The "Steve Jobs effect": is it working?

In the course of my usual scouting for clients I met not long ago (fall 2011) a scientist running projects in the biotech industry. I was seeking insight from her: my observation was that biotech and pharma manage internally very complex information sets and there would be plenty of need to create a user experience that would make users happier, more productive and even more creative in using their information systems.

She was skeptical and gave me the usual arguments for not investing in UX: "too expensive, you can't justify the budget on internal tools. You might want to look at software companies that sell to those industries". That was a bit disappointing but somewhat promising as enterprise software typically pays little attention to User Experience as UX is supposed to be a consumer product issue (as if users didn't have the same demands in the workplace).

Later on I met with a large software company, a leader in the field of security. They've had for a long time an internal team focused on UX and usability with their own usability lab. However UX has been brought in as an add-on, well downstream after the product is designed, specified and implemented. Now there is a push to move UX to the forefront of product design. "You know with with products like the iPhone we are now getting pressure to  make UX a critical priority", "there is still a long way to go but upper management is slowly moving in that direction".

With tablets and iPhones moving from personal use to the workplace we could say that indeed there is hope and the "Steve Jobs effect" is working. That would be the best legacy of all: the fact that UX and ease of use become a priority in product design for both consumers and enterprises.

voice or not voice?

With the new law against texting and driving, speech UI for the mobile phones is back on the table but the challenges remain: voice dictation appears to still be prone to errors and ambient noise is still an issue. Who will take over the challenge? Nobody yet has re-invented Wildfire, the phone assistant as she lays dormant waiting for her prince to come. MOBIVOX could have been an interesting contender but no major functionality has been added to its voice UI for the past 2 years.

Re-inventing the phone experience

I started my career as a telecom engineer and at the time my work involved understanding the phone experience as a "protocol" that can vary from country to country: when the phone rings, you pick it up and say "hello", "hola", "con quien?" then start talking once your hear a voice at the other end ... If you want to call someone you expect to hear a familiar dial tone first. Very much like watching a movie on a screen this process has become part of our common consciousness since we learned by watching as children and practicing calling emergency numbers.

Later on my work took a turn and I got into exploring advanced user interface models and associated technologies, such as speech recognition. We learned that when screen real estate is minimal, voice can then take over the dialog with a human. This is also true for users who experience difficulties reading and would rather talk.

Meanwhile in the "real" world, cell phones took over our communication lanscape and in recent years the graphical interface moved from the computer screen to the "smart phones" with web sites offering access to "mobile" users.

With a VoIP services like MOBIVOX we approached the phone experience the old fashioned way with a twist: we made a difference connecting people via voice but independently of the device and the location in order to free them of many of the constraints of the physical world.


Which way is it going to be? The iPhone started integrating voice commands but we are far from a sophisticated voice interface like Wildfire's (electronic phone assistant - Wildfire got bought by Orange France Telecom before it was eventually disconnected). Vlingo is another example of voice making it's way back into the phone interaction.

Usability and Innovation in Interactive Technolgies

Once upon a time there was a lab ...
One of the principals floating around the Media Lab was that we should not worry about usability, that wasn't somehow our job. That was fairly provocative statement: we were trying to be at the cutting edge of communication and media, yet making it "easy and usable" was not a pre-requisite. It took me years to come to terms with this and today I can offer a perspective based on my intensive exposure to the innovation process both through research and product release. Call me slow but you'll have to admit any skeptical mind would take issue....

The Research Process
Research works - in particular - by breaking rules, looking at the same old things with new eyes and projecting us in the far future where only our children or their children will see the result in action. You would have to set your usability tests with people who are not born yet, hard to find that demographic sample ... But then, are we so different from that population? We don't know. When it comes to human behavior, prototypes can be brain teasers to force to us to think different. We are not talking about exploring the human genome (I suspect the research strategies would be different). I would argue that some "light" user experimentation would bring useful and perhaps unexpected information. For one thing you want to have a prototype that works in a smooth and clean fashion to really focus on the big issues.

The Media Lab in many cases doesn't invent the technologies themselves, but leverages them to confront people with new experiences such as a the Daily Me, a customized newspaper that seemed so provocative at the time. 

The Commercial Process
The more innovation in a product, the more the risk associated with it. It makes sense to expose a small sample of people to it before a public launch but what would have an early user test of Facebook told its founders? When the Newton failed due (in particular) to its size was that a usability issue? Probably, because the same concept succeeded when the Palm launched with a smaller device. 

Two completely different approaches
Usability seeks to make an existing product easy-to-use and it can prevent major errors prior to launching a product. It can also give some - very relative - indication of future success but by no mean can it spell life or death. It can't tell you if you totally new concept will succeed. Assessing the validity of a very innovative prototype must find its basis in other areas, making educated guesses about market size, user behavior, market trends, or socio-economic factors.

Designing for hybrid applications : voice and web

Let's take MOBIVOX.com as an example of "cross channel design". MOBIVOX offer users a way to place calls pretty much anywhere in the world from any phone. It's like having Skype without the computer to run it. It let's users not only place cheap international calls, but also access premium services such as dictating SMS messages. This done using a combination of web and phone interfaces.

The web site is the first entry point for potential users who would then start placing calls once their account is created. The site is the "hook" and then a good portion of the users stick to just using the phone after setting up an auto refill payment on the site.

At this point some "web" functionality could be moved to the phone UI: for instance you could register, buy credits or add contacts over the phone. As of now MOBIVOX still depends on the web site for that probably as the cost of the upgrade is not offset by added revenue. Contact creation however is more or less synched. When contacts are created over the phone using voice they are also added to the online address book as audio files where the user eventually has to sort out and edit those new contacts. This is a result of technical difficulties in recognizing the names' spelling when they are spoken. They could be resolved at some cost to be justified if enough users engage in the service.

As we can see there phone and web are made for each other but there is still work to be done to to get early adopters to be followed ...

Cross Channel Design

My goal here is to understand trends in interactive media that challenge both the User Experience designer and the business strategist when it comes to combining different channels of communication between a business and its customers. As I go about it, I will provide examples of specific services I worked on and how such challenges were approached. We need to figure out what questions to ask in order to define the right user experience strategy (more than comparing solutions).

Let's set the stage 

By "cross channel" design I refer to a type of interactive design that involves various modes of interaction (primarily voice and graphical interactions) to access the same information system. For instance a user may check her balance either through an interactive voice response system (IVR) (i.e. by calling her bank) or through the bank web site. Voice and web are two separate channels typically used by companies to interact with their customers. They have been the corner stone of automated self-service applications. A face-to-face conversation in a bank branch is also another form of channel but it involves a human at the other end, not a "robot" . Live channels involve two or more people interacting in real time either in person, by phone, or via an online chat. Typically a customer and a customer service representative. Such channels are the most expensive to deploy and increasingly companies use automated self service to cover the most repetitive and predictable interactions at a fraction of the cost of a live agent. Asynchronous channels imply a delay in the dialog: a customer may send an email to tech support or receive an SMS indicating that a transaction was completed.

Multimodal Interaction

A digression on multimodal user interfaces appears to be very a propos at this point. Multimodal interaction has been discussed in high tech circle at least ever since research took off on virtual reality and the so called data glove or wired glove some 20 years ago or more. The MIT Media Lab certainly pioneered some of the research with prototypes such as the famous Put That There (1979). The bottom line, however, is a man-machine interaction that combines most of the ways a human interacts with the world: seeing, speaking, hearing, touching (although in commercial products, touch is used mostly to simulate clicking; touch to sense texture or temperature has not really reached the masses). Similarly, smell is not really part of the equation yet except for some prototypes. Multimodal UI can also involve a gesture: the early handheld devices already offered gestures to specify an action to be performed (such as delete).

Trends

Why did I mention here multimodal interaction? Because it guides us to understand a trend where slowly traditional channels are morphing into integrated modes of navigation. Both designers and business strategists need to see the connection to figure out what steps to take, what to think about, and be ahead of their competitors. 

Each "Channels of communication" specializes in one mode of interaction, usually voice UI or graphical UI. It becomes then obvious that emergence of multimodal interaction will affect channel integration. It is not clear yet exactly how: when you have your smart phone in hand would you go to a web site to check your account balance or would you call your banK? Asking the question is perhaps more important than answering it (as used to say my 12th grade math teacher). It sets the terms of the issue to solve.

Currently the consumer industry handles channels mostly very separately: the customer gets a toll free number to call an IVR and a URL to access a web site. Even agencies in charge of designing and developing those channels act as two very different and independent entities. Inside the company different managers may oversee those 2 channels. Airline companies typically handle independently their automated voice service and their web site. Even branding may not be fully consistent.

But the communication devices we are using - such as the phone - are re-inventing themselves: the iPhone is starting to offer multimodal interaction, smart phones are integrating music, video and web. This puts pressure on channels as I defined them earlier to offer a better integration.

Design Challenges

At the very least channels have to use a consistent language: if one channel uses the term "payee", then the other should use it too as opposed to using a term like "recipient".

The steps and processes used to achieve a goal should also be consistent. This goes as far as re-thinking top level menus offered on the site home page and the phone service.

Another example could be using the same security infrastructure and UI guidelines for user authentication. In 2007 I worked for RSA Security designing a voice authentication system. Its main goal was to allow financial institutions to offer transactions over the phone that require higher levels of security (typically enabling money transfers). However at the time I was not able to incorporate in the design the challenge questions that customers were typically used to on the web site (such as "what is the name of your first pet?"). Such question could be triggered if you are not using your regular phone.

The limitation here was technical: the infrastructure could not be shared, resulting in a customer experience that was not as good as one would naturally expect. Instead we had to come up with another way to double check the caller's identity on the phone, hence creating an undesirable inconsistency.

That being said, both channels are of course intrinsically different. If Voice Verification is used on the phone it changes the customer experience but it remains consistent with the voice medium itself and as a result feels natural: entering a password on the phone (action that is more relevant to the web UI) is not very natural.

Some actions are indeed performed a lot faster online: if you need to answer a series of yes/no questions you can quickly do it by submitting one form using radio buttons. On the phone you will have to answer the questions one after the other. But then some users tend to use more the phone and other more the web depending on their lifestyle (in my experience additional user research is needed here).

When you step back you have to ask yourself t what's the life and behavior of your user throughout the day. When would voice be better? when would web be the medium of choice? Too often companies act based on peer pressure: we need to offer voice because our competitors do (or because touch tone is outdated), we need to offer voice authentication because it works and it is now available. 


Incidentally RSA Security dropped its Voice Authentication Product after the sales teams failed to bring any customers 6 to 10 months into the project. No budget was invested in doing direct research to understand how users behave in relation to their money, the communication devices they use, their age and lifestyle. I found a number of studies that show usage of phone versus web in banking or who uses cell phones and how. There was no definitive proof that what we were trying to build would affect revenue and customer service in a significant way (one that would of course justify the investment). Our main argument was new government regulation that forced US financial institutions to provide higher security to their customers to prevent fraud and identity theft. There had been a trend in fraudulent phone calls that were similar to phishing on the web. But this clearly was not enough to convince businesses although it has been resurrected in collaboration with Intervoice.

Future posts will follow up on this issue as I intend to continue exploring it.

Try before you buy

You know how when you buy a pair of shoes it usually makes sense to try before you buy, right? It seems so simple as long as you are willing to go to the store. But how about software? How about a service like placing international phone calls? That particular market is a competitive place, filling up with companies eager to get a piece of the phenomenal pie. As a designer you face a very savvy, demanding, and motivated audience. They know what they want and they are quick to compare, judge and leave if they can't find what they want. It is also a market plagued with fraud and missed promises. Consumers know that, have paid the price and earning their trust is a real challenge. In addition - and just like any other web user - they are often eager to protect their privacy and reluctant to create yet another account giving away precious personal information. Like my mother says: "nothing is free and everything has its price", but are you willing to pay, why, and how?

The answer comes in steps: it involves first a free trial on the home page and a limited view of what users could get if indeed they would accept to sign up. The option of a free account with an expiration date would be ideal for the user but costly to the company if unlimited calling to any destination is available and such account would still require identification from the user. Users need to understand that there could be more to it than just a free or cheap call: the whole experience of placing a call could be improved in many ways. From the quality of the phone connection to the ease of managing and using your contact list. 

At MOBIVOX, for instance, robots continuously, 24/7, test the quality of the lines. The free call gives a good sense of the call quality but it is the tip of the iceberg. You want users to get a hint that behind that call there is a great potential for more value. Incentives such as free credits can be enticing, but demos and sneak previews of what their account would be like, how the service would work, are more effective ways to try before you buy. All of this needs to be easily available off the home page to quickly engage the user.