The importance of defining UX through data.
🤯
The user experience (UX) is what the user experiences. It’s that simple. But, we silo functions and create arbitrary distinctions through teams, structures, and titles forgetting that the user doesn’t care.
Let’s look at this blog that differentiates UX vs UI designers.
While much of this is true, there’s a lot of overlap. For example, the best UI designers are good at research. Also, is UI not part of UX? Why are they separated? Go one step further when you have a physical experience. Operations and Logistics are all also “UX” designers. With so many moving pieces, how do you create a great UX?
Quantify the UX. By quantifying, your UX becomes:
Defined
Aligned
Actioned
Measured
Defined
Is this a good UX or a bad UX? Now, there’s an objective way to know for certain.
Aligned
By defining good and bad, cross functional teams have clear alignment on what they need to build towards.
Actioned
Now that UX is aligned, teams can move forward on actioning changes within their verticals to see improvement.
Measured
Now that there are concrete actions, you can start to measure and see improvements to your customer’s UX which ultimately moves growth and retention.
D.A.A.M. That’s awesome.
Let’s look at an example.
How Uber defined a magic experience
The complexity of ridesharing UX is underestimated.
For each trip:
Rider sees price & product ETA
Rider selects product
Rider waits for driver
Rider gets picked up
Rider gets a ride
Rider gets dropped off
Rider leaves rating
How do you know if a customer had a great UX on a trip?
That’s why Uber defined a Magic Trip.
Experience | Metric |
|---|---|
Rider sees price & product ETA | < 1.1x surge |
Rider selects product | 3 minute Predicted ETA |
Rider waits for driver | < 1 minute difference between predicted and actual ETA |
Rider gets picked up | < 100 feet from pickup location |
Rider gets a ride | < 2 minute deviation from predicted trip time |
Rider gets dropped off | < 100 feet from dropoff location |
Rider leaves rating | Rider and Driver 5 star rating |
If any of these didn’t happen, it was not a “Magic Trip”. Imagine you had to walk 200 feet to/from your entered pickup or dropoff point. That is annoying and thus not magical.
On the flip side, when a rider did experience all of the great UX it felt like magic.It felt seamless. It felt novel. It felt world changing. With “Customer obsession” a core value, we would constantly look at Magic Trips. Picture being a General Manager for a city and seeing this dashboard on Monday morning.
Metric | Value | % |
|---|---|---|
# of Trips | 100 | |
% of trips Magic | 90 | 90% |
% of Non Magic trips | 10 | 10% |
→ Because of surge | 2 | 20% |
→ Because of pickup / dropoff location | 5 | 50% |
→ Because of ETA | 3 | 30% |
You go to your ops team and ask them to dig into why pickup/dropoff location was such a big issue and they find the root cause.
The pickup dropoff issues are only happening near Buckingham Palace!
We would then fix many of these problems ourselves (using tools like geofencing) or escalate to product teams to create solutions.
The impact on customer experience and growth had tremendous impact. But, it all started with defining the magic UX we wanted customers to have.
Bonus: We customized the thresholds for a magic trip per city, stage of growth, and a few other factors.
How to define your magic UX
To do this for your own UX, follow a few “simple” steps:
List the key decisions a user makes on the journey
Convert these decisions into quantifiable metrics
Every action is quantifiable in some way. It might not be obvious but force this.
Put thresholds for each metric representing “great”
This should be done with data or customer research. Don’t use what you think it should be.
Define the whole UX with these thresholds as a magic experience
Measure what % of journeys are magic
Identify why a journey isn’t magic
Improve it
That’s it for this week.
To recap, I shared:
why it’s important to define UX through data
how Uber defined a Magic Trip
how you can define a magic UX
Good luck building magical and delightful experiences for your customers!
