteristic of the content and visitor so other profile key characteristics would be used to differentiate content and users.

For the purposes of trying to explain these relationships, I have created an example of  a 1-to-many relationship:

In this example, there are profile keys to describe characteristics of the content and visitors and then profile and pattern cards for the different types of content and visitors using the profile keys either 100% or a mixture of multiple profile keys to one profile or pattern card. Including a listing of pages with the mapped profile card assignment can be useful because then you can easily map out the paths to match on a specific pattern to test the setup.

Once a profile, profile keys, profile and pattern cards are defined on paper/spreadsheet, it is just a matter of creating the Sitecore items, tagging content, testing and then sitting back and waiting for the data to come rolling in to eventually begin to personalize content based on these personas.

Are your eyes glazing over yet? No? Yay!

Well, if your eyes did glaze over and you are still curious about patterns, profile cards and so on or know some other analogy or way to explain this, without using cars ;-), or have questions about the post, submit a comment below, submit the contact form or you can always message me on LinkedIn or Twitter @sitecorejo!  

And for those located in Florida and the Tampa Bay area, check out the Florida Sitecore User Group and join us at the meetings. Check out the events and stay up-to-date on Twitter @FloridaSitecore!

Jo Troxell will return…

Perficient Digital was a proud sponsor of World Information Architecture Day on February 18. WIAD was a one-day conference held simultaneously in cities around the world. Perficient Digital sponsored 3 locations: Ann Arbor, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
160 attendees flocked here in L.A. Presentations frequently touched upon best practices in research for information architects. The following topics – and quotes – were my personal favorites.
1. You Need User Research
Jaime Levy, professor and author of the acclaimed book “UX Strategy,” shared her experiences designing for the open source Hyperloop project. A key takeaway? Though Elon Musk’s Hyperloop may be viewed as an incredible technical ambition, it demands equal attention to the human experience. Last year, Jaime and her students at USC generated user interface concepts for future Hyperloop riders. As Jaime put it: “A unique kick-ass customer experience coupled with the right business model can define a ‘disruptive’ product or service.” Thus, customer experience is not a derivative of a new business model. It is a component of the model itself.
Jaime’s framework for UX strategy begins with a business hypothesis about target consumer needs, followed by field research with real people for corroboration. Later in the day, Eugene Kim of QuanticMind quipped that only 5% of user research is done in the field. I was extremely surprised by this figure. For experience professionals, it’s imperative to go out and actually speak with users.
2. You Need Both Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
Nate Bolt, author of “Remote Research,” presented the importance of user research. I’m cheating here since Nate actually quoted Mark Zuckerberg. But here’s what Facebook’s CEO said: “We conduct quantitative research to test our assumptions, and qualitative research to learn what we don’t know.”
A simple but great quote. One of the most successful digital companies of our generation openly promoting both quantitative and qualitative methods. As an aside, there’s a misconception floating around that Apple doesn’t do usability testing, and therefore none of this stuff matters. In practice, Apple skimps on market research – like Henry Ford asking customers if they want a faster horse – and absolutely invests in user research, usability testing and analytics. Yes, these professionals exist.
Why does research matter? Jaime and Nate both reminded me of another author, Richard Rumelt, who wrote: “Generally available functional knowledge is essential, but because it is available to all, it can rarely be decisive. The most precious functional knowledge is proprietary, available only to your organization.”
Research generates proprietary insights. Fittingly, Richard Rumelt is a professor down the road at UCLA’s business school. Not one of those touchy-feely designer types! He’s the author of the business guidebook, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.” For all of us who work in digital, it all ends up being about insights regardless of our backgrounds.
3. Make Your Pictures Strategic, Not Just Pretty
Eric Beteille, a senior content strategist at Disney, shared a wonderful checklist for leveraging photography in user experience design. I thought that this presentation beautifully illustrated quantitative and qualitative practices in action. Eric shared research-backed quantitative principles like dividing a photo canvas into thirds for maximum effect. What’s more, he explained the psychological aspects of compelling photos. Emotional content. Unusual subject matter. Authentic images versus stock photography. He even showed eye-tracking heatmaps from past research to support his assertions. This was a great checklist for anyone involved in visual design, user experience, content strategy, and even marketing.
Here at Perficient Digital, we are delighted to have sponsored a wonderful WIAD event this year. For those who attended in L.A., we hope to see you again next year.

The rise of the voice-enabled search function has created “conversational shopping,” a buzzword introduced by Behshad Behzadi, Google’s Director of Search, at the SMX West’s Event in early 2016.
Although voice search isn’t a new feature – after all, Siri was born in 2011 – it’s now picking up in popularity since error rates are down and convenience is up. The 2014 Google Mobile Voice Study found that teenagers in particular have adapted to voice search. Around 55% of teenagers owning a smartphone use voice search several times a day, while only 41% of adults use voice search at least once a day. On top of that, sales of voice-enabled devices, like the Amazon Echo, are rising, with sales for that product alone projected to hit $10 million next year.
So as voice search becomes more and more popular, what does it mean for your company? When your potential customers are searching, how do their voice searches differ from written searches? Research from Microsoft revealed that users are more likely to search for longer queries in spoken searches versus written ones. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller also said in a recent Google Hangout that many of the voice searches are done in much longer-form sentences – though that’s more true for older generations than younger generations, who tend to speak in short, to-the-point keywords.
To adapt for these different types of searches, add more natural phrasing for long-tail searches to your search engine marketing campaigns. And take a look at your website copy and overall content strategy to ensure it reflects these new “natural language” searches. Your content should answer the spoken questions your potential clients might ask, beyond just allowing you to be found for branded or keyword searches.
And revisit these strategies as voice-enabled devices and search capabilities continue to evolve. Amazon is pushing for companies to develop new “skills” (similar to mobile phone apps) for its Echo and Dot, to make the devices more useful and powerful. As the number of skills available increases, searches will become more direct, using already downloaded apps instead of leaving searches open-ended.
To learn more about how voice search and other top trends are impacting eCommerce, download our guide, Innovating eCommerce: Nine Top Trends for 2017.

Sources:
Conversation as the new UI: Microsoft makes its chatbot pitch at Build 2016, Marketing Land, Danny Sullivan, March 30, 2016.
Google Looking To Bring Voice Search & AMP Reporting To Search Console, Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz, May 9, 2016.
OMG! Mobile voice survey reveals teens love to talk, Google Blog, Scott Huffman, October 14, 2014

I conducted my first software usability research sessions in a lab back in 1999 as a graduate student. We had desktops and video cameras set up at different angles to capture participants’ facial expressions as well as their interaction with the system. I took notes by hand. I had a stopwatch to record start and end times for tasks.
When I started working for real clients, I set their labs up the same way. A video camera and a tripod, my notebook and a stopwatch. This setup served me well in the lab and on the road for years. I later welcomed the development of recording software, and lighter laptops.
The emergence of mobile brought my first real setup challenges. I wanted to capture feedback from authentic interactions with the device, not have users click a simulated mobile screen on a laptop or desktop. Many of my mobile studies have been conducted outside of a lab, sometimes pulling participants off the street and taking them to a room where we watch them use their devices.
I had to have a truly mobile lab to get the best results. It’s one thing to load up a car for a local study, but another to board a plane with needed equipment. Regardless of the mode of travel and distance, my preference is to travel light. Flexibility and creativity are required because I don’t know what my environment will be until I’m onsite. My mobile lab consists of these simple tools that have served me well no matter what I encounter:
External Camera
I’ve used the Hue HD external camera for years. Its flexible neck allows it to be positioned in tight spaces, a must when you are onsite with a participant and setup is limited. It’s also great for usability testing of mobile apps. Software that shows the participant mobile screenshots and allows them to click through a scenario are okay, but mouse clicks on a screen aren’t the same as swiping on an actual device. Add a clip to the base of the camera, connect to your computer running screen recording software, and you have what you need.
Screen Recording Software
There are many tools for recording, including built-in recording tools on Mac and PC, but I’ve found Morae most useful because of its picture-in-picture feature. It works with almost every camera, has the Observer feature that allows others to watch the participant, performs auto-analysis and much more.
Second computer or iPad for notes
With the first computer running Morae and connected to the Hue HD, I use my second device to take notes. Gone are my notepads, mostly because I type faster than I can write, and I can back up notes on the cloud that autosaves.
This simple setup is flexible and light enough not to weigh down a traveler racking up miles for the sake of research. What tools have you found useful for your mobile lab?

On Saturday February 20, 2016, 57 cities in 28 countries all over the globe celebrated an annual meeting of information architects, content strategists, user experience designers, developers and students. This year’s theme was “Information Everywhere, Architects Everywhere.” The thought is that information is pervasive and it is “architected” by people everywhere whether or not they have the “information architect” title.

PerficientDigital was a gold sponsor at the 2016 World Information Architecture Day held in Los Angeles. A group of us including Gideon Banez, Grace Lau, Robert Lee, and Jeff Tang represented the Irvine Perficient office and fielded questions about who Perficient is and what we did as UX architects, or, in Gideon’s case, as a front-end developer. Grace Lau and Jeff Tang were also part of the Los Angeles team of volunteers, helping pull together snacks and refreshments as well as supporting the live stream of the event on YouTube.

This year’s sessions reiterated some old insights as well as introduced some new ways of thinking about design research and information architecture. Here’s a quick rundown from the day’s sessions.

1. JD Buckley, in her session “A Brave New World: IA Research and Emerging Technology,” reasserted that no matter how much the technology has changed, how products differ from each other, how innovative the experience, they all start from the same model of understanding content, context and users.
2. Todd Masilko, in his session “Designing for Behavior,” introduced the concept of using design storms as three-day multidisciplinary hackathons where the expected outcome are low-fidelity prototypes, sketch models, and scenarios to help think through complicated interactions not limited by screens. The project “captivated by her” is one designstudio experiment inspired by the Spike Jonze film “Her” that pulled themes out of the movie such as intimacy and artificial intelligence and participants developed scenarios through acting. Play studio is another design approach in which students take a behavior and then design for it.
3. Sensor Salon was an interesting take on wearable technology in the form of sensors installed on nails. Did you see the 3D printed cat on one of the fingers?! Jenny Rodenhouse went through their methodology and insights gathered as they explored the steps of sensor installation and client therapy.
4. Audience modelling, introduced by Hunter Ochs from Capital Group, was another new take on an abstract type of user research that doesn’t go deep into the persona level of understanding users. Incidentally, it resonated well with me personally as it was an approach we took recently on a major healthcare project for user research recruiting and taxonomy development.
5. Roel Punzalan talked about his on-boarding experience at ADP to share how effective domain modeling is for complex topics, such as employment taxes. Other lessons he shared are to know the target audience for your design problem and know when the appropriate time is for following standards and doing what you’re told versus being creative.
6. Burcu Bakioglu provided her background in game research and ethnographic observations of gaming jerks (aka trolls) for conducting effective user research in a big corporation. Trolls are aware of their context and their impact on the game experience to maximize laughs. How could we apply these Art of War principles to user research?
7. Erik Hanson talked about innovation not being focused on screens and products, but on teams, process, communication, and methods. It’s important to look for the local maximum as the bigger opportunity and understanding the difference between optimization and innovation. He asked what kind of companies are willing to take the risks to innovate. Innovation, he asserted, is not about changing a corporate culture but being able to articulate and bring the voices together to tell stories.
8. Jod Kaftan and Chris Chandler presented a more philosophical approach to understanding 3 main types of people: the Big No, the Big Shrug, and the Big Yes. These three types explained how people relate to their approach to design work, their solutions, and their work relationships.
9. My biggest takeaway from Jahmeilah Roberson’s “UX in Gaming” session was this League of Legends login sequence that Riot Games created for their April Fool’s Day prank last year that she used to illustrate her point: “Champion the social and emotional aspects of your product to inspire your audience.” (Please excuse me while I proceed to listen to hours of this as my background work music.) In all seriousness, Jaimeilah’s session provided some key user experience patterns that have been utilized in gaming such as progressive onboarding. “Leverage what users love, address what they don’t.”
10. Nate Bolt from ethn.io gave a very moving story of CalFresh’s transformation from an online application form that took 90 minutes to complete to under 11 minutes. He showed us the evolution of design research over the last 60 years and different examples that design research (also known as information architecture) has impacted us.

With celebrations like World IA Day Los Angeles, we get a sense of the broad industries that Southern California represents from financial services to gaming. It was an honor that PerficientDigital was a sponsor for this event so that we can come together and share how Perficient enables information architecture in our projects.
To end this post, let me share this last takeaway with you: the sun is never too far away in Southern California!

Watch the entire @WIAD_LA audience shift 90 degrees because we get too darn much sun in LA! #WIAD16 @WorldIADay pic.twitter.com/JFPmzqCyYH

— WIAD Los Angeles (@WIAD_LA) February 20, 2016

Part 1 of this post shared some ways that I’ve seen user experience debt burgeon from projects. This includes all manner of usability flaws and poor experiences. Here, Part 2 offers a strategic framework for addressing those problems. It’s divided into the following 3 sections as “Why”, “What” and “How.”

1. Purpose. Why do we want to improve our designs?
2. Assessment. What needs to be done to improve them?
3. Design Principles. How will we do it?

1. Purpose 
Strategy must begin with genuine purpose. As the business philosopher Jim Rohn said, your success in life will be measured by your impact on other people. What is the purpose of your design? How will improving your user experience help the world in some small way?
It’s easy for design improvement projects to ignore these questions. I know because I’ve been guilty of this about eight thousand times. Here are some misguided purposes from past experience:
Simply wanting to “be the best.”
Project scopes sometimes proclaim that Product X will supersede the competition by becoming “the best” in the industry. The thinking stops there. In practice, though, every organization aspires to be on top. A purpose should define exactly what that means for your company and customers. To quote the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Being different for the sake of being different.
I once worked with a product manager at a Global 500 company who stated, “All our competitors have a grid UI. So we want to implement anything except a grid.” The merits of grid design aside, this philosophy is purely reactive. Zigging just because the competition is zagging indicates a lack of vision for serving one’s customers.
Ignoring competitive advantage.
This is the opposite of the last pitfall but equally dangerous. It occurs when stakeholders reference their favorite websites to prescribe, say, Parallax UI with a novel JQuery twist.
In practice, purposeful design must be grounded in business strategy. Designers should know if their business generally distinguishes itself through price leadership, product differentiation or specialization. It’s great to look at UI trends, but form must follow function.
Enterprise website design (here at Perficient) should reflect the marketing principles of specialization, differentiation, segmentation and concentration. It’s necessary to recognize how an organization specializes in a particular market and differentiates itself from competitors. What are the user segments (perhaps represented by personas and supported with web analytics) that the site should target? And lastly, how should design and content strategy concentrate on those offerings for those demographics?
It’s so tempting to skip the business broccoli and jump straight to design dessert. The sooner that executives can see visual designs the better, right? However, ignoring your competitive advantage means that your best-case scenario is to match the status quo… you’ll never beat it.
Fixating on conversions (or revenue).
Gamification has emerged as a hot trend in recent years. But I feel there’s also an unstated gamification of web analytics and conversion design. Personally, I’ve been as guilty to this as anyone. At my worst I’ve treated A/B testing on an e-commerce site like a contest. Which button color, image or label will triumph each week? My only goal was to “win.” In retrospect, this was devoid of user empathy… which is an underlying cause of UX debt in the first place.
What does a legitimate purpose look like? A technique to consider is the “5 Whys.” Ask yourself why you want to improve a design, and keep challenging yourself by repeatedly asking “Why?” The fifth time you ask “why” may reveal some interesting truths. This is a shorthand method for “Starting with Why”, as organizational expert Simon Sinek encourages us all to do. To paraphrase Sinek, profit is a byproduct of purpose. It should not be the purpose itself.
I never applied the 5 Whys to the e-commerce site that I mentioned. Here’s what the logic chain might have been if I did:

1. I want to use A/B testing to improve the checkout funnel. Why?
2. I want to quantify improvements to checkout. Why?
3. I want stakeholders to stop speculating which designs work best. Why?
4. I believe it’s important to show ROI in design improvement initiatives. Why?
5. I want to convince our company to adopt a more user-centered design culture. Why?
6. I believe design should be a differentiating factor for our company in an extremely competitive industry.  

As you can probably appreciate, there’s a huge leap from picking A/B button colors (Why #1), and envisioning design as a competitive advantage for the whole company (Why #5). When examining UX debt, try to have a real purpose. It will define you as much as your work.
In a couple final posts I’ll share the next steps in this framework. This involves Assessment – what needs to be done? and Design Principles – how will we accomplish it?

Part 2 of 2
We are rapidly moving into the holiday shopping season and retailers are in for a rubber meets the road experience. The tried and true sales gimmicks they’ve relied on in season’s past may not work so well this November and December. Consumers have become accustomed to receiving free shipping, price matching and other price-related perks. And while some of those tactics work in the short term, as author Denise Lee Yohn has found, “Competing on price produces less of an advantage now.” Competing on price, product, placement and promotion is the classic marketing template for how organizations compete (i.e., the 4Ps of Marketing). It still has value today, but it’s no longer solely relevant to attracting and retaining consumers. I believe there is an additional “P” of marketing products and services that matters more in the marketplace of today, and that is people (aka, customers, consumers). So how will retailers compete to gain consumers’ wallets this season?

I am putting my money on those retailers who will compete on delivering a superior customer experience, and who invest in delighting their customer.

I agree with Yohn when she says, “They [meaning retailers] know that people make shopping decisions not only on product, price, offers, convenience, or even service, but rather…the way they make people feel.” Successful retailing is about getting into the hearts and minds of customers and prospective customers. This is not a new phenomenon brought on by a marketplace that is digitally connected and software driven. Smart consumer products companies have placed heavy emphasis on competing on customer experience since before the previous century. Take for example Proctor & Gamble, established in 1837. As I mentioned in CX and software – consumers lead the experience, this company has embraced a customer-centered philosophy (aka, a market orientation) under its current CEO A.G. Lafley, and that is one reason among others that Lafley more than doubled sales to nearly $84 billion as its CEO. They operationalized this philosophy by spending time with their customers, observing them and listening to them in their own homes. So, this ties into my post in Part 1, and that is – savvy researchers know that they can’t take user feedback at face value. People are well meaning with their feedback on how to resolve their problems, but they are not equipped to design solutions to their problems.
To get at what keeps people up at night, to find hidden opportunities, it takes a combination of drawing users out with open-ended questions, filtering out responses that are not focused on outcomes, and most importantly demonstrating empathy. Developing empathy, that ability to “see” someone’s frustrations or their goals, is akin to attuned communication, and it reduces social distance and draws users into the conversation. It says, “I’m not judging you and everything you share is important.” This form of research, the kind that P&G has been using for decades, is not superficial; and, it takes a huge commitment by an organization to invest in that learning. But as consumers continue to chart their own experience, share those experiences, and either build up or take down companies with them, companies need to realize that indirect means (one example, intercept surveys) of user research has drawbacks. Case in point, Craig Borowski, researcher with the Gartner Company Software Advice, shared that, “For months now, a regional deli I frequent has been asking me to answer an online survey. With every meal I purchase, the cashier highlights on the receipt the web address they’d like me to visit to complete the survey. But my customer journey with this sandwich shop never had any digital components. Why would they expect me to go online and complete their survey now? Digital and online are not synonyms for convenient.” I agree with Borowski. If a retailer, or any organization for that fact, cares to know what its customers think, then buy their lunch or offer a nice gift for their time to understand their aspirations.

A customer should never have to “work” to be a customer.

The holiday season is now in full swing and smart retailers, like Nordstrom, started long before this holiday season to provide a fabulous customer experience to consumers. I truly hope that we’ll see the rise in more user research that involves users, not just observes them, in creating their delightful experiences. Because without going to people and involving them in rich dialogues, the feedback gained is largely a scientific wild a#!? guess (SWAG), a rough understanding pulled out of the air.

As a user experience designer, I used to think that the worst designed websites were the best candidates for improvement. Symptoms of user experience debt may sound familiar to you – confusing navigation, excess clicks, accessibility violations, and painful load times. I applied to jobs thinking the larger the UX debt, the greater the opportunity. Perversely, however, the opposite is true.
Why? Because a good site already has the resources – money, labor, and knowledge capital – to improve. A bad site doesn’t.
We may be seduced to believe otherwise when so many elements of web design are free. Responsive frameworks like Bootstrap? Free. jQuery libraries? Free. Stock photography? Free. So it should cost little to transform a bad website into a fully responsive, whizzy experience.
Unfortunately UX debt can’t always be paid with free templates, or extra people or refactored code. This is because UX debt represents more than a lack of resources. It represents the existence of exacerbating conditions. Some examples:
Lack of executive support. Rightly or wrongly, organization leaders may prioritize other activities (e.g., developing new functions) over user experience. You can’t improve UX simply by hiring more designers. The decision-makers in your organization are still there!
Hero mentality. Some designers want recognition as creative geniuses, and tackle every project with visual brainstorming. However, standard UX processes today – including research, usability testing, analytics and multivariate testing – are all about user data and iteration. Brainstorming is an activity, not a strategy. Your designers may be actively generating UX debt by focusing on artistry instead of usability.
Overdesign. Often a design doesn’t lack resources. On the contrary, it may suffer from excess people and ideas. A common scenario is a new feature that could potentially work like X or Y. Stakeholders disagree, then compromise by making X and Y a user setting. The final settings menu has 67 items that’s impossible to navigate. Bigger is not always better. Good design has boundaries. You can actually incur UX debt through addition, not subtraction.
What is the commonality in these examples? I would argue that it’s philosophy, not quantity. Settling UX debt requires a change in philosophy, not just a bigger budget.
The Four Stages of Competence
In psychology, there is a four-step model for learning that can apply to user experience design. These steps include:

1. Unconscious incompetence – you’re not good at an activity and aren’t aware of it.
2. Conscious incompetence – you’re not good at an activity but are aware of your limitations.
3. Conscious competence – you’re good at an activity but need to concentrate and make a conscious effort.
4. Unconscious competence – you’re so good at an activity that it’s become second nature. You can do it automatically and naturally.

UX debt is incurred in stages 1 and 2. When it comes to unconscious incompetence, some design teams don’t realize what they’re doing wrong. As an example, a well-known company conducted user research for a prototype of a new product. Participants were invited on campus to evaluate the prototype for $50. One question was: “How likely are you to use this product?”
The participants, afraid of insulting their host benefactors, all answered politely and positively. The prototype was thereby declared a success. This research team never recognized the awkward social dilemma that participants faced. (The company is now out of business.)
With regard to conscious incompetence, a design team might acknowledge their UX debt but struggle with planning. For instance, a company runs an outdated website that lacks tablet and mobile support. Should it be adaptive or responsive? And if it’s responsive, should it use Framework A or Framework B?
Organizations should diagnose their UX competence before attempting to pay down UX debt. Self-diagnosis has to come before design diagnosis. Otherwise, resources will be spent on activities like $50 biased interviews that can actually hurt UX endeavors.
Summary
The term “debt” itself misleading. It implies that the underlying problem is calculable and transactional. It isn’t, not always. You have a student loan with a specific interest rate that can be paid, given enough money. You can lower your credit card debt by transferring the balance. But even then, people often get out of financial debt through a change in spending habits, not by finding a bag of cash in the street.
Reducing UX debt is the same way. It’s a strategic problem rather than a transactional one. You can’t throw Flat UI or Parallax scrolling at problems requiring changes to organizational culture.
In Part 2 of a future post, I will describe ways to tackle UX debt by using a strategic framework.