UX Strategy, page 13
Take Advantage of UX Influencers
In Chapter 5, you learned about UX influencers. They are not your direct or indirect competitors; their value proposition has absolutely no relation to your own. However, their user experiences and features can provide insight into your product’s value innovation. The trick is that you need to think outside of the box. Remember how one of our value innovation patterns is mixing and matching disparate feature sets? Well, that’s what happens here. Sometimes by jamming pieces that don’t seem to fit together, you get amazing disruption. You just need to take a leap of faith to see how a noncompetitive product or service could be bent to serve your needs.
For example, Bita and Ena found inspiration in DIRECTV and the paid bundles that it offers its users. That company has absolutely nothing to do with the Airbnb for Weddings value proposition, but the UX around the TV bundles was very well thought out. Obviously, DIRECTV takes its UX very seriously, and Bita and Ena thought this type of UX would make an excellent starting point for their key experience.
First, let’s visit DIRECTV to see how it present its TV packages. Take a look at Figure 6-7; there are quite a few interesting ideas about how to group things together and allow people to customize their own TV package. You might even see a glimmer of a potential new business model. Look closely. (Hint: it’s the concept of a turnkey solutions.)
Figure 6-7. DIRECTV package (example of great information design)
When you visit DIRECTV, the first thing you do is type in your zip code. A result set immediately appears presenting you with a handful of packages. It’s not a lot, but it’s just enough for a user to work with. That gave Bita and Ena their first clue for how to present their key experience: do not present more than five packages to a bride-to-be.
Although each package has the same design and layout, they are differentiated by background color. That gave Bita and Ena a second clue: present wedding packages with an obvious differentiation mechanism. Perhaps they could use different background colors. But an even better idea might be to use a recognizable image or icon that denotes the distinction among the packages. For example, a high-end wedding package might show a limousine that says “Just Married” on the back window, whereas an economy package could show a regular compact car. Clues three and four came when they noticed how DIRECTV displayed packages by price from lowest to highest. As the user scrolls down, the more expensive packages list more benefits and take up twice as much space.
You’ll catch clues by looking at all the details and figuring out how to use them for your product. Ideally, you will improve on the concepts, taking them up a notch on the design ladder for your product. But, you’re not trying to design anything just now. Instead, you’re aiming to pluck out the best ideas. After you have them, you’ll mock them up into a storyboard to demonstrate the value innovation.
Do Feature Comparisons
Before you begin creating mock-ups and storyboards, be sure that you look for more than just one comparison reference. Research and identify multiple (three to five) instances of a similar user feature, and put all those references into one document. This way, you can compare different approaches to a single UX problem. The comparison findings can be useless or inspirational. Still, you are looking for new models, and you want to think beyond the familiar to conceive of better ways to browse, search, filter, share, and reach a user objective.
This deconstructed approach is called a feature comparison. You might find it contradictory, especially given that in Chapter 5 I agreed with Steve Blank, who deplores creating a bloated feature requirements list. Nevertheless, now that you are just using tools for discovery without necessarily showing the client, a feature comparison can be very helpful to identify opportunities for value innovation. It takes all the puzzle pieces out of the box and puts them onto the table in plain sight. Then, you can pick out the best pieces and components to build a new interaction pattern. You do whatever is necessary to poach elements and then stitch together a superior UX.
A feature comparison can even take you deeper into the research you already have. When you did your competitor research, you created and captured a short list of the most interesting features of your direct and indirect competitors, as depicted in Figure 6-8. You can return to this list to hunt out your inspiration.
Figure 6-8. Features learned from the competitive research
The answer easily could be staring you in the face. Or, you might need to go a step farther to make your value innovation discovery. You might need to go back to the competitors’ websites, take screenshots of the features, and really study them.
For instance, several years ago, a multinational conglomerate hired me to design the UX of an ebook reader for the iPhone. Because there were already several readers on the market (Stanza, eReader, Kindle, Nook), I did my competitive research and analysis. I downloaded them and captured my data. I captured screenshots of many different functions, features, and experiences, such as how to browse for a book, the UI of the loading screen, the navigation of the table of contents, and how to highlight and annotate. Basically, I documented any feature that touched the key experiences I had to design. I then imported all of my screenshots into iPhoto and organized them based on their relationships to one another. As my final step, I arranged them onto large canvasses in Adobe InDesign so that I could compare them visually side-by-side. Based on these comparisons, I took notes when ideas occurred to me. Figure 6-9 presents a sample of that document.
Figure 6-9. eBook reader feature comparison of adding a note or highlight
The process took at least four hours, and the client didn’t ask me or pay me to do any of it. In the end, however, I was able to observe and quantify best practices, lame practices, and the really interesting approaches the competitors were creating for users to accomplish tasks with formal or newfangled design patterns. It also saved me endless design hours. I didn’t need to design the project from scratch, because I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Some other benefits included the following:
Seeing the common user flows through the apps so that I could quickly make an application or site map.
Recognizing the patterns and common ways for helping users accomplish their goal. In other words, if I wanted to lure customers over from another application to my own, I could determine user expectations in advance.
Avoiding creating something totally new and making the UI more complicated because I now knew what my competition was already doing well.
Dealing with insane stakeholders or a HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) who, based on no empirical evidence, thought that he knew the best way to do my job. With my well-researched evidence, I was able to lead the UX design the way I thought best 95 percent of the time.
Using a feature comparison on competitors and UX influencers, you can compare everything from visual design, to interaction design, to feature sets, to how the content is displayed. The objective is to avoid being as clueless about your competitive environment as our friend in Figure 6-10 clearly is. Sometimes, you can capture the necessary iPhone or Android screenshots from the competition’s store or you can just spend the money ($10 to $30) on the applications. Charge the client, or pay for it yourself and bill your client for an extra hour. Ultimately, the comparison will save you and your client time and money. It will open your mind, especially after the deep, focused dive you took in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
Personal Disruption
The big payoff of exposing yourself to new experiences outside of your comfort zone is that they make it possible for us to grow as people. You change when you disrupt habitual patterns, and it affords you new ways of doing, being, and experiencing. For example:
When I took up ballet at age 45, I finally learned how to stand up straight.
When I took up gardening at age 42, I finally learned how to make a tasty fresh salad.
When I had my son at age 39, I finally learned how to slow down and just let some things happen.
Looking at everyday things with fresh eyes helps us to look beyond the obvious and unearth new mental models.
Disruption, whether in our professional or personal lives, breaks down the self-imposed walls that lock us into conceiving or designing the same thing over and over again.
Figure 6-10. Not being aware of your surroundings is like the old myth about an ostrich hiding from danger by burying its head in the sand.
Storyboard the Value Innovation
Now that you have identified the key experience of your product, you will want to stitch those moments together into a narrative thread otherwise known as a “story.” And obviously, with your emphasis on the visuals from your feature comparisons, it will be great tool to do that.
The storyboarding process has been around since German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger first drew and colored storyboards for her animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, in 1926.[44] Since then, they have become versatile tools used for advertising campaigns, comics, motion pictures, software design, and various other business processes. The reason is that a storyboard promotes visual thinking. Or, as the authors of the book Game Storming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers,[45] write, “[It is a] visioning exercise [that] allows participants to imagine and create possibilities.”
Three steps to storyboarding value innovation
The goal of a storyboard is to tell the story of your key experience(s) visually. You want to use the format to zero in on the most important components of the experience. Say more with less, and finish with a happy ending in that the problem for your user is solved. Here is my recommended framework for building (and presenting) a storyboard:
Step 1: Create your list of panels.
Keep in mind that you do not want to demonstrate all the features of the product (as Ena incorrectly did when she first mapped out her key experiences). You are only showing the most “valuable” moments of your customer’s journey through the storyboard panels. Some of these moments will impact the interface design, and other moments will actually occur offline. Show the progression of the entire experience regardless of whether the experience takes 20 minutes (such as Uber) or two months (Airbnb) in real time.
For Bita and Ena, this meant showing how their bride-to-be experienced her dream wedding coming true rather than showing how account registration on Airbnb for Weddings works. Here are the panels they stitched together:
Bride-to-be is looking for a beautiful and affordable venue online.
She finds a result set of two to three listings.
She sees a detail view of an awesome listing.
She selects a package (venue, food, flowers).
She receives a confirmation of venue/tour/submission.
She gets married on the beach!
Step 2: Decide on your visual format (digital montages versus sketching on paper).
Some people know how to draw or sketch. Others (like me) cannot even draw a meaningful stick figure. What matters the most is that you choose a format that is fast and easy for you and your team to pull your storyboard together. If you are fast in Photoshop, just mash up some interface ideas together as graphics. Do not waste time wireframing a storyboard. It’s fine to use photos from Google or to slightly modify screen grabs from other sites. Create, draw, or gather all your images and make certain that they are the same approximate aspect ratio and that they fit nicely onto your canvas. There is no reason to design an entire user interface at this stage. Instead, zoom into the components of the interface that illustrate the best concept.
Ena decided to use a mix of photos she found on Google Images. She then mocked up her comps quickly in Photoshop. She also used the exact layout from DIRECTV for her results set and the detail view of the listing because it’s not important for her to design something new right now. She just needs to show how the UX might work.
Step 3: Lay out your storyboard on a canvas, add captions below each panel.
Now, review your storyboard. Does it flow well? Is it concise? Is it easy to follow the customer’s ideal experience? If so, you’ve successfully storyboarded your value innovation. Keep the captions brief and in lowercase—less than two lines. Again, less is more.
Figure 6-11 and Figure 6-12 present Bita and Ena’s storyboards, respectively. Don’t they give you a good sense about what the value innovation for their product will be like?
Figure 6-11. Bita’s storyboard showing value innovation for the bride-to-be
Figure 6-12. Ena’s storyboard showing value innovation for the host
As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, storyboards are not necessarily deliverables. There are cases for storyboards in other work environments where they are super helpful to pitch ideas, but for now, we just are using them to map out the key experience in a narrative context.
Business Models and Value Innovation
I’ve discussed how to do value innovation feature poaching in regard to the UX, but don’t forget that they also can be and should apply to your business model. The reason is that value innovation is a competitive advantage that ultimately combines cost leadership with differentiation. This means that your killer UX is related to the business model, and vice versa. These two factors combined will also ultimately leave your competition in the dust and sustain your product in the dynamic marketplace.
Let’s take a look at a marketplace that I wish I had less personal experience with: online dating, and three platforms that exemplify it, eHarmony, OkCupid, and Tinder.
eHarmony’s business model is based on a monthly subscription service. Its value proposition relies on its matching algorithm which focuses on the core traits of its clients, such as agreeableness, spirituality, and extroversion. The onboarding requires users to answer hundreds of questions before they are sent a highly curated set of matches. To get more matches, you need to close out the ones that you have. There is no way to browse profiles on your own. It even provides tools for a more guided communication process, because the platform is designed for “marriage-minded people.”
OkCupid is the polar opposite of eHarmony, even though it exists in the same marketplace. Its business model is free to customers, and over time, its revenue stream evolved from paid advertising, such as with Facebook, to a premium feature service. But the value proposition is intrinsically wrapped up in a powerful UX by which users can filter matches based on qualitative and quantitative data points. Users can also customize their own algorithm by answering highly personalized prompts in a polling feature. The customers are always completely in control of how wide or narrow they cast their nets while OkCupid reaps the benefits of the user data and premium revenue stream.
The latest and most innovative of the online dating products is Tinder. This mobile-only contender already has more than 30 million users[46] and is quickly chipping away at OkCupid’s value proposition. Tinder is all about ease-of-use and immediacy. As Figure 6-13 shows, users sign in with a real or fake Facebook account, upload a few photos, maybe write a bio, and are up and running 15 minutes later.
Figure 6-13. My concise user profile on Tinder
Here’s where Tinder’s value innovation kicks in by inverting the historical mental model of dating sites by only allowing users to interact with each other once both parties express mutual interest. With Tinder, users are constantly served up cards that are only curated by distance, age, and gender. That’s key experience #1. The user swipes left if she doesn’t like the profile. She swipes right if she does. If both users swipe right, they can send messages to each other in a native message system. Unlike other dating sites, Tinder provides matches within a one-mile radius. That’s key experience #2. If you live in a traffic-heavy city like Los Angeles or New York, you can zoom in on suitors who live within walking distance. So what started as a hookup app for millennials has now evolved into the go-to place for people of all ages to fall swiftly into an any-length relationship.
In addition to that, Tinder didn’t initially launch with a identified revenue stream because its business model first required mass adoption. Now, Tinder is experimenting with revenue streams such as selling targeted advertising or a paid membership (Figure 6-14), which offers users more sophisticated functionality.
Figure 6-14. The new Tinder revenue stream
Here are the points that I want to make:
All these products have completely distinct user experiences and business models.
They all have had undeniable success competing in the same customer pool.
What makes each of them innovative is its unique way of hooking users through a permutation of features and business model components, through their finely tuned different parts.
