The User Experience: Why Data – Not Just Design – Hits the Sweet Spot 08-03

The successful user experience is about meeting a consumer’s needs on an individual level – a “segment of one” not “one-size-fits” all, many experts say. But what does that look like in practice? “What really differentiates companies is their personalization through data — which allows them to build unique experiences that lead to increased engagement and better outcomes, …” write Scott A. Snyder, president and CSO of Mobiquity and a senior fellow at Wharton, and Jason Hreha, founder of Dopamine, a behavior design firm, in this opinion piece.

Today, design has a seat at the table. With the success of products like the iPod and the iPhone, businesses have realized that a good user experience is key for the bottom line.

Yet even with this determined focus on design, most digital experiences fall short of user expectations. Of the 700 million websites that exist, 72% fail to consistently engage users or drive conversions. Of the 1.6 million apps available, just 200 account for 70% of all usage, and three out of four apps aren’t even used beyond the initial download.

So where did things go wrong? Or more importantly, how can we get them right? Surprisingly, the answer does not lie with design. It lies with data.

Netflix is an example of a company that pays attention to user experience. Early on Netflix chose not to charge late fees, like Blockbuster did, in order to help build its subscription DVD business. Netflix soon put Blockbuster out of business, but also came under threat from other online video streaming businesses like Sling and Roku. Fortunately, Netflix was able to use its viewing analytics to create personalized content recommendations, and even create its own shows geared toward viewer interests, such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black.

For Netflix, the user experience was the price of entry, and the viewing data they gathered and analyzed became the strategic advantage of the business. Because of their approach, we don’t order special TV/Movie packages anymore. Instead, thanks to Netflix analytics, we have our viewing experience tailored to who we are. This is one example of a new breed of data-driven user experiences created by companies like Amazon, Pandora, Sephora, Nike, Progressive and Disney.

Good user experience design has become table stakes. If you don’t do it well, you can’t even get out of the gate in this hyper-competitive digital world. What really differentiates companies is their personalization through data — which allows them to build unique experiences that lead to increased engagement and better outcomes for the user and company. However, there is a fine line between “helpful” and “annoying” in the digital world, and the price of getting your data-driven personalization right or wrong may be the difference between a delighted customer and one who will never come back to your brand.

Good user experience design has become table stakes. If you don’t do it well, you can’t even get out of the gate in this hyper-competitive digital world.

How Can We Achieve Truly Personalized Experiences?

There are three reasons why digital solutions fail to engage users long term and drive positive outcomes: segmentation, relevance and rewards.

1. Segmentation: Behavioral

Are you someone who likes competition and rewards? Or are you someone motivated by helpful nudges from friends and family? Do you respond to text messages during work, or do you catch up on your personal messages at night? Do you travel a lot? Do you have a “wearable” (or are willing to use one)?

These are the types of questions we should be asking our users. We can either ask them directly, or infer answers from user interactions and behaviors. People are all different — but you wouldn’t know it by looking at most digital products. The majority of applications create a one-size-fits-all experience that fails to engage even a fifth of those who sign up. The good news is that we have the ability to collect individual behavioral data from users so that we can segment them more accurately, and present them with experiences that speak to their unique experiences and preferences.

2. Relevance: Getting Context Right

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In order to deliver relevant, impactful interactions at the right moment, we need to understand each user’s context. But context is much more than just time (when?) and location (where?). With richer data being collected from both users and third-party sources, context is now evolving to include situation (what am I doing?) and emotion (how am I feeling?). An expanded definition of context is shown in the figure above.

(Reference: Mobiquity and Wireless Innovation Council Research, 2014)

With this multifaceted model of context, we move closer to the ideal “segment of one” (a unique profile for each user at a given point in time). You would not want to send weight loss content to a customer who is maintaining a healthy weight, or give a shopping coupon to a stressed out traveler in an airport security line. Context-aware applications like Google Now and Tempo AI (acquired by Salesforce) leverage a user’s calendar as a source of context, so that they know when a user may be busy, in a meeting or enjoying downtime. This information is used by these applications to adjust their content and experience to fit the context-determined mindset of each individual user.

Context-aware applications like Google Now and Tempo AI (acquired by Salesforce) leverage a user’s calendar as a source of context, so that they know when a user may be busy, in a meeting or enjoying downtime.

Most users are only willing to share their data if they perceive that they will get real benefits in return. More than 60% of consumers want real-time promotions, yet 67% don’t trust retailers with their data (Opinion Lab Survey, 2015). We have the opportunity to do better.

3. Reward: Overcoming the Effort versus Benefit Challenge

In order to get, you have to give. Unfortunately, most applications ask for too much and offer too little. Twitter It’s common for apps to have a long-winded sign-up process that asks you every question under the sun. This is not a recipe for success.

Popular applications like Waze and Pandora are case studies in proper information gathering. They provide us with immediate benefits right after we download their apps. Waze improves our driving route in exchange for our location. Pandora gives us a personal DJ, tailored to our tastes, in exchange for rating the songs we’re listening to. In both these cases, our effort seems minimal in comparison to the benefits we get back. Contrast this with the majority of digital solutions that ask for a lot of data (like registration, profile, location, etc.) before delivering one ounce of benefit. We have to “earn the right” to collect the type of data we need to appropriately segment users. We have to win the “benefit versus effort” trade-off with our users by providing them with immediate, tangible benefits and using the data being collected to further personalize their experiences.

Evolving to a Data-driven UX Approach

Eighty-six percent of mobile marketers have reported success from personalization — including increased engagement, higher revenue, improved conversions, better user insights, and higher retention. However, only 1.5% of apps personalize their experiences (Mobile Marketing Automation Report, VB Insight, July 2015). In order to get to true personalization, and deliver greater effort than benefit, we need to make our user-experience (UX) design data-driven.

A traditional UX design process starts with user research followed by user flow creation, persona creation, storyboards/wireframes creation, and (finally) a graphical mock-up or prototype of the design. The desired result of this process is a single beautiful design that attempts to deliver the best possible experience to meet the needs of all the different user types.

By knowing something about each user’s behaviors, motivations and contexts, we have the opportunity to deliver a variation of the core experience that is best suited to each individual user by using robust analytics and an adaptive user interface.

But the reality is that all users are not the same — and they don’t all want to interact with your app in the same way. By knowing something about each user’s behaviors, motivations and contexts, we have the opportunity to deliver a variation of the core experience that is best suited to each individual user by using robust analytics and an adaptive user interface. In a data-driven UX approach like this, we start with the desired outcomes and behaviors we are trying to achieve with the target user base.

We then develop an initial behavioral segmentation model, and identify the optimal interaction strategies and user experience for each segment. And finally, we use analytics and machine learning to have our system adapt over time, so we can further optimize the design and underlying interaction models.

The figure below depicts the difference between a traditional and data-driven UX approach.

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Make it Real

Data-driven UX design is a fundamental shift in how companies approach product design and development. While the journey is not easy, the potential payoff is huge in terms of long-term engagement and positive outcomes for your customers. If you want to move to this new model, you need to consider the following:

1. Expand your definition of context beyond location and time. Situation and Emotion matter.

2. Deliver immediate benefits to users before asking for more of their data. There is a fine line between useful and creepy.

3. Segment your users based on digital behaviors, preferences, motivations and context to drive the most relevant interactions.

4. Set up a big data and analytics environment capable of capturing and acting on behavioral analytics data in real time.

5. Use analytics and machine learning to adapt the target interactions for each user-segment over time, based on user responses.

6. Recruit a new breed of user experience designers—those with analytics skills to support the design of adaptive user experiences.

7. Start with desired outcomes, then pilot and adjust quickly.

It’s no longer good enough to know your customers. It’s what you do with that knowledge that really matters. Your customers are willing to engage and share their data if they perceive a real benefit for them.

Are you ready to live up to your end of the bargain?

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How to Understand and Measure User Experience 04-11

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User experience is the foundation on which customer journeys are built and, fundamentally, a huge factor in how customers perceive, understand and trust your company.

Endless (electronic) ink has been spilled on different UX designs, challenges, opportunities, opinions, and methods. There is no one perfect approach. People are emotional creatures, and part of their reaction to your online presence will depend purely on aesthetics. Good user experience fits both the emotional and the transactional needs of your users. In this ocean of choices, therefore, the real question becomes: How do companies measure or quantify the success of their user experience?

What Exactly Is Good User Experience?

There are many different approaches to user experience (UX). Some companies, like Apple, create a “walled garden” or immersive approach, tightly controlling the user experience and forcing people to follow a specific set of tasks, without room for flexibility. Others, like Amazon, use a reactive approach, offering different responses and unique calls to action based on a customer’s behavior. There is no ‘correct’ UX and a company’s UX should be tied directly to their business model, their customer expectations, and their long-term strategy.


The ideal user experience occurs when people are able to do exactly what they want when interacting with your company. You fulfill their needs in a way that meets and even exceeds their expectations. Fundamentally, when customers’ expectations are exceeded, they experience a positive emotion, and providing consistent positive interactions with your company is the highest goal of UX design.

Why Quantify User Experience?

Measuring or quantifying UX is necessary for a variety of reasons:

• It allows you to generate a baseline cohesive strategy for customer interactions.
• It helps establish a foundation for any new initiatives or customer-facing products you produce.
• It lets you benchmark yourself against other companies.
• Hard numbers make UX initiatives easier to communicate and integrate into an organization.

UX is the foundation on which customer journeys are built and, fundamentally, a huge factor in how customers perceive, understand and trust your company. If customers try to achieve something on one of your digital channels and fail, it will lower their opinion of your company and eventually deplete your profitability.

Subjectivity vs. Objectivity in Measuring UX:

The inherent challenge of UX is that it’s almost entirely subjective. As a result, many companies make the mistake of believing that user experience as a whole cannot be measured.

If a company assumes that UX is not quantifiable, then anytime it adds a new digital function, the outcome will be wildly dependent on the unique tastes and preferences of the creative team that designed it. Moreover, in the absence of benchmark information, any mistakes will be difficult to identify.

How to Quantify

UX will never be fully quantifiable. There is always subjectivity when dealing with the opinions of individuals. Furthermore, consumer tastes and general design trends change along larger social patterns and are not always easy to predict. User experience, however, is not totally design-oriented.
If a customer wants to provide payment information but finds no easy option for that action, this is bad UX design. If a customer has a question and there is no FAQ page, this is bad UX design. If a customer’s data is intercepted or otherwise insecure within your system, this is a VERY bad UX experience. UX builds on itself, from back-end fundamental elements to front-facing consumer visuals and this clear construction creates the potential for objectivity.

Simplify the Issues – Make them Granular

The failures listed above are simple yes-or-no switches. If there is no FAQ page, then you are not providing best-practice UX. This is a no. If you do have an FAQ page, this is a yes. If your customers can pay easily, this is a success. If they cannot, it is a failure. You can break down the payment process even further: do customers have to enter information twice? Is the form too long to fit on a mobile screen? By breaking down each touchpoint into a series of binary questions, you can assemble the structure for a meaningful analysis.

What Questions Do You Ask?

The hardest tactical challenge is defining the right set of questions. Centric Digital uses a set of precisely relevant questions when generating the benchmark for your business. We’ve developed a taxonomy of over 2,000 individual best-practice questions that are based on understanding a company’s outward-facing and internal digital user experience. These questions can be used to compare your company to its own previous states, to other companies in your industry and to trends across several industries. Here are just a few of our topic areas to give you an overview of how we construct our hierarchy of questions regarding a typical business website:

We begin with basic mechanics: Is your site easily accessible on mobile?

While you’ve probably achieved the standard of making your site compatible with the main online browsers, today’s crucial user experience challenge pertains to mobile access. Google’s “Mobile First” approach means that the search giant is switching its approach this year. It now crawls your site as a mobile user, rather than a desktop user. If it notices aspects of your site that aren’t effective in mobile (for example, links that don’t work or slow-loading pages), Google will downrank you in its search results. You can look at Google as an external force making quantified judgments about your UX, and evaluate your site along the same metrics.

This change in search ranking was driven by customer trends: Mobile users outnumbered desktop users back in 2014, and the mobile trend has only grown since then. Unfortunately, user experience hasn’t kept pace with this trend, and 45 to 47 percent of mobile users report disliking their experience with websites and apps. This percentage will undoubtedly improve as more websites catch up to the mobile online universe, but it proves that, for the moment, you can get out in front of the pack if you provide a pleasing experience.

Does your code avoid deprecated callouts or functions? Is your HTML optimized?

Although your site will be visited by growing numbers of mobile users, that doesn’t mean you can neglect to update your computer-based experience. Especially in the more developed nations, people expect omnichannel access to the digital marketplace. Even in the fourth quarter of 2016, conversion rates were higher on traditional websites than on mobile sites or apps. These statistics indicate that users may do some browsing on the phone that’s always in their hand, but they often switch to a computer to make the actual purchase.

Once you have evaluated these basic utilities, the hierarchy of questions moves to slightly higher levels: Are your site visitors using search effectively? Do they use the back arrow frequently? Excessive searching and backtracking without conversions are a good numerical indicator that there’s a UX problem with your website.

Does your company use Twitter for customer service?

Social media has become an important element in user experience, especially the use of Twitter as an alternative customer assistance channel. Twitter recently introduced special tools specifically for streamlining its customer support function because so many companies are using it for that purpose.

What does your customer journey look like?

The types of questions become more challenging to answer when you move into higher levels of evaluation because you’re discussing more of the subjective human response. As subjectivity increases, quantification is still possible, but it’s a bit less straightforward. At this level, understanding your customer is key. Your customers may be drawn from a different demographic than those of your competitors, so your user experience may need to be correspondingly different. Your granular and binary user metrics are drawn from a more holistic approach, one in which you map out your customer journeys to give a clear understanding of how, when and why a customer would need to interact with your company – both in the digital and real-world realms – and identifying points of potential success and failure.

Every Channel Should Provide Equally Easy Access

A unified customer service experience provides streamlined access across every channel. Do your customers have quick access to the answers they need? A thorough FAQ page on a website can serve this purpose, while a question menu may be more useful for a customer support line. Is the wording on your FAQ page similar to the wording your customer service representatives use? Consistency is part of your branding, and your company voice should be evident at every touchpoint.

Surveying Customer Responses

With a strong idea of your customer persona, deconstructing user experience becomes much easier and more effective. You are entering the realm of intuition, but intuitive navigation is a real thing and you know it when you experience it. To measure the emotional impact of your user experience, Centric structures questions regarding your customer touchpoints, evaluating interactions across all media. It’s also important to have a large enough sample of questions – having only 50 measures is not as helpful as having 200.

Emotions Are Measurable

As you move into evaluating the subtle levels of user experience and explore the question of whether your customers find your website appealing, you can also seek responses directly from users. Surveys, user testing and focus groups all have a place in evaluating the subjective experiences of users, and it’s possible to gauge responses on numerical scales.

Updating Must Become Routine

Your online presence is never static, and your digital strategy will never be “finished.” Robust testing and continuous development are ongoing processes; you must review, update and snapshot your questions repeatedly in order to maintain value. When building your digital strategy, regularly assess not only your user experience but also your UX measurements – standards and tastes change, and your company must remain agile to stay at the leading digital edge. 


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