"Inside views and assumptions are the worst building blocks for a digital product"

m&k: Oliver Stäcker - when researching your company's offering, one comes across three buzzwords: "research-based design," "mobile experience" and "usability. Can you explain to a layperson in one sentence each what lies behind these terms?

Oliver Stäcker: They all involve methods and approaches that let us consistently look at a customer brief through the end-user lens. "Research based Design" is the basic driver of all three and ensures that any concept or design is based on scientifically researched end user needs or PainPoints. The most well-known methodology we use under this term is the Service Design methodology. In "Mobile Experience" we combine the mobile context of use, the customer need and mobile technologies. With this we build experiences for the mobile channel. This can be apps or mobile marketing campaigns. The focus is always on the experience. "Usability" is the hatchet. If it is bad - the best product idea is doomed to fail. The main methods we use in this area are qualitative and quantitative usability testing with real customers.

All these topics interfere with marketing. What's exciting now is to break down the extent to which they do. Let's start with "research-based design" - which radically thinks about products or processes from the customer's point of view. Shouldn't that be a matter of course for companies?

That's correct, it should. With research-based design, for example, we prevent a company's existing content or services from being adapted to a new touchpoint without question. Just because a company knows exactly who its target group is, or even has a nice set of personas, doesn't mean that it can automatically act from the customer's perspective. Digital marketing products are "feeders" to the actual service of a company. This means that you have to consider all factors of both elements. Also the context of use. Take, for example, an app for a gas station. The customer need for the actual service - the gas station - is to fill up. However, that is difficult to map onto an app. Nevertheless, the company wants to bring the mobile channel into play. So the task is to find out what the customer's basic needs and challenges are in connection with using the gas station.

With the right tools, I can very quickly find out the customer's pain points in connection with the actual service and solve them with a "feeder touchpoint" such as an app. The result is then a marketing product with added value that also takes into account the company's wishes.

Research-based design uses methodical procedures to ensure that a marketing solution consistently focuses on the customer's needs. It is quite possible that at the end of the first research phase you will come to the conclusion that the planned touchpoint - for example, mobile - does not in itself bring any added value. Thanks to the methodical approach, however, this can then be substantiated with facts and, in the worst case, the project can be stopped or modified at an early stage.

Sometimes companies launch products or services with great enthusiasm, only to fail. Is this due to the fact that they think too much from their own possibilities - and act less from the customers' wishes?

Exactly. Inside views and assumptions are the worst building blocks for a digital product. If management presents an app idea to you with the sentence "Wouldn't it be great if our customers had an app that ...", alarm bells should immediately start ringing. Because this product idea is first based on a hypothesis. A successful product - whether B2C or B2B - should always be based on a carefully researched customer need or customer PainPoint. However, I can only obtain such important information from the customer in the course of well-prepared interviews and through observation. As a rule, this results in a list with a maximum of three congruent items of information. This means that it is relatively easy to build a product from this list that solves the customer's most important PainPoint with just a single function, if necessary, and thus generates a great deal of added value. We often see companies launching expensive products with an insane number of functions and content. On closer inspection, we then realize that this is so that "there is certainly something for everyone". This not only costs more money, but is also more difficult to market. Because you can't make a clear statement about the added value. In short: Products that have an "invented" added value are very quickly doomed to failure.

Can you outline very simply how you proceed with "research-based design"? Which methodology, which tools do you use?

Let me outline this using the Service Design methodology. Service design is used as a methodology to create new service concepts. The most important starting point is that you do not have a clear goal or a product vision in mind, but are consistently guided by researched user phenomena.
The first and most important phase is data collection. In this quantitatively supported "learn" phase, semi-standardized interviews and observations are conducted with the potential customers. In the transcribed interviews, congruent phenomena are searched for, which are then recorded sorted by topic. A handful of PainPoints and challenges can later be found in this list. Another important tool in the "analysis" phase is our Value Proposition Canvas. Using this, we can create initial hypothetical solutions for the points from the list. Now it is a matter of finding out whether the solution approaches are going in the right direction. To do this, the service concepts are implemented with very rudimentary prototypes. These (paper) prototypes can be used to obtain initial feedback from customers on the basis of user tests. In summary, the approach is: Learn, analyze, hypothesize, test. The tools: Interview Guide, Axial Coding Software, Value Proposition Canvas, Prototyping and User Testing.

You are also active in the field of mobile experience. It's clear that the cell phone is one of the marketing touchpoints par excellence - but what are the current trends in this area?

In recent years, new technologies have been in the spotlight in the mobile sector. QR code, beacon, chatbots, voice, NFC and so on. Many test balloons have risen over the years. But no trend has truly brought the holy grail to marketing and turned out to be an egg-laying jack-in-the-box. This is not surprising, as technology divorced from experience is not promising. In line with the general market focus on the customer journey, the most important trend on mobile is currently the experience. Technologies are now secondary. But the question of how to combine them properly has become central. We are in the fortunate position that we have dealt extensively with all these technologies over the last few years, but have not let any of them become our business model. This means that we know every advantage and disadvantage of these technologies and can respond in the best possible way to the challenges surrounding the "mobile experience" trend.

Finally, the third competence of your company: "Usability". Hand on heart - why are many websites or apps still so poorly designed today?

If you really want to ruin your day, you should just spend a few hours reading through the reviews in the Appstore. They give unvarnished feedback on the poor usability. I think the reason why even today many digital touchpoints are not user-friendly is the inside view from the designer's or product owner's perspective. Just because it looks nice doesn't mean it has to be user friendly. One must never disregard the customer perspective when it comes to usability either. When it comes to evaluating the design or the final usability, there is really only one person who has the say. And that is the user. So if I want good usability for my product, I can't get around user testing and usability analyses. By the way, currently only 55 percent of companies carry out usability testing for their products. The additional effort, which one takes on during the conception phase through usability testing, pays off x-fold after going live. After all, fixing a problem in development costs ten times as much as fixing the problem in design, and 100 times as much if you try to fix the problem in an already released product.

When people can't find what they're looking for on a website or in an app: How much patience do they have to research? And when do they abandon the process?

According to research, the user's patience lasts exactly nine seconds. If nothing close to what is wanted is displayed within this time, the user is gone. By the way, the time spent on a page can be perfectly analyzed and increased with usability testing.

What mistakes do you experience most often in the area of usability?

In a survey, 46 percent of online shoppers cite not being able to tell exactly what the company does as a reason for leaving a website. In other words, they simply can't find the contact information. Or in the case of design elements, the mixing of so-called "user patterns" is often seen. For example, when a design element with the same look suddenly takes on a different task within the app. Or if the user is offered four different call-to-actions on one page. These are only small usability errors that can be fixed relatively quickly. But what also often happens, and is actually a huge mistake, is when usability does not take people with disabilities into account. By the way, usability testings with people with disabilities are enormously inspiring and always an enrichment for all persons present. I am very grateful that I was able to experience this a few times already.

Many companies shy away from a usability audit. These processes are often lengthy, complex and expensive. But you came up with something during the Corona Lockdown to lower the inhibition threshold, right?

Yes, that is correct. You are referring to our new offer the "Usability-Level-Agreement". Usability Testing in a subscription model. However, this product is not only about making something cheaper, but also about how to keep the usability of a product on a high level sustainably and in the long run. As a rule, a Monster analysis is commissioned once before a planned relaunch. The available findings and user feedback then flow into a completely new design with a completely different user experience. Afterwards, the budget is used up but the website is actually already full of hypotheses again. In such a case, a selective rework or observation could prevent the same project from devouring a large sum of money for a renewed optimization after one or two years.

We had been toying with the idea of simplifying the test processes for some time and thus lowering the hurdle for regular usability monitoring. However, the fact that we then dealt more intensively with the topic is due to a meeting with a medium-sized SME, in which the unpopular discussion about the high costs arose. When we then also observed in the last few weeks how strongly a situation like the lockdown can accelerate the change in user behavior, it was clear to us that we had to put our plans into action as quickly as possible.

Why is it necessary to continuously monitor usability? Doesn't that sound a bit like a sales argument for a permanent consulting service?

The COVID lockdown situation made it clear how quickly and drastically user habits can change. On the one hand, new tools were adapted within a few weeks, while on the other hand, existing applications were suddenly perceived as cumbersome. The realization that the usability of digital touchpoints is a rapidly perishable commodity has now hopefully reached every product owner and marketing manager. The logical consequence of this is therefore the permanent maintenance, observation and adjustment of usability. For large companies with many internal UX resources this is no problem. But SMEs that have their software, apps or websites developed externally on a project basis have not factored in such a scenario. Our service subscription makes this calculable and transparent in budgeting.

How exactly do I have to imagine the usability testing subscription?

Our Usability Level Agreement combines various quantitative and qualitative user testing methods and test intervals and bundles them into a subscription model in four different service variants. Basically, it is the logical and necessary supplement to an SLA (Service Level Agreement) as it is used for apps, websites or software applications.

While the SLA ensures that the software is always up to date and the code is maintained, the User Level Agreement is responsible for ensuring that the usability of an application remains at the highest level and can continuously adapt to changes in user behavior. In this way, our customers receive transparent and calculable UX support and continuous usability enhancement of their touchpoints. Depending on the subscription version, you receive up to 650 individual test results per year. I can't imagine a better way to keep an eye on user behavior on a regular basis.

Do you see subscription offers like your new product as a model that can be extended into other areas of digital services?

Well - it took some brainpower and Excel formulas until we had calculated the performance variants. From this point of view, we could now even put a booking system online, broken down to internal resources and tools, where customers could put together their own monthly "package". Yes, I can imagine the subscription model being scalable to other digital services. Ultimately, using service subscriptions would be a win-win situation. As an entrepreneur, I can plan my internal resources and tools in the medium term, and the client on the other hand gets full transparency and calculability for his expenses. We haven't thought of anything else yet, but if any reader here is enthusiastic about this form of cooperation, I look forward to an exchange.