 I'm going to have my notes because I have a lot of important data and credit and I don't want to mess anything up, so don't be distracted. Today I want to remind everyone that the most successful organizations are research led. They reduce risk for their projects and their organizations, and they optimize with a bias towards action. There are very heavy costs associated with delivering a poor user experience, and we're going to talk about what those are and who they impact. We will also count down 15 ways user experience can influence business success. You're going to need your phones. So grab your phones, have your phone handy, and feel free to take pictures. We'll start with the uncomfortable part first, where I'll talk a little bit about me and give you some context on where my perspectives come from. So five years before the internet became available in households in the U.S., I graduated from college. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I went to art school and it was a huge disappointment for my entire family that I would waste university on fine art, but in the end it turned out to be the right path for me. In 1997, I opened my studio. I studied drawing and sculpture and performance art, so I figured I could make a living as an illustrator. I was optimistic. Opened the studio in 97, completely analog, so just drawing. By about 2003, my studio had become half analog and then half digital. By 2003 was when the Adobe Creative Suite became available, and that's when I sort of transitioned to a graphic designer. Of course, WordPress 1.0 was released at that time, and by 2005 my studio was completely digital. I had to make a website for myself to get my illustration portfolio online, and sure, as soon as you can make a website, everyone in your town thinks you're a web designer and you can make their website, so that's just sort of how my career evolved. Another inflection point that I've witnessed was in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced and everybody was mobile and bringing the Internet with them, WordPress REST IPA came out in 2010 approximately, and by 2012 I was at a point where I was collaborating with other developers and front-end engineers, and SVG animation was really an exciting part of the work we did, and scaling up my projects. Then we started creating mobile apps for customers. I began to realize that myself and all of my clients were heavily dependent on WordPress, and it became a huge sense of responsibility to recommend that to people. Their livelihoods depended on it, so I began to contribute back and participated with the design team and making core contributions, and actually made lifelong friendships and colleagues that I could collaborate with, and we subcontracted work with each other. In 2018 I also worked on the WordPress governance project, and by 2020 I collaborated with two other designers, and we opened up a UX design collective. All of my businesses were not successful, some of them were kind of successful, and some of them were, but it looks like I was a huge success. I pretty much learned everything the hard way. The next inflection point is sort of where we're at now with AI, so it's been very interesting to see all these inflection points in my career. I'm the senior manager of UX research at Pantheon. So let's talk about user experience design. CX, so many acronyms, right? Customer experience, user experience, user experience research, user experience writing, end-to-end user experience design. One of the reasons I highlighted user experience design is because I'm surprised by this. I still have to remind a lot of people that visual design is only one aspect of user experience, and research is really just critical thinking. We all do research. We all do discovery, and everyone making decisions that impact the user experience or the customer experience are making design decisions. So design is something we all make design decisions, no matter what our roles are if we're developers or designers or project managers. I'm less interested in roles people have, and I'm really much more interested in the work that they're getting done together. As a famous quote, I've got to read the quote from Albert Lee on the future of design in startups. Sales with the highest investment in UX are referred to as design unicorns. They saw their sales increase by 75%. It's a lot. We know the costs associated with poor user experience. They're costly. Before we identify those 15 great ways we can influence business success, let's review quickly some of the costs. They include lost sales due to demos and free trials that don't convert or retention issues because the product is just too complex to use. Support costs due to problems users can't resolve without asking for help or due to complexity that makes it hard for them to figure anything out on their own. Productivity costs are very expensive, and that's due to users needing to go through extra steps just to do very simple things. Developer costs, poor user experiences due to having to work on features that don't produce value because nobody's using them or having to redo work because the previous version didn't meet the user's needs or users couldn't figure it out. There's resource costs as well. Product managers and team members can be spending too much time in damage control mode rather than working on new value for customers. We've all been there. They are also a cost of focusing on escalation issues instead of working on new capabilities. These are very costly for organizations. Businesses that invest wisely in user experience research and design deliver useful and compelling experiences for users, and they positively impact their company's success as well as the experience for the end user. Okay, so let's do the countdown. 15 ways UX impacts and can influence business success. It shows up like companies are able to solve problems and reduce risk with evidence-based techniques together. We can foster a culture where continuous learning is valued. The best jobs are jobs where you learn together and you grow in your career through project work. Teams that do great job with user experience can attract and retain the top talent for their companies. They can communicate better with customers and they can show up the competition. Solving the right problem with the right solution is the secret sauce. I love this hill chart. This changed my life, this chart. This is a diagram by Ryan Singer from Basecamp. Understanding users' needs measured in time and progression towards a feature delivery. So when we look at this chart over time, the whole 50% of this side is research and discovery. We are working from we know nothing about the problems our customers are facing to the middle of where we understand the problem we want to solve. And then the second half is getting to the right solution. When we really understand the problem we're trying to solve, the solution is really evident. If you're really struggling to find a solution, you're probably not as focused on the right problem as you need to be. And then the last section is getting it done. Pushing code, A-B testing, creating prototypes, that sort of thing. So moving from the unknowns to the knowns, half the job is research and discovery. And we all rushed through that far too much, I think. And so this changed my life. It gave me opportunities to make impact through value delivery. Delivering value doesn't change over time. Tools change, technologies change. Everything's always changing. But if you and your career can focus on your ability to deliver value, you transcend a lot of that. I have another quote. According to a study done by Forrester, which is a secondary research analyst research, every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return. Now this is an average figure, but it's an ROI of an impressive 9,900%. OK, back to the countdown. Coming in at number 10, we can unlock revenue for innovation or unique allocations when we're doing great user research. We can lighten the load on our support teams. We can easily report outcomes to impressed stakeholders and investors. And we can increase existing business. So that would mean renewals or upsells. And we proactively decrease long-term costs. How do teams do this? How do they do this for their clients or their products? They use frameworks. They use scenario-based user groups and other models. We'll look at some of those. This is important. If it's not secure, performant, and accessible, it's not usable. We shouldn't ship it. This was a motto of our team. Formally known as UX-ATT, we created this usability diagram. Monique Doublemann and Jackie Dillia and myself built this as a framework for which we would work through. We would work with clients who met this criteria and we made sure we held ourselves accountable to these standards. Ethical, sustainable, and inclusive was the foundation of anything that we worked on or produced or shipped. It had to be secure, performant, and accessible. And we used the 10 interface usability heuristics to measure the quality of our work. If it was websites, it had to be findable and discoverable. And UX writing was really important. There's a lot of hats we had to wear. I'm slightly dyslexic. I was not in charge of UX writing. But it's incredibly important to user experience. All of our projects were research-led. We look at projects through three levels, too. We look at projects through the interface level. So one example I like to share with people is the Google SiteKit plugin. The interface is incredibly delightful to use. It's very clear. It's very informative. We look at that experience on the interface level, and it's very usable. So the interface level, one view at a time. The next level would be the journey level. And when we review software or look at software, we look at it through the journey level. So an example of that would be level, level has the alley collective. And it might be the journey a customer takes through a subscription from when they sign up and the courses they take. And if that journey has an endpoint or if they come back. So the journey level, the interface level, and then the relationship level. And this is really powerful, especially if you plan on being around for a while. The example I'll share about the relationship level is the Gravity Forms plugin. Back in the day, it was the first paid plugin I ever purchased. And it was a big deal at the time that I'm paying for a plugin. But that plugin was incredibly valuable. I could sell products through it. I could do a lot of things very early on. And I sold it over and over and over again to my clients. And they loved it, and they bought it. And then later in my relationship with Gravity Forms, I saw online that they did this huge accessibility work on their plugin. And they marketed with that. And they even shared what they did so I was able to inform some of my development teams how to do that work. And so my relationship level with Gravity Forms and that trust I have is the third level. We look at things through. The purpose of UX research is often to support decision makers with the valuable information they need to reduce risk in many areas. Even organizational UX research is important work. This brings me to a possibly well-known model. It's called the Exposure Formula. I didn't invent these models. Oh, we all want to remove friction, shorten tool time, and increase goal time for customers, of course. This is important. We know from research that everyone spends at least two hours every six weeks exposing their work directly with customers. If you fall below that, the quality of your work drops off. You can do more than that. And you can get some improvement. This was like a magic threshold. The key is to interact with someone, ask them to show you how they would do something using your software, and be in a place where you can ask questions. It's very humbling. It could be done on Zoom. It doesn't have to be in person. But not only will improve the quality of the software you deliver, we know from research that as teams go through periods of growth, they lose contact with customers. And they also lose the meaningful nature of their work. There's sense that what they do improves someone's life in some way. And this is really important. I find that the developers and the engineering teams that I work with really need to have that connection and know that their work is meaningful to people. And this is one way you can keep that healthy and thriving. There's a famous Amazon button story, a simple change of copy, and the addition of a continue button on this retailer site netted an increase of $15 million in sales in the first month and $300 million in the first year. And you can read more about that from Jared Spool's article. User experience matters, and it really influences business. OK, let's continue the countdown. We can increase long-term sustainability for our organizations. We can improve cross-team performance. Coming in at number three, we can reduce churn. We all want successful business metrics to report, and we all do research. Hopefully just enough research. It doesn't have to be research theater. This can be very scrappy. But we also know that not everyone has the same amount of skills for research. So let's take a moment of reflection. Literacy is defined as detailed knowledge of what differentiates good quality from poor quality. Pretty literate. It reflects that motion from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. Painful. I thought I gave all my friends these biscuits, but I put way too much salt in them, and now I'm aware of it. It's like that painful thing. And we loop through this on all the different things we learn. It's not just one linear time you go through it. Fluency is defined as a repeated practice of procedures to create good quality outcomes. And it's the motion from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. I know the things I didn't know before, and I've moved out of that awkward, painful state of conscious incompetence. And then mastery. Defined as comprehensive knowledge and craftsmanship for intuitive work, you move into unconscious competence. I think of my grandmother making biscuits from scratch. She didn't have a recipe. She could do it like this, but she couldn't really teach me how to do it because I didn't have a recipe, and she didn't have one either. So that intuitive way of working feels really good. But be careful. You want to be able to teach what you're doing as well, probably. We all loop through this over and over and over. Every time we have to learn something new. And everything's transient in technology. We're always going through these stages. It's exhausting. Our work requires a lot of endurance because of this. Courage and bravery and resilience. It's important to stay informed about theory as well as technical achievement. So I hope to unlock an opportunity for us to be intellectually and emotionally honest with ourselves about the value and the quality of the solutions we deliver to our customers, to their end users, and to each other as well as we work on WordPress core. Research is a team sport. And there are many kinds of research. I won't go through all of them, but this is one of the trifectas of joy that I like to work under. And that's where we have UX research working with structured data or telemetry and voice of the customer. And these have different inputs. And when they come together, we can measure our work. We can expose our work to customers. And we can test it towards growth. This is an example of a customer acquisition cost diagram. So by using frameworks, we can hold ourselves accountable and make really informed decisions about how we move forward and how we choose not to. So the customer acquisition cost diagram is how we measure the cost of customer acquisition, how it's paid back over time, and then measure that data towards lifetime customer value that will help our teams avoid risk. So there's lots of different frameworks, lots of different researchers provide support to organizations with. That includes primary research, structured data, analyst research, strategic marketing, corporate research, A-B testing, win-loss marketing, all kinds of research is happening. If you're not aware of it, get excited about it. It can really help you further your career to have some strengths in your research. Oh, I went too fast. User experience research is best measured by its impact on the roadmap. This happens by way of features ratified for the roadmap as is, features altered based on insights derived through research or features removed from the roadmap entirely. These are the key takeaways. We know the heavy costs associated with delivering poor user experience. The most successful organizations are research led and they reduce risk and optimize with the bias towards action for their teams. Two wards and coming in at number two is increasing new customer base and increasing revenue. We do far too little research or discovery and this forces teams to have to spend way more effort compensating for not having the information they need. Okay, you're gonna need your phones now. Some field research for WordCamp Europe. I have this six question, two minute survey. No spam, you don't have to give your email. We will share the findings from this with the community. Essentially, the survey is based on the way we each interact with WordPress and it's designed to surface any questions we currently have or any observations we have made about the usability or the technical requirements we need the platform to meet for us. Again, you will not be spammed and we'll definitely share the results out and maybe we'll unlock some useful insights. I'll share my deck slide out with links to the survey as well after this and the hashtag social channels. There are three potential reasons that customers fail to convert according to Laura Klein. They don't understand what you're offering them or they don't want what you're offering them or they are not willing to pay what you're asking for what you offer them. Luckily, these problems can be addressed and there are important steps towards achieving this and it all points back to spending that time up front working on identifying the right problem to solve with the right solution. Don't rush through the research and discovery. It's way too costly and that concludes this presentation. Happy to take questions. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, so thank you very much. That was really nice. I loved it. If anybody has questions, please remember that the microphones are on the sides so you can walk over to them and to speak up because this is a very interesting topic and we all need to learn a little bit more about UX. It's everywhere, everything needs it especially in what we work, what we do. So thank you, thank you for doing what you do, what you say. I have a question that maybe relates a little bit to what you said last is how can people become a UX researcher because we are all, but I am sure there's more to learn. Good question, good question. So I find typically people land at UX research from one of two areas. They either lean into UX research from design, which is my path from a designer into designer researcher to full-time researcher, or they enter into research through academic research. So they may not have anything to do with WordPress or technology or anything, but they bring rigorous research skills to projects. So either of those two paths, which is very productive if you can have multiple origin points for your research team, yeah. Okay, okay. Does anybody have more questions? Because otherwise I can't keep asking. And for people that are maybe not yet in US research, how can they, where can they go or how can they integrate a little bit more about learning more examples of... Yeah, the Nielsen-Norman group online. I mean, I didn't invent all these frameworks. There are lots of great resources to learn about the 10 heuristics. I think the most important thing you can do is just expose your work to people trying to use your software. Just dive in. You don't have to have a fancy education or super, super analytic chops. Just really need to get in there and watch people struggling to use your software. It can be humble. Yes, yes. I think we have some questions over there. Hello. So as a former graphic designer, now as a developer, I wanted to ask you, what's the best practices when you're doing the research? I mean, okay, we have surveys, but is there anything else except surveys? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm using a survey as a last resort, to be honest. The surveys are not as reliable quantifiably as actually doing a semi-structured interview with someone. So I do semi-structured interviews with customers and also with stakeholders, the developers, the people making decisions about particular feature work that's underway. A semi-structured interview, it sounds fancy or jargony. It's just a series of questions that we're gonna ask to answer our research question, like is this usable? And we ask them some questions and then in every interview, I ask them to show me how they would do something. And we usually have them show us how they would do something through a prototype. So figma prototypes, you don't have to invest a lot of money, but every time I interview someone, if we include them showing us how they would accomplish a task, it's gold. So at least five interviews per topic. That's the core of it. Thank you. Hello. Hello. Nice presentation. Thank you. I wanna ask, most of the businesses out there are feature factories. So how do you convince them in a sentence to stop creating unvaluable features and invest more time to provide value? Nobody listens to me, I swear. Really, being able to measure the whole, if the whole team and the company does not measure their work and the impact of their work, it's a bit of an uphill battle because we're just growing towards feature bloat and things are gonna, the experience wrought is just gonna keep going down, down, down, down. And so we use really direct language. Sometimes in my role, I'm sort of a people pleaser by nature, but sometimes in my role, I have to really address and ruffle feathers a lot and say, this is creating a very complex situation and we have to get people to stop doing it. And if your teams you're working with are spending at least two hours every six weeks watching people try to use their software, they're gonna see it themselves. You don't have to convince them. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Cathy. Please give her a round of applause. That's for you. Thank you very much. That's awesome.