 Okay, so today I'm going to be talking about one of the ways that we have at my AUX consultancy learned to create empathy between the user and the decision maker that builds their products and services. So to get started, I just want to tell you a little bit about myself and my team. I am co-founder and co-owner of a AUX consultancy in Chicago called Traceable Change. This is my team here. My partner Gino there all the way to the end and then my partner Martin. We started the company five years ago. We had worked at a variety of different types of AUX companies and ended up at a really large one where we felt like we weren't quite able to push innovation and holistic AUX thinking as much as we wanted. So we decided we were going to branch off and start our own thing so that we could be really creative, not only in the designs that we make, but the way that we approach research and the way that we approach strategizing for our clients. So I want to give you a little bit of a background about the composition of our leadership team. It was very intentional. So Gino's background is an industrial design and brand strategy. My partner Martin, his background is an interaction design and he also in a past life was a clinical psychologist and my background is in a smattering of things, but primarily behavioral sciences, so social and cognitive psychology and anthropology. So my focus is really around the behavioral and social aspects of AUX and how we can bring that knowledge to the designs that we create. So I want to stop here and ask how many people in here have done user research? A couple of you. Okay. Have you guys ever presented your findings to a room of stakeholders or colleagues or anything like that? Have you ever run into a situation where you're presenting some findings and maybe one person gets really hung up on one detail that totally doesn't matter to them? Yeah. So for those of you who haven't done it, that's pretty much how it always plays out. You have to be very careful about how you tell the story because stakeholders will find something they wanted to hear or didn't want to hear and that's the end of the story. I can't hear anything else you're saying. So that's kind of the point of why I wanted to put together today's talk because it actually really, really matters what stakeholders and decision makers come away with when we do user research and we present user insights to them that are going to influence the designs and the services that they put together. If they get the wrong impression or if they hang up on the wrong detail, everything can get derailed. So it's sort of incumbent upon us as UXers to make sure that we are doing that intentional storytelling so that we can actually help them build real empathy with the users. So one of the ways that we have done this and it's, it was kind of accidental that we came across this because we had a couple of studies where we realized that it was actually really crucial that we told the story of the core experience of the user so that the stakeholders, in this case our clients, could really help them out so that they weren't going to get distracted by the details. I'm sure the term experience statement exists in many iterations and forms, but we use this term to describe basically boiling down all of the insights into one meaningful theme, one meaningful core belief, one meaningful emotion that underlies all of the comments that we might hear from users and user feedback because we want to present something as focused and precise as we can so that when decision makers are deciding where to put their money or deciding which projects to entertain that they're doing it from the most important piece of user experience and it's everything that underlies maybe what we hear coming out of their mouths. So the idea behind this is based in psychology and emotional studies. I'm not going to read all of that. I know this is really wordy. I'll talk about it. You don't have to read this slide. But this is sort of a simple model that we put together for one of our clients that we called an emotional experience model to help them understand that they may be hearing a lot of things from their users, but the experience and the emotions that are driving making those things important to them are underlying that and they may not be able to express that themselves. So they have an experience for the first time you have an emotional response. This is typical. This is how we work. You sort of form a new belief about that experience and you go forward with that. Time passes. Another event happens that happens to trigger that feeling that you developed about that event. The belief grows. This is kind of how trauma works, right? Something you have triggers that keep hitting at something it gets firmer and firmer firmer the belief. So this kind of helped us to illustrate to them why are my users so upset about something that seems so stupid? It's because what they're describing to you is what they know, but this is actually what's driving their decision making to use your product or not use your product or to be happy or unhappy. Any questions about that before I go forward? Okay. I know we don't have time so I'm going to give you a couple of examples. So one of our clients is they're a major manufacturing company in Cleveland, Ohio in the United States and they came to us because they're factory floor workers of which they have tens of thousands. It's a huge company. They seemed unhappy about a lot of things. When I come to my shift one of my tools is missing or I feel like my supervisor doesn't listen to me or I feel like I'm not evaluated correctly. And with all of this array of issues that they were encountering, they weren't sure how to actually address it. There are a lot of different things they could pick to address. So they wanted to figure out what can we do and so they brought in a UX company, us, to try to help them understand that. So what we did and I won't get into the details too much as we put together a research program for them that included ethnography which just meant that we were on the floor, the factory floor with the workers, day shift and night shift we observed them. We executed some contextual inquiry which just basically means interviewing them in their natural space while they're experiencing what they're experiencing because it's fresh in their minds. We put together some focus groups, a whole mixed method basically to understand what's actually going on here so we can put some cohesive themes together. So some examples of what they might say. My boss doesn't understand that my performance depends on my equipment. My machine breaks all the time. I get these bad performance reviews. I try to tell them they don't listen to me. I'm frustrated. I have to cut corners to be noticed. I have to fudge my numbers in order to get positive reviews but that's dishonest and I'd really rather not work that way. Just a couple of thousands of things that we heard. But within this category we wanted to derive what is the impact on the user to experience these things over and over, these things triggering over and over, growing this belief inside of them that makes them dissatisfied. We found out that they feel no matter how hard I work I'm not going to be seen as successful. All these different things mean one thing to me and they mean this. This is a really painful thing for me to experience. I'll give you one more example. We also worked with a major non-profit in the US that does a lot of humanitarian work and what they were having an issue with is they have some programming for family health in the communities where they reside and they noticed that underprivileged and low-income families weren't attending these programs as much. They didn't know why they wanted to figure out and then they also wanted to figure out how to redesign the program so that they could engage these people. Some of the things we heard from these folks my neighborhood is too dangerous to get out. In Chicago if you live in a low-income neighborhood that also means it's generally very violent neighborhood so families are really afraid to go out and do too many things after dark. I can't afford a gym membership. I don't have time to travel. I have three kids. I have two jobs and no car. How am I going to take a bus out to this thing twice a week? It just doesn't work for me. But what is the thing beneath these statements that hurts? What is the thing that matters to the user? There's just no way for me to lead an active lifestyle where I live because I live where I live because I make the money I make. This is not something that is available to me and I'm not allowed to have it. This is the thing that hurt for them underneath. So what we did with these experience statements was we brought them to the client and we said this is what you need to solve for. You get all these comments. It's overwhelming. There's a lot of different things that you could pinpoint. But if you solve for this those things will eventually work themselves out. And this is especially important to get stakeholders, decision makers, people with money in the room. A lot of times that's difficult to do and you might only get one shot at it. But if you do, you need to make sure that you're giving them a very focused story so that they can empathize directly with the core experience of the user and not get hung up on the details of the comments that they make. So a couple ways that this could play out. One of the activities that we like to do with our experience statement is immersive ideation. We like to hold as many workshops with our clients as possible just to sort of bring the insight directly to them and make some the action right next to the experience statement. Bring these things close together. Don't let the research insights get lost when action is being taken and products are being built. This is just a shot of one of the ideation stations that we did with the nonprofit. So you'll see what we do with the ideation station is we put one experience statement on there. They have to solve for that experience statement. In this case it was sort of like a small groups would get together and we'd go around the room and do rapid ideation. I think we had eight experience statements that we brought to this client and for each one they'd have to focus only on that experience statement and then they have to solve for that issue. So a little more detailed look at what an ideation space might look like for something like this. So we have our experience statement up in the top. This is the anchor. This is what they need to solve for. Why do I feel this way? These are just some examples of maybe some of the insights that came out. Some of the detailed findings that came out that drove the experience statement to give them some something to work from to ideate solutions. Channels that could be used. Ideation tips. These things to trigger conversation and creativity. There could be a lot of different things. The point of this concept is that we are asking people to act on this immediately. There is no distance between the core user experience and the action that they're planning to take. I'm just going to give a few examples of these tools that we use as well. So I think the next step in this is you've brought the experience statement to the stakeholder and the decision maker. They're able to keep that rooted in the solutions that they're trying to come up with. The next step is once you're gone, once the UX team is gone, once the consultant is gone, are they going to forget all of this stuff and just start making haphazard decisions? Well, you want to try to avoid that by leaving them some artifacts that they can use that are linked to these core experiences. So I'm just going to show a few examples of some things that we've done. One thing that's very common that we use in user experience is experience mapping. Journey mapping is really common. There's lots of different ways that you can map user insights, though. This one here at the top, you can't see the details, which is fine. It's not a big deal. We call that an empathy map. Basically, what that is is a snapshot of a persona that we researched. It shows what they're thinking, what they're feeling and doing, where they are, what's happening around them during that time. So if you're feeling disconnected from the actual insights from the core user experience when you need to build a new product or service, you can pull this thing out and basically just be in their shoes and immerse yourself. This is a core experience map. We made this up to link insights to the experience statements themselves. So the way we tell people to use these is that these are the things you need to solve for. These are your experience statements. But you heard a lot of feedback. So here's the user comments that you have. But here's how complex it is, how these core experiences are linked to the actual things that you heard from users. So don't solve from here. This is complicated. And you could hit one of these targets and miss everything else. Solve from here and eventually you're going to impact one of these things. So it just helps focus them and level them up to what really matters. Sorry? Yeah, let me read it from my computer. Thinking, feeling, doing and seeing what's around you, what's your environment when you're going through that experience. I'll get into the details of this in a second, okay? So just a couple other things, scenario cards. This is useful because it's just kind of like a handy card deck that you can leave with them. These would be problem areas, pain points that came out of the insights. Again, reiterating what's happening, thinking, feeling and doing around this pain point. And then down here you'll have that experience statement linked to it as well. So if they have this issue popping up again, they can bring this out. Okay, this is what's happening with my employee or with my user when they're experiencing this issue. And then finally, concept cards. This is ideally you want to get here in your workshops when you are dealing with experience statements because this links you directly from the experience statement to an action plan. So the concept cards are basic. You go through ideation for ideas for designs, ideas for programs, ideas for processes. You have the experience statement at the top. You have the design idea and then you have an action plan. So you've completely linked that core user experience to the next steps for what they're actually going to develop. Okay, it looks like we're just about out of time. Are there any questions at all?