User Experience Blog Posts

I just noticed that the Velocity Online Conference is coming up next week. This conference is focused on best practices in performance and operations for web applications to improve the user experience as well as a company's bottom line.

I've written previously about the importance of perceived performance in the design of a SaaS application. For SaaS, where customers can easily switch to another provider, user satisfaction is critically important. Low perceived performance can lead to low satisfaction and high customer churn. High perceived performance can result in high customer satisfaction and stability.

But what is the empirical evidence and how much of a change in perceived performance is necessary to have a significant impact? Well I just came across some hard data - metrics for page views, amount of interaction/use and online revenue presented at Velocity 2009 from some data-heavy players.

The empirical data on the impact of web application performance

Microsoft reported that with Bing, a 2 second slowdown in response time reduced the number of searches by 1.8% and reduced revenue/user by 4.3%. That a lot of money left on the table.

Google reported that as little as a 400 millisecond delay resulted in 0.59% fewer searches per user. But perhaps more interesting, even after the delay was removed, these users still had 0.21% fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affected long term behavior. While Google did not report revenue directly, fewer searches likely means fewer AdWord clicks.

Shopzilla had the most complete data on the impact of performance on the bottom line. A year-long performance redesign reduced response times by 5 seconds (from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds). This resulted in a 7-12% increase in revenue.

But it's really perceived performance that matters

This empirical "bottom line" data becomes even more interesting when it is reviewed in the context of the study 'The Truth About Download Times. This study found that users do not rate the download speeds of Web pages based on the actual stopwatch-clocked download speeds. Perceived speed is dependent on how well "users successfully complete their tasks on a site."

In other words, it's not just page load time that matters. It is the time it takes for a user to successfully complete a task that has the real impact. In the case of the Velocity 2009 data, users couldn't interact with a page until it loaded. Those few milliseconds of additional time, prevented users from accomplishing their search tasks. That signficantly impacted the bottom line.

Designing RIAs for perceived performance

So how do you design a SaaS to enable the user to perform real work more productively - to feel fast, responsive and streamlined. Our RIA designers focus on a number of application flow and design areas.

• Determine the high value scenarios and then reduce the number of actions required to accomplish them
• Minimize the need for complete page refreshes and reloads - the waiting between screens creates serious friction with the user
• Incrementally add information and functionality to a page, based on an analysis of how users process the information (e.g. load a modular component only when needed or in the background based on predictive analysis)
• Progressively download data locally to avoid round-tripping to the database (HTML 5 is a great development here)
• Validate designs (visual, information, interaction and architectural) to determine where users perceive adequate performance vs. where they get slowed down and wait for the web application to catch up
• Enable queries or actions to be canceled - it gives the user a feeling of control and lets them move on to something else they consider more important than waiting
• Add reliable indicators of progress on activities (i.e. don't let users get frustrated in front of a screen not knowing how long something will take)

RIAs are about more than features, graphics and nice visuals. Optimizing perceived and actual performance has a real and quantifiable impact on the bottom line. The more productive an RIA/SaaS design, the more users interact with software.

Like everyone, I want to believe that cutting-edge Cleantech will provide the solution to most or all of our environmental and energy problems.  Whether it’s wind, solar,  geothermal, algae-produced biofuels, laser-powered nuclear fusion, or something even more exotic, most efforts to move the world to a low-carbon, low-resource economy view the sustainability challenge in technological terms.  Much of the dollars are flowing this way as well.

But I am increasingly skeptical.  Notwithstanding the closing scene of 1985’s “Back to the Future,” in which Doc Brown returns from the future and refuels his time-traveling DeLorean with a banana peel, beer can and other garbage, for us in the present, a universal power source that consumes our waste and garbage and turns it into clean energy to power our electrical grid and transportation needs, simply does not exist.

Moreover, even with technological breakthroughs,  Cleantech will struggle to compete head-on against incumbents in established markets. It will take time to take root and become widespread outside of niche environments. But time is one luxury we are lacking if we are going to mitigate climate change.

Sustainability as a parallel track to Cleantech

So I see the need for a parallel sustainability track focused on using software and hardware to optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology. This may not be as “glamorous” as the Cleantech vision of cheap, inexhaustible, carbon-neutral power, but it is likely far more efficacious in the short term, and completely transferable to any new tech in the long term.

As I’ve written previously, companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production in order to:  lower costs across internal operations and their supply chain; meet regulations; and document their sustainability efforts to an increasingly aware consumer.  This requires investment in and development of web applications (specifically SaaS solutions) in order to track, manage, and determine ROI of energy/resource optimization actions.

Innovating the user experience of sustainability

In contrast to Cleantech, the challenge to successfully implementing SaaS-based sustainability solutions is less about designing new technology and more about designing new ways to motivate behavior.  For sustainability SaaS to succeed we need to innovate with user experience. The basic functionality of monitoring and tracking resource use does not really change, but the meaning of the application and the way the user interacts with the application, must be unique and valuable.

Examples of user experience changing the meaning of the mundane abound.  15 years ago, organic food was associated with co-ops and lower incomes.  Along came Whole Foods which changed the experience of shopping organic. The basic product stayed the same, but the meaning and value of the product changed.

The iPod is, of course, a classic example of user experience changing meaning. The iPod was not just an MP3 storage device, it offered a seamless experience for finding, buying, organizing, sharing and listening to music through an intuitive, rich interface.

Design Sustainability SaaS RIAs to be more than record management

As we design SaaS sustainability applications, we need to design the same shift in meaning.  We need to identify propositions so compelling that the customers/business could not have possibly asked for them (user-centered design be damned). This kind of innovation is “push” not “pull” and is based on compelling vision, Rich Internet Application (RIA) design, and the ability to seek inspiration outside of current application.

I had planned to get away without having to write a predictions blog this year, but my topic for this week's blog, turns out to also be a prediction.

I've been meeting with many VC firms, investors, and industry leaders in the Valley and it is readily apparent to me that sustainability is a topic on everyone's mind and and a business opportunity on which many startups and established players will focus over the next 5-10 years.

The motivations are very compelling:

• Energy and commodity costs will continue to increase and companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production to lower costs across internal operations and the connected supply chain. (As one colleague put it: "The days of cutting costs via off-shoring are coming to an end. Resource optimization is the future for achieving cost savings").
• Environmental regulation will certainly increase and companies will need to document, track and report their compliance for emissions and waste reductions (as well as potentially monetize their reduced carbon emissions)
• Consumers are becoming aware of and requesting information on corporate sustainability efforts. Brand value will depend on providing transparency into sustainability initiatives.

Sustainability applications will be SaaS

Clearly, companies (both large and small) are already on the move to decrease large expenditures on in-house projects and software installations with a fifth of all enterprises planning to have no internal IT assets by 2012. Instead the move is to cloud computing and SaaS - with no software to install or maintain or upgrade.

So it is a no-brainer to predict that on-premise solutions for sustainability will be rare. Instead businesses (and consumers) will be looking for SaaS solutions that can be easily accessed by employees from desktops, laptops or smartphones.

Since SaaS is inherently "connected in the cloud", a sustainability service can be effectively designed across organizational boundaries, incorporating the entire extended enterprise - partners, suppliers and customers.

Success depends on much time people devote to use

The other no-brainer is that user experience will make or break these SaaS applications. They key to making sustainability applications work, is how compelling and easy they are for users to enter information, how well they are on-boarded, and how easy it is track the impact (visually including mapping, as well as numerically). The user interface should be designed around a clear conceptual model, high value scenarios with desktop levels of performance using RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

I'll write more about the sustainability topic in the future, but if you were wondering what the application design crystal ball holds for 2010 (and beyond), think SaaS-based energy and environmental optimization software with a compelling cross-device user interface.

You may have noticed that CatalystReources.com has added a new Case Studies and Clients section. Our purpose for adding these sections is to give visitors a quick visual sampling of the types of projects and clients we have worked with.

It is easy to show case studies if the work is consumer-oriented and public.  It becomes a bit more problematic when the work is for mission critical applications or contain proprietary information (the secret sauce behind a company’s workings) - i.e. the kind of application that Catalyst typically designs.

In our new case studies section we think we achieve a balance between showing visual concepts and descriptive text, and not revealing anything competitive or confidential. We show representative samples in each of our primary areas of service.

We encourage you to take a look at samples of our application design work.  If you see projects that particularly interest you, contact us for a private and confidential briefing where we can provide more details.

Feedback of course is always welcome in the comments of this blog post or any other blog entry.

One of the unique benefits of SaaS is that the application user interface (the components the user interacts with) can be designed to monitor the users behavior and give the vendor information on how the software is actually being used. This not only provides insight into how the SaaS should be improved to meet changing customer requirements, but also how to proactively reduce customer churn.

On-boarding, the process of getting customer signed up and using a SaaS is a good example. Effective on-boarding is critical in terms of determining the tenure and profitability of a SaaS customer relationship. The challenge for SaaS vendors is to immediately gain and leverage an early understanding of new customers behavior and then drive relevant communications to facilitate both immediate on-boarding and continued engaged use for the first 60 days (and beyond).

Designing your SaaS to take advantage of monitoring

So what are some of the steps in application design for effective monitoring?

• Identify the high value scenarios for your SaaS application. We use a systematic and formal process to determine these, but on a casual level try to imagine what what customers/users want to accomplish (not what you think they need).
• Define 2-3 key benefits that differentiate your software from the competition from a customer point of view (e.g. customized interface / ready to use out of the box / cheaper / faster).
• Define the critical behaviors a user must take to successfully accomplish the high value scenarios (e.g. they must import their contact list).
• During the application design process, as you streamline workflows and user-validate the UI, track where even a small percentage of users face issues. While a goal in the design phase is to refine the user interface to minimize these friction points, track any issues that do arise, no matter how infrequently. These can be used to develop processes for intervention during on-boarding.
• Build your UI as a modular system with the capability to track user patterns and clicks, and relate them to desired behavior sequences.
• When you deploy your SaaS, use these monitoring components to identify what features of the software do not seem to be used, where users get distracted from completing high value scenarios, where they make mistakes, where they stop at signup, etc, Integrated monitoring is essentially a continuation of user-validation testing and data collection we do during the basic application design. But here is it used both as information on how to modify the software in future revs, but also where to determine where you can provide assistance before those new revisions are out.

On-premise vs SaaS on-boarding

With on-premise applications, customer on-boarding is considered as outside of the functionality of the software product itself. But with SaaS, on-boarding is an essential process and monitoring the user behavior needs to be part of the SaaS application design. Whether you are trying to get users to complete signup for a trial, or whether you are trying to get users to successfully start using your software, tracking user behavior enables the software (or humans) to intercede at any points where the user might be dropping out.

For example, if users drop out in sign-up, only partially completing the process, the SaaS application can send out an automated, semi-customized e-mail which reads "Thanks for starting your online trial. To finish the process, do XYZ."

Or if users are not going through the critical behaviors that are necessary to complete high values scenerios (and thus experience the benefits of your service), then you can have a tech support person call (costly but effective, particularly for important individuals representing large clients), or you could send them links to videos or invite them to webinars explaining how to complete these behaviors, or point them to discussion board posts that answer other users questions related to completing the tasks.

For example, based on where a customer appears to be dropping out, an automated email goes out saying: "To really take get maximum advantage from our software, you will want to do XX. We have a options to help you through the process including one on one telephone support."

Customer Engagement

This same kind of monitoring can be used to determine intelligent automated (or human-based) up-selling or to tap into social networking for referrals. Once you have determined the high value scenarios and behaviors that users need to complete in order to find "addictive" or engaging value in your software, then monitoring and intelligent SaaS application design, can help users along.

Monitoring at the user experience level is an effective way both to to correct drop out points during the first 60 days, improve effectiveness and efficiency for your customers, and quickly determine how to modify your application on a regular cycle to meet user needs, increase sales and up sell, and reduce churn.

I was reviewing the latest FinTech 100 and noticed that 4 of the top 10 firms are recent or current clients of Catalyst Resources. To be sure, the economic downturn has impacted the financial services sector and almost everyone is aggressively seeking ways to cut costs. However we find that many of these firms are also responding by investing in new applications that improve ROI, manage risk, reduce business process inefficiencies and attract new customers.

Financial services firms continue to invest in new applications

Different financial services firms (across banking, capital markets and insurance) call Catalyst in at different points in the design of these new applications - anywhere from the early idea stage, to a project with well-defined requirements. But one thing that is consistent. Because these tend to be mission critical applications, designing the application functionality and the user experience, is always an interesting challenge.

Typically these are global systems with extremely high performance requirements (e.g. trading platforms, or financial communications systems), as well as uncompromising fault tolerance and security (e.g. payroll systems or credit card processing). Progressively there is an increasing awareness that the functionality and components need to be modular so that they can be applied across disparate applications and, more importantly, to so that they can be reconfigured very quickly, and still adhere to regulatory compliance standards.

Changes in how software is delivered consumed - SaaS and mobile

There has been a fundamental shift in the requirements for how services are delivered and consumed in the financial services industry. Web-based applications, SaaS and on-demand cloud infrastructure are increasingly important for point financial processes such as governance, or tax management, as well as core systems such as HR, payroll and process management. In a Feb 2009 report, Saugatuck predicted that usage of SaaS-based core financial systems will reach 40% or greater by the end of 2010.

Firms are also asking that their applications become more user-centric, accommodating the diverse ways that their services are experienced by an increasingly distributed and mobile workforce. In the past, mobile meant laptops. But with users now accustomed to web-based business applications, firms are asking to adapt their mission-critical applications for handheld devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry. For these applications in particular it is essential to thoroughly encapsulate critical business processes and streamline the functionality so the apps are more refined, prioritized and elicit greater productivity within the small visual real-estate of the device.

A renewed focus on monitoring

As part of the focus on optimized application design, financial services firms want to be able to monitor how and when applications are being used. This information can then be applied to correct drop out points, improve effectiveness and efficiency for their users, and quickly determine how to modify an application on a regular cycle to adjust to changing needs.

Changing priorities

The priorities of senior financial service firm executives are changing as they adapt to today’s unprecedented economic conditions. Firms are jettisoning less efficient business processes and technologies, but they are also spending on well-designed applications that allows them to reduce costs elsewhere (via automation and self-support), generate new revenues, or attract additional customers. For us its an exciting time and certainly keeping us busy.

It used to be in the healthcare arena, that investment dollars followed the companies searching for the next new breakthrough drug or treatment. Recently however, the opportunities and incentives have started to shift to less glamorous products aimed at health care efficiency, and cost-control using SaaS, RIAs and optimized user experience design.

A $19 billion nudge

This move is spurred in part, by provider funding freezes, regulatory scrutiny and the growing push for universal health coverage. The other driving force, of course, is the $19 billion in the Obama stimulus package to encourage doctors to convert to digital medical records.

Efficiency and cost-cutting through health care software solutions can be achieved in many ways, across many sectors of the healthcare industry - in everything from research, to Pharma clinical trial management to patient scheduling, records and billing. The design of these applications will be a high growth area in both the short and long term. SaaS solutions will grow particularly fast as tighter regulatory compliance forces more standardization and interoperability in healthcare protocols, reporting and practice.

The success of these new applications will depend on how well they are designed to maximize efficiency, usability and performance. A few of the key best practices for successful application design include: define the high value scenarios, determine the best conceptual model, user-validate, design for perceived control using RIAs, and create application UI that is modular and reusable.

So where will optimized UI and SaaS application design play especially prominent roles? Here are a few targets that are already moving steadily in that direction:

Medical Research

Efficiencies in clinical research can be achieved from analyzing workflows, user interactions and then designing software interfaces to streamline the process. For example, for Ventana Medical we developed a dynamic Rich Internet Application (RIA) that interfaced to a piece of complex equipment for immunohistochemical assays for diagnosis of cancer and infectious disease. The new user interface greatly increased efficiency and reduced delays, allowing labs to do more screening in less time.

Pharma

Pharma is already moving to a SaaS model, particularly for clinical trials with electronic data capture (EDC) and analysis, and sales & marketing using CRM. The SaaS delivery model allows companies to easily scale resources as needed depending on the number of drugs in clinical trials or based on a dynamically changing sales force. Ease of use, performance and mobile access will be the key drivers.

Patient scheduling, records and billing has Service written all over it

Less than 9% of U.S. physicians in small practices and less than 30% in medium size offices are using digital patient records, according to a June 2008 study in The New England Journal of Medicine. This represents an enormous opportunity for companies to develop solutions to provide provides patient registration, scheduling, patient electronic health records with HIPAA compliance, clinical work flow, billing and collections. The key to success is to package the technology, functionality, and support at a cost/usability/perfomance level that makes it accessible to the average physician. This translates directly to user-validated UI and a SaaS business model. A well-designed modular SaaS application will be able to handle a sole practitioner seeing 20 patients a day or a multi-clinic operation seeing hundreds of patients a day.

Moving beyond the entrenched culture

Healthcare is one of the largest software and IT footprint has the most to benefit from the use of SaaS and user experience design. The biggest challenge will be cultural. But change is finding its way through the cracks and the new federal stimulus money will be a compelling motivator.