Building the skill: How to really see experiences in your world

You and I evolved to filter out information. We do it all the time… For example, do you really remember the details of brushing your teeth this morning? Driving to work? Checking your email this morning? This skill, ignoring information, is critical for you to function in the world. If you had to pay attention to everything that you did all the time, it would be very difficult to get anything done.

However, when we are trying to discover opportunities to delight, it is important that we overcome this ignoring skill and really notice the details of the experience. To do this, we need to consciously take ourselves out of the experiences to observe all of these elements:

• Goals – what is the experience for? How is it attained?
• Setup/Context (when, why)
• Content (words, pictures, colors, designs, architecture, etc)
• Actions (steps in the task)
• Sensory Details (sounds, tastes, smells, tactile feeling)
• Emotions (are there elements that are specifically designed to evoke emotions?)

For example, consider the experience of me brushing my teeth in the morning. Normally, I don’t think about it at all. But when I paid close attention to the experience this morning, I was able to gather a large amount of information:

Goals:

• Get clean, smooth teeth, avoid cavities, and have fresh breath for my morning.

Setup/Context:

• I need to brush my teeth because I hate my breath, the taste in my mouth, and the feeling of my teeth first thing in the morning.
• I keep my toothbrush and toothpaste in the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, behind the mirror above the sink.
• I stand in front of the sink while brushing my teeth.

Content:

• Tools I use to accomplish this task: toothbrush, toothpaste, and water.
• My toothbrush is green and white, with nubs on the side and handle.
• My toothpaste tube has a cap that rotates off (kind of traditional for toothpaste).

Actions:

• I get up and walk to my sink, open up the mirror, reach in and grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. Then, I open the lid of the toothpaste and set it down on the counter. I squeeze the toothpaste onto the brush (in the middle of the tube, which irritates my husband), and then put the brush in my mouth. I put the lid on the tube of toothpaste and put it back in the cabinet. I brush my teeth (brush, brush, brush), spitting at some point in the experience when my mouth gets too full of foam. When I feel like I’ve thoroughly brushed, I rinse the brush, slurping up water with the brush to rinse my mouth, hit my brush against the sink a couple of times, and then put the toothbrush away.

Sensory Details:

• My toothbrush has a soft and rubbery handle, so it is squishy, which makes it pleasant to hold.
• While brushing my teeth, the experience is cool, wet and foamy. My mouth fills with foam, so I have to spit.

Emotions:

• I’m usually a bit grumpy and unconscious when I start this task.
• The toothbrush itself is soft and squishy, and also bright and cheery, which makes me a little happy. But, I only notice the squishiness every once in a while (this was probably intentionally designed to delight me).
• I experience very slight anxiety when my mouth fills with foam, until I spit. Then I feel a little relief.
• I’m always a bit more awake and perky after I’m through brushing.

My challenge to you:
Try going through your day and identify the specific experiences that you encounter. Take note of the context, content, actions and sensory details. Pay attention to your emotions. Ignoring information comes naturally… work at building the skill of switching your attention back on to the experience itself.

This skill is critical when we visit customers. We have a tendency to focus in on the actions (and challenges) in the current experience, but not necessarily the related details in the environment itself and the emotions experienced.

What would happen if you stopped ignoring all those cues? What would you learn about delighting your customers if you “listened” to them on a whole new level? Start by listening to yourself. Becoming an expert at switching on your attention to look for opportunities to delight – yourself and your customers!

The benefits and risks of objective tracking

When trying to understand customers, studying their behavior is the gold standard. We’ve all experienced situations where customers say one thing but do something completely different.

A study recently came out in the journal “Nature” that looked at mobile phone use in 100,000 people (somewhere in Europe). The researchers were able to see where people were, roughly, based on which cell tower their handset was communicating with.

The aggregated data gave a picture similar to that we can get from telemetry tracking data in our products and websites.

This data gives us a clear picture of what people are really doing, although it does not provide us with information about why they are doing it.

There has been a backlash since the release of the Nature study results. This AP article makes it sound like the researchers were doing something sneaky or unethical. In fact, what they did was NOT LEGAL in the United States because they did not have permission from the people they tracked.

Some products have internal tracking, as do many websites, but we do not always include this capability in everything we build. I think we need to be doing this all the time! There are definite benefits to having this capability:
• We can see what people really do. A usability test can tell us what barriers might exist, but it doesn't show us what people would really do. Ethnographic research can give us insights into what people really do, but the data may not hold up across all of our users (perhaps only a subset of users do it that way... maybe the majority, but not everyone).
• We can see shifts in behavior, that can inform us about the effectiveness of different aspects of a design. For example, many websites do massive numbers of A/B tests on the live site to understand what drove the most traffic to the product.

The risks are:
• Jumping to the wrong conclusion about WHY something is happening (we really need to follow up with other types of research such as surveys, site visit studies, and other methods)
• Coming across as sneaky or sly. We need to ensure that data is aggregated or anonymous, or that people opt-in or are aware of the tracking so we don’t get accused of invading their privacy.

Thinking about neutral

I have mixed feelings about the NetPromoter metric. It is a 11-point survey question that we ask to our customers to assess their stated likelihood of recommending the product or service they use. The NetPromoter value is highly correlated with revenue growth in most markets, and so it is currently our best metric to predict revenue growth of a product or service. That's great. It is a self-report measure, of course, so it doesn't really correspond completely with behavior... some people give us a 10, but haven't actually recommended us... and some people have given us a 6 and have.

What is interesting, though, is how we use this measure to try to identify areas for improvement. We focus on why people are detractors.

We have a tendency to ignore the people who give ratings of 7 or 8 on the Net Promoter scale, because they don't drag our overall numbers down like detractors do.But this tendency means that we are ignoring the goldmine of rich ideas for building even more promoters. We should be building more promoters by focusing on people who are neutral.

Here are 5 reasons to focus on neutral:
They already like your product/service. Rating something well above the mid-point indicates an overall positive feeling. It is likely something fairly minor holding them back from enthusiasm.
More bang for the buck. Their issues may represent those of some of the detractors. Addressing these issues may lead to higher promoters than expected, given the population of neutrals.
It’s easier to nudge than shove.Sometimes a small thing will make the difference for this group of individuals.
They are likely to want to help.Since they like your stuff already, they are probably open to helping you devise ways to improve it.
Just interacting with them may make the difference.Positive personal interaction engenders some degree of trust and loyalty. If you make it clear that you care about them, they will care more about you.