The central concept of Albert Ellis’ approach is his A-B-C model, in which A is an activating event; B is the belief system that interprets the activating event; and C is the consequent behavior.

If, for example, a snake were suddenly to appear in the waiting room of a train station, you might see several different reactions to it. Those reactions would depend, principally, on the beliefs the different people held about snakes.

The snake’s appearance (activating event) sees one person jump on a chair, a second person take a quick look and continues reading the paper, while a third person picks it up and strokes its head. The people behave differently because they hold different sets of beliefs about snakes. The first believes that all snakes are dangerous and revolting; the second believes this snake to be non-poisonous and therefore no threat; the third believes the snake has put itself in danger and moves to protect it.

The point is simply that it is easier to understand behavior if you can make visible the beliefs that determine it. The better you understand behavior, the greater your chance of influencing it.
Our adaptation of Dr. Ellis’ A-B-C model moves it from a horizontal (left to right) orientation to a vertical (top-down) orientation and adds the dimension of Values.

We define Values as something we believe IN. Values are formed over time and tend to be resistant to change. An individual might believe, for example, IN education, or IN thrift, or IN perseverance.

We define Beliefs as our attitudes or opinions. Beliefs can be identified by completing the sentence, “I believe (or think or feel) that … the world is flat; or that … Tokyo real estate is over-valued; or that … Brazil will win the next World Cup.

Beliefs lead to our Behavior — the actions we take and the decisions we make every day of our lives. These Behaviors result in our Experiences, the accumulation of which we call our life.

The bottom three of these elements work in an endless loop. Our experiences constantly modify our beliefs, which in turn lead to modified behavior, which result in new experiences, etc, etc.

From the design team’s perspective, the ability to identify the beliefs that dictate persona behaviors is invaluable. And in order to understand and interpret beliefs, it is essential to understand the experiences that forged them (or in some cases the values that guide them). These beliefs, behaviors, and experiences emerge from the research (which we will address in Post #3 of this series). The training component of this process (Post #5 of the series) centers on this feedback loop and forms the basis for predicting persona reaction to design ideas.

This is how the model works.

Once the design team learns to use the model, recognition of causality and consequence becomes second nature. Once that happens, consensus-building becomes easier because team members can see in a common way the logic that applies to the different personas’ reactions. A design idea is never good or bad. It is simply something that a persona will react to in a specific way because of how their experiences have led them to see the world. Persona-derived decisions take the designers’ personalities and egos out of the discussion and allow the merits of an idea to be decided on its appeal to the individual personas. This is the primary reason our agency clients have seen such dramatic reduction in development time when using personas in this way. Design decisions are arrived at faster, with less friction, and with greater confidence and resilience – they don’t end up being revised (at greater cost) as decisions are second-guessed in the later stages of development.

So embrace the value and the use of a mental model. You don’t have to use Albert Ellis. The world of behavior modification is filled with alternatives. Whatever model you choose needs to have a proven intellectual basis. The simpler it is, however, the greater likelihood it will be used as a design aide and decision-making tool. Simpler is better.

- Roger Beynon, CSO, Usability Sciences

Interested in talking with us about Personas? Contact us over at UsabilitySciences.com

Let’s assume your team’s list of ideas includes a mobile-optimized version of your site. The idea triggers immediate questions. What sort of design should you use? Should you promote it? How should mobile be integrated into the brand experience? Which visitor types are most likely to use it? Where will they be located when accessing it? What will they be trying to accomplish?

If you don’t have well-developed personas, answering questions like these becomes a crap-shoot, an exercise in advanced guessing, which is the same as an exercise in regular guessing. You have a 50/50 chance of being right.

The persona responses below, however, demonstrate how you can answer these types of questions definitively IF you have a set of well-researched, diligently crafted personas. Not only can you predict HOW your visitors will react to a mobile-optimized site, you can explain WHY they will react that way.

Billy Boomer – A mobile version of the site is of no use to him BECAUSE his eyesight and dexterity are eroding faster than his patience and he uses his smartphone for little other than calls and the occasional text
Vince Value – He would use the mobile site IF it gave him access to the same tools he currently uses for product comparison and evaluation; thoroughness (the process) is more important to him than convenience (the context of use)
Annie Always – She would use a mobile site BECAUSE she is stretched, stressed, and sleep-deprived these days and snatches even the briefest opportunities to shop, most often during the intervals between ferrying kids from one activity to another
Cason Committed – He would embrace a mobile experience BECAUSE it plays to his identity as an early adopter and expert in all things related to life-enhancing technologies
Reggie Reluctant – He would NOT investigate a mobile site UNLESS he was incented or given a personally compelling reason; he wants to be seduced into new experiences, not be seen to be seeking them out
Jessie Joiner – She will use a mobile site IF she sees her friends using it; she will use it less out of personal utility than out of a need to be in step with her peer group

Note the emphasis of the CONJUNCTIONS. These are the proof of predictability. The presence of conditional or causal conjunctions illustrates the depth of the team’s understanding of their personas’ attitudes and underpins the confidence with which they can predict persona responses. The design team can pose any question – content-, layout-, design-, feature-, or function-related. They can explain not only how their personas think, but why they think that way. They can predict responses to almost any stimulus.

This degree of certitude takes the guesswork out of design and makes the decision-making process run faster and more confidently than could otherwise be the case. Agencies we have worked with maintain that this process reduces development time by weeks. (One agency estimated it had reduced development time by two months in comparison to recently completed, large-scale projects.) The ROI on that kind of saving is too obvious to need quantifying.

Let’s look at this predictive capability within the context of a brand site. The design ideas up for discussion in this instance include the need for a persuasive registration page. Similar questions ensue: How do you know if visitors will use it? What sort of design should you use? Should you offer an immediate incentive or should you simply list the advantages that accrue to registrants? How should registration be integrated into the site experience?

If you had personas like these, you would know that:

Sammy Social – Registration would be his first action from the home page BECAUSE “the need to belong” is his driving motivation
Val Vanity – She would register IF it elevated in some visible way her status with the brand and provided additional access
Nellie Nervous – She would register BECAUSE she cannot leave any stone unturned and would worry she’d missing out on something valuable if she didn’t register
Campbell Committed – He would register BECAUSE it is the responsible thing to do in a relationship built on trust and communication

A design team can achieve this level of insight only through a disciplined, training-enabled approach to persona development and application. There are five primary elements to the process. You won’t find them (as a single, coherent process) in the “best practices” webinars of the likes of Forrester, where the experts are not so much practitioners as they are collators. In the next five blog posts in this series, you’ll learn how real practitioners do it. Stay tuned.

- Roger Beynon, CSO, Usability Sciences

Interested in talking with us about Personas? Contact us over at UsabilitySciences.com

Fast-forward to modern times, and I again found myself wandering into a Jos. A Bank store, surprised they were still in business. I bought a dress shirt and a tie, wore them once to a special occasion, then forgot about them. Jos. A Bank did not forget about me, however. At some point in the transaction, I must have given them my email address, because a month or two ago I began getting regular marketing emails from them, a development that triggered my first true experience of frictionless commerce. Here’s the sequence of events:

1. One of the marketing emails appeared on my desktop the morning I realized a need for something other than khakis, so I clicked on the email and went to the Jos. A Bank site.
2. To begin with, I landed on the page that actually featured the product on offer, not – as so often happens – on the home page or some other location from which I would have to track down the emailed offer manually.
3. I eventually ordered four pairs of pants, complete with permanent press. 60% off. Free shipping. What a deal.
4. Moments after my online transaction, I got a confirmation email. 50 minutes later, I got another email thanking me for my “recent” purchase asking me to rate it, presumably after I had the chance to wear it.
5. A week or so later, the first pair of pants arrived. It had been shipped from a store in South Carolina. Another packaged arrived a couple of days later with two pairs, this from a store in Maryland. The fourth pair arrived in a third package from yet another locale.
6. When I saw the pants, they were not what I was expecting. The fabric was heavier than I had anticipated, which is not good in a Texas summer. The fault was not in the product description on the website, it was mine. I evidently had a different notion of “Twill” from the rest of society.
7. So I dug out my original purchase confirmation email and wrote the Jos. A Bank customer service folks explaining my mistake and asking if I could return the garments. Since they had been shipped from three separate stores, I asked if I could simply return them to a local retail store. I did not want to have to box and ship three separate packages to the three different stores that had shipped them.
8. Imagine my delight, then, when a customer service representative emailed me back within 30 minutes explaining that I could take the pants back to any store for a credit or a full refund.
9. I did. I have been a victim of cross-channel miscommunication more than once, however, so I went in with my emails printed out (the original order confirmation and the customer service reply) along with the three receipts and the actual garments squeezed into one of the delivery boxes. I was, as you see, anticipating a hassle. Not at all. The sales guy smiled at me and asked if I wanted a refund or a credit. There were several Sales posters in the store, so I said I’d have a look round and take a credit if there was anything I liked. The sales guy scanned the labels on my returned pants. Not only did that action send them straight back into Jos. A Bank’s nationwide, cross-channel inventory system, it evidently identified me for the sales guy, because he was able to bring up my purchase history and tell me they had 15 ½ / 32 shirts on sale.
10. As it so happened, I bought a jacket (on sale), along with two shirts and a tie (at full retail). I ended up spending another $200 and walked out of the store in an unfamiliar state of satisfaction . There had been no hassles, no wait, no re-stocking penalty, nothing. Just one continuous, frictionless transaction across channels (online and in-store) and touch points (emails, website, delivery, packaging, product, return, add-on sale).

Jos. A Bank has achieved a single view of the customer (and of its inventory, no less) and it has resulted in a frictionless customer experience — one that, in my case, has assured the brand of my loyalty, repeat business, and advocacy of the kind that can only be earned, not bought. That’s a lot of lifetime value.

What is your organization doing to build your own SVC?

-Roger Beynon, CSO, Usability Sciences

1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time.
2. Can I: They will want to do truly new disparate things that create value for them.
3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs.
4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy.

The article paints a picture of what we can expect in 2020 by providing a rather complex scenario in which a consumer engages with a physical product (a pair of headphones), interacts with the product online to virtually try them, shares her experience via social media, and responds to a multitude of personalized marketing messages that extend her interactions with the brand long after her purchase of the product.

Without getting too far into the specifics of the above example, we’d like to point out how important it is that scenarios like the one above do not place a high cognitive load on the user.  In other words, not only must the technologies/user interfaces be simple, so must the actual processes required of the user (i.e. QR Code confusion).  This is all the more reason to perform user experience research in the early stages of developing your technology, your interface, and the actual processes that make up the consumer journey in dealing with your product/brand.

While emerging technologies will undoubtedly continue to change how we interact with companies and brands, ensuring “simplicity” would be #1 on our list. Technological wizardry and clever marketing tactics will only work if designed from the user’s perspective. When charting  this new territory of “on-demand marketing”, user research is an integral piece of the puzzle to ensure high cognitive loads don’t foil the underlying business purpose.

Jason Vasilas

Senior User Experience Strategist, Usability Sciences

REFERENCE:   The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing — April 2013 — by Peter Dahlström and David Edelman

Source: Mckinsey.com

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/20/cognitive-overhead/

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

In looking at their purchase history 84% of 1st time visitors indicated that they had made a purchase in the customer’s store. This clearly identifies these visitors not only as current in-store customers but also a key segment in the future of your online customer base. We also learned that 86% of the 1st time visitors indicated they were the primary shopper for their household.

Perhaps most surprising was that the core demographics of the first time visitor were predominantly female 25-45 year olds while the frequent site customers were males 35-54. The site was catering to the frequent customer but not paying enough attention to the 1st time visitors and their needs. These are all key metrics that need to be taken into consideration to ensure the growth of the site. Our advice: Continue to understand your 1st time visitor population, including their basic needs into future designs and modifications to your site. They are your future customers!

We’ve created an informational video, “An Intro to User Experience Testing”, to help cut through all the noise and give you a better understanding of what user experience testing is and how it can help you and your organization. Take 6 and half minutes to view the video, then visit our website or give us a call and we’ll help walk you through the rest of the story.

Contact us at: www.usabilitysciences.com/contact-us

• Speed of abandonment: 71% expect to be able to access help when purchasing online within five minutes, whilst 31% expect this help to be immediate.
• Help-seeking behaviors: Globally 83% of online users admit that they need some form of support during their online journey.
• Chat on demand: 59% of global users would like to have more choice in how they contact online brands with 93% seeing real time help being of use in at least one online shopping scenario.
• Purchase: 51% stated that they were more likely to purchase from a website if they could get answers via Live Chat, with particular demand in Italy (60%), the USA (56%) and Australia (52%).

The findings, however, beg a deeper question: Why, after a decade and a half of design experience, should e-commerce still drive its users to seek so much help?  My own recent experience as a multi-channel shopper points to a few of the answers.

E-commerce often allows for only the most basic shopping experiences.  Product comparison, search by feature, channel coordination, and even the kind of “extended” transactions described below tax the design limitations of many iconic sites. Even if personas were used in their design, the use cases that accompanied those personas left out great chunks of real-life shopping behavior.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have researched tablets online and in-store and bought two from a store. I researched and purchased two trans-Atlantic air fares. I researched but did not book hotels in London. I also researched rain gear online and bought a pair of Gore-tex walking shoes from a store.

The store experiences were, for the most part, both satisfactory and successful.  The online element was far less so.  Let’s start with the tablets.  Online, I could get no real idea of the comparative experience of watching a cloud-delivered movie on a 7” screen vs. an 8.9” screen.  Would the streaming be faster on the smaller version? Was there more pixelization on the larger screen? How did the two units compare for sound?  Since I do not play games online, what benefit would I gain from a quad processor?  Trying to find answers to these and other commonly asked question was far from easy.  I had to go to the store to get them in the end.  I had to ask a sales person and have him set the units side by side so I could see for myself the comparative performance, brand by brand.  The decision, when made within this physical context, was simple.  That’s a real use case.  That’s what e-commerce should offer.

The air fares were easier.  Coach is coach is coach.  Sitting in a seat in which a cat would have difficulty getting comfortable and breathing stale air for 8 hours sucks no matter what airline you travel.  So it’s just a matter of schedules and cost.  That was easy to determine, once I worked out the apples-to-apples aspects of the offerings.  Booking, however, was a different issue. I had to call the 800 number when my booking failed to go through.  The customer service lady explained that the booking failure might have occurred because I had paid extra for selecting my seats ahead of time. Say what?  Is that not a use case for which their booking engine has been programmed?

The hotels, you may have noticed, I did not book.  I could not.  I could not because I have hired a car and will need to park it at the hotel.  London hotels do not uniformly offer on-premise parking.  Nor do they typically tell you where the nearest available parking may be or what it costs.  London is an expensive place to stay, far more so than any of the other European capitals, and parking is often a nightmare in terms of cost, security, and convenience.  But do you think it is possible to search for hotels with on-premise parking?  Or determine the cost or the security arrangements or the walk back to the hotel?  Not for this user? Yet this, again, is a common use case.  Thousands of travelers hire cars at Gatwick and Heathrow every day and many of them will be staying in London for at least part of their visit.  Yet hotel parking is another common use case that the hotel consolidator sites have either ignored or not adequately accommodated.

The Gore-tex shoe purchase was an adventure unto itself.  One needs waterproof gear and footwear in the UK or one does not go outside. So I searched a well-known sports retailer’s website for Sale and Clearance items. I was, indeed, able to filter by footwear, then by hiking boots, then by Gore-tex.  I found a pair I liked. I wanted to be able to pick them up at my local store.  No way.  And because the boots were on sale, they did not qualify for free shipping.  So I went to the store to see if they had the boots on sale and in-stock and in my size.  Of course not.  Nor was there a mechanism on their website that allowed me to search the local store’s inventory, so that I could have saved myself a wasted trip.  So where in this retailer’s online strategy, I ask, does my need for multi-channel coordination rank as “untypical”?  It does not.  Yet my use case did not appear to have been even a design consideration.

By way of conclusion, I would point to a recent Forrester email I received. It marketed one of their persona webinars and posed the question: Are personas still necessary?  The question, of course, was rhetorical.  Not only are they necessary, they need to be bolstered by a wide range of authentic use cases, so that the eventual design accommodates real-life shopping behaviors and reduces the need for LivePerson-like safety nets.

 -Roger Beynon, CSO, Usability Sciences Corporation

“If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: Have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers.”

This, I believe, is perhaps a more common problem that is widely acknowledged. Few enterprise-level companies these days lack data about their customers. To the contrary, most of them are awash with data and drowning in it. What they lack is timely, relevant data.

This is the problem our WA(RP) page-tagging technology helps address. Customers, especially those of pure-play e-commerce or multi-channel retailers, arrive at their websites in the millions. Their relationship and behavior qualifies them to answer many of the questions that people like Andrew Mason would like to have had answered. The time required to deploy quick, targeted surveys on major websites, however, often makes the data (the answers) obsolete before it can be collected. This is because the IT department typically has a backlog of projects running months behind and it requires divine intervention to get a simple survey inserted into the appropriate pages.

So the questions remain unasked. Decisions that would have been made with greater confidence (and presumably much greater effect) had customer feedback been available, become little more than guesses.

WA(RP), once installed, removes the IT department from the process, leaving the marketers or the researchers — or even someone like Andrew Mason — free to ask questions of whomever they please whenever the need arises.

Perhaps we can sell WA(RP) to Mr. Mason’s successor.

-Roger Beynon, CSO, Usability Sciences Corporation