459: CX Design for products customers love – with Debbie Levitt

How product managers can promote human-centered design I wonder if you can relate to this frustration—the pressure to get products and product updates released quickly sometimes means making compromises on design quality. It’s an organizational issue—moving quickly to beat competitors and keep up with changing customer preferences. Speed is more important than quality. Our guest, Debbie Levitt, renowned CX designer and author, recommends a different approach. When companies take the time to design products that match what the customer needs, profits soar, customer satisfaction (and retention) soars, and employee satisfaction gets a nice uptick too. Her book, Customers Know You Suck, address how to better understand, attract, and retain customers. We’ll discuss some practices that will help you be more successful with the products you work on. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:56] What is your perspective as a customer experience (CX) designer? My experience is in strategy, customer experience, and user experience. I’m focused on strategy and tactics that affect every touchpoint with customers. Sometimes when people hear design, they think making things pretty or deciding what color the button is, but I don’t have an artistic background. My background is about human behavior, psychology, and ethics. Customer experience design is human-centered design (HCD). Some people don’t know HCD has ISO standards. It is formalized and real. Human-centered design doesn’t really start with design. It starts with evidence, knowledge, and data. What do we know about people, systems, and contexts? If we don’t really understand our customers and the tasks they’re trying to accomplish, we’re unlikely to understand their problems and unlikely to solve their problems. HCD is making sure we’re customer-centric. [6:49] How is poor CX costly to an organization? There are always ways to be cheaper or faster, and we can pursue those if they match our company values, but there are many opportunities to have quality over speed. I know that scares people. It takes time and money, but the companies we admire most put in that time and money and we love them for it. [9:30] Where should we start with CX? Some companies already have UX researches who specialize in qualitative research. The try to get the best evidence, knowledge, and data to drive strategies, priorities, decisions, and products using qualitative data. The problem is we can run a survey that asks, “Are you sometimes thirsty and wish you could drink out of a cup?” And so many people say yes. Then we can all sit around a meeting table and say, “I think people need this cup idea that we have.” And then we release this giant one-liter cup the size of your head, and it’s not selling. We say, “We gave them the cup. What happened here?” That means we didn’t do the right research. We didn’t have our qualified specialists plan, execute, analyze, synthesize, and come up with actionable data to understand our users’ needs. It all comes down to tasks. Understand customers, what they do now, and ways they try to make it easier for themselves through workarounds and band-aids. Everything we notice in an observational study is an opportunity for our company to either adjust something small or to be disruptors and innovators. I’m not going to say you must be innovative and disruptive, but I will say you must be great. That’s what customers want from us more than anything. More than speed, they want the quality. [12:10] What other sources of data do you use? We use surveys, focus groups, NPS, customer support tickets, angry tweets, etc. Often these give us a clue of what could be going wrong, but we know customers are not great at understanding their own problems.