Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Subaru recently unveiled a new series of TV spots called "Dog Tested." The premise is this: dogs at the wheel of a Subaru Forester. The campaign follows two dogs on their driving adventures -- picking up a yippy pal at the airport, trying (and failing) to parallel park, losing a parking space to a cat in a sedan (you know how it is).

Depending on how you feel about dogs, you'll either find this campaign ridiculous or brilliant. I fall firmly in the Dog-Loving Camp, and I think it's brilliant -- but not just because I love dogs. This is not a stunt or a gimmick on Subaru's part. It's smart branding.

In looking at their market data, Subaru discovered that about 50% of their buyers are also pet owners. Last year, they ran a sales campaign that gave customers the option to donate $250 of their purchase to one of five charities. It turns out a large number of those donations went to the ASPCA (the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).

So, the lesson is this:

Get to know your audience.

We tend to make a lot assumptions about our audience without talking to them -- or better yet, listening to them. Our default setting is to think about our product, our organization, our selling points, instead of thinking about what makes an audience tick. Isn't is annoying when someone is "me, me, me" all the time? Yes, it is. The best brands know their audience well and let them guide the message.

Look for the audience insight.

Subaru looked beyond basic demographics to learn more about their audience. That's when they discovered a dog-loving crowd. Sometimes the insight will surprise you. Be open to what you'll discover about your audience, and don't overlook a surprising trend in your audience -- it could be the connection point you've been searching for.

Love what your audience loves.

Here's what the Subaru spots says to their target audience: "We know you. We get you. You love dogs. So do we." A brand is a relationship, and like any relationship, it's part emotion. So, maybe Subaru isn't touting the Forester's super-charged GPS system or roomy cargo space in these spots, but they are cultivating a connection with prospective buyers, and they're giving current owners one more reason to love their Subaru.

 

 

I thought the commercial was a parody of ubiquitous pharmaceutical ads. The announcer starts, "Grow lashes. Grow longer, grow fuller and darker lashes."

Unfortunately it was a real ubiquitous ad. Thank God the FDA has approved Latisse — "the first and only prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough lashes." Seems the same company that brought us Botox — botulism for beauty sake — recently launched a cure-all for wimpy lashes. I'm no alopecia hater. I've even worked on clinical trials for hair growth. Clearly everyone is entitled to eyelashes but this is further proof that elective cosmeceuticals are the growing trend.

Get used to it folks. There's less hassle for pharmaceutical companies in products that focus on lifestyle and not just life. People in wealthy developed regions choose to pay for these treatments. Therefore price pressures and perceptions of health entitlement aren't in the mix. Heck, diseases like Cancer and HIV are just too hard and take too long to research. I only wish the same developed regions wanted to pay for treatments that helped them breathe better, increase mobility or prolong quality of life. Research dollars would flow.

Luckily, I was graced with long, dark, luxurious eyelashes. No Latisse for me. But unleashing a little botulism on a few laugh lines…hmmmm.

At the Funologists panel  at SXSW , the speakers lightly touched on digital ethnography. One of the points they that came up was the "lying user" phenomenon. While they didn't go into it too far, it sparked an idea I've been meaning to write about.

One of the hardest parts about user research and analysis is controlling for lying users. It's not that users try to be deceitful. But there are many reasons why they may not be telling you the truth. Here are four:

Need to represent themselves.
Users may lie about choices they have made in the past because the truth reflects negatively on their self image. For example, a user may state they purchased an iPod because of it's ease-of-use, when the real reason was that they felt buying a SanDisk MP3 player would mark them as less hip. 

For this phenomenon, a best practice is to probe further until you can get specific information about what influenced the decision.

Inability to forecast future actions.
People are notoriously bad predictors of how they will behave in the future. They expect their future behavior to be markedly different than what past behavior suggests. Similarly, their ability to recall previous actions degrades over time. For example, a user may say that they really want a customization feature. If you ask them to recall customizing a similar feature in the past 6 months, the answer is often very different. In both cases, the further you get away from the present, the rosier the glasses become.

A tip for handling this situation is to follow questions that speculate about behavior with "grounding" questions that ask them to recall behaving like this in the past. 

Fear of insulting the moderator.
Simply to avoid being critical or confrontational, users will often not truly confess dissatisfaction with a product. Not wanting to hurt the feelings of the researcher is a common unspoken issue.

At the onset of research, the researcher should explicitly distance himself from the design, saying something like "Be candid. I'm not the designer, so nothing you can say will hurt my feelings." 

Fear of looking uncreative.
This happens often in sessions where you simply ask the user to rattle off features they would like. Often, users base their responses on those they already know exist--rather than suggesting features that solve real problems they face. For example, you may hear "I'd like the page to be customizable like iGoogle" when they have no precedent of customizing pages.

For this situation, it's ok to solicit features but make this a low-priority research tactic. Instead, focus on the actual challenges they face, agnostic of a solution.

 

These are just four of the many reasons users lie to researchers. The message is this: when doing research, consider the answers they give but be cautious and critical. Don't take any self-reported information too seriously, since they are easily tainted. Where you expect there to be lying bias, probe for detail and past history to validate their responses.

Design research is an area that really interests me. In the field of User Experience, design research is really the portion of user experience design that encourages a blend of method and creativity with an observational social experience that helps User Experience Designers fully understand the people their designs will ultimately be communicating with on a very complex level.

At UX Intensive in Minneapolis, the topic of design research was dissected and analyzed extensively and masterfully by Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path.

There were two aspects of Todd's presentation that really struck me as incredibly useful ideas to enhance the design research process and develop effective and meaningful results across the board that all project team members understand and actively implement. The first of these concepts is painfully simple: bring your client with you as you research their users. This concept can certainly be extended to include the fact that an Experience Designer should ideally involve as many project team members in the design research process as possible. This really helps all of those who will be handling the results of the experience designer's research to more adeptly understand the information that's pouring in and how it should be used.

The second aspect of Todd's presentation that I really clued in on was the concept of creating proto-personas. A proto-persona is basically a very primitive and rough edged version of a likely persona for a certain user set, based more or less entirely upon "gut feeling" about how a certain persona might be portrayed. One of the follow up concepts to this idea was an interesting and very clear approach to developing personas: creating a set of "dimensions" about an entire user set. A dimension is essentially a set of opposites to describe a characteristic. For example, a particular user set might be comprised of single mothers for a project that concerns a baby-sitter business: one dimension of this user set might define two opposites such as, "very cautious and concerned about who is watching her children" versus "just needs someone to keep them occupied while I go to work." This allows the user experience designer to place his/her research findings along clearly defined dimensions and see where patterns emerge. Certain attributes of the user set or actual users (based on user interviews) might fall in similar places along the predefined dimensions. Finding and extrapolating these "clusters" will help the designer clearly see where his/her personas are emerging from the research they've done.

These methods and concepts are extremely useful and provide a good deal of stucture to the experience design process without taking anything away from the creativity and deep thinking required to create a brilliant and comfortable user experience.  Don't be afraid to try them out.

Figuring out who your users are can be challenging. Many times stakeholders can have varying and conflicting opinions about what users deserve focus. Personas help manage this, but they're products of user research. Prior to research, it's important to provide some direction on who will be studied and in what capacity.

As I was preparing for a brainstorming session, I started thinking about how to start discussion about a business' users without explicitly asking "who do you think your users are?" That approach seemed rife with canned answers; I was looking for something different.

"Hire Your Users" is technique that would be applied in early discovery to start defining these boundaries. Using the metaphor of a hiring process, it helps design strategists and stakeholders collaborate on who the users are, in what order they should be considered, what they need to accomplish, and how they might do so.

In use, a facilitator would guide discussion around the following points:

What's the need?
This first question is used to start translating the business strategy and mission into tactical needs. Like hiring for a position, it uses the business objectives as input and defines how these can be accomplished. Often, this information is known and socialized; hopefully, the facilitator will not need to dwell too long here.

Who do we hire?
This question is starts to map those business needs to user segments and define their characteristics. To do this, we would use a job description to organize and divide the users. Doing so places rigor around each segment to reduce misinterpretation. Within each description are the following:

• Job title - a succinct phrase that defines the user type
• Position summary - this focuses on the core mission and goals of the user
• Responsibilities - the tasks they must perform to support the goals
• Experience - their background, knowledge, traits and capabilities

How will they accomplish this?
This question starts to elicit the features and content that may be needed to support the user's responsibilities. Demonstrating this relationship is important since it helps ensure technology is driven by business need and not the other way around. It should also help ensure that features are justifiable and not simply faddish.

What can we offer?
This question is about trade-offs. For this task, the participants are given a personnel budget of $100,000. Using a divide-the-dollar approach, they apportion that sum among all of the job descriptions. The result is a rough indication of the order and degree of priority of the segments.

 

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I've just hacked together this idea, so I'm hoping to hear your thoughts. Take this further? Abandon it immediately?