TEI 337: An expanded perspective on UX to make better products – with Mark Baldino

How to align your organization and product management team with the voice of your customer

In this discussion we address what it means to properly incorporate UX (user experience) into your product work. This is not merely making things look right. This is deeply understanding the user experience that creates greater value, beating competitors and delighting customers.

Joining us is Mark Baldino, UX product design expert and co-founder of Fuzzy Math, which designs software products for companies. Mark has 20+ years experience implementing human-centered design to solve difficult problems.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[1:37] Why should UX (user experience) be part of product strategy?

There’s no better way to provide customer value than aligning your organization and product team with the voice of your customer.

Often, UX gets bolted on at the beginning and end of the product cycle. Many organizations only contact their customers during sales and support, often because they’re scared to listen to their customer and make product decisions based on knowledge of their customers. Sales and support are important, but you’re missing out if you don’t also talk to customers while they’re using your product. Listen to customers and rely on a customer-centered design process.

[5:43] How do we make UX more effective in our product strategy?

Often, underperforming UX teams are stuck in a cycle responding to developers’ requests and fixing features without aligning the overall product with the customer. To get out of the cycle, you have to level-up and understand the entire process. Product managers are our best partners in this because they value listening to customers. You need to invest time and energy talking to current and potential customers and watching them use your products so you can make research-backed decisions. The power of user-centered design is that it allows us to tell stories about customers and the future of the product, getting product and engineering in full alignment. Pull cross-functional teams into the research and synthesis of concepts.

[10:15] What tools are helpful in UX?

Quantitative Tools:

* Super Q: a standardized set of questions asking the user to gauge the product’s features and functions

* Net Promoter Score: would you refer someone to this product?

Qualitative Tools:

* Interviews with customers: open-ended questions and discussion

* Observation of customers using the product

* Think Aloud method: customers says exactly what they’re doing while using the tool

Story-telling Tools:

* Personas: archetypes of the users

* Journey Maps: tell stories of how customers use the product

Through customer observation, you’ll learn that how people use tools is not how you think they use tools. Have stakeholders join you in observing customers; it’s illuminating for them to see how their customers are using the products.

[19:59] Wouldn’t adding UX to product strategy slow us down?

Adding UX will introduce new parts to the process, but you have to ask, What is the cost of not adding UX? What is the business suffering from because you’re not spending time with customers and not making informed decisions? It might be a decrease in efficiency of your team, a lot of rework, high customer support numbers, low customer satisfaction, or missing sales. One study showed that UX give a 10x ROI. It may be closer to 3 or 4 times, which is still really good. When you begin to use UX, you will slow down for a period of time, but the cost of not doing anything is much greater.

If you’re going to embrace UX, start running parallel paths. Choose a pilot project you can run with user-centered design while still doing incremental updates on the current product.