ISG Playbook
APIs
What are Quality Metrics?
Quality Metrics are the measurement by which you can determine if you are meeting your goal of providing your users with useful and pleasant experience. These metrics demonstrate what your values and priorities are and ideally on what is essential to your user.
Why Use Quality Metrics?
In your effort to provide excellent user experience, you will implement changes to your product or service. The only way to determine if these changes are effective is by measuring the results. Quality metrics provide you with the platform to measure the results of your previous process with your improved process. After which you can determine if the changes moved you closer to your goal and what further improvements are necessary. Ultimately Pearson's Law applies: "That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially."
How to Create Quality Metrics
Quality Metrics are established during the planning phase. Before you can improve a process, you have to outline what is “improvement.” This outline will serve as the basis from which you create your metrics. You can use your Feedback Loop to collect and analyze the information based on your metrics. It is vital that you establish metrics based on the following guidelines:
- Your metrics should be quantifiable: You are looking for results such as “85% of clients are satisfied” rather than “most clients are satisfied.”
- Your metrics should be actionable: Be sure to create actionable metrics, such as customer satisfaction or ease of use.
- Your metrics should be trackable over time: Construct your metrics in such a way that you can determine if the quality is improving.
- Your metrics should be maintained and updated regularly: Be sure to test your metrics consistently and to adjust them as your product or service changes.
- Your metrics are tied to your goals: Make sure your metrics focus on what is essential to your user and will drive the success of your product or service.
Service design is the process of understanding and refining an organization’s people, processes, systems, and policies to improve both the employee experience and, directly and indirectly, the customer’s experience.
The Human-Centered Design (HCD) Center of Excellence (CoE) teaches a simple approach to service design that results in 3 outputs:
- Persona – Identify, define, and prioritize the customer types impacted by ISG’s products, services, and policies;
- Journey Map (customer viewpoint) – Research, document, and validate the persona’s experience (journey) with the organization over time and touchpoints; and
- Service Blueprint (business viewpoint) – Document how the organization currently supports the customer journeys and use these artifacts to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience by creating new or improving upon existing products, services, and policies.
Personas: What and why
Today we focus on personas, artifacts that are a fictitious, specific, and concrete representations of a target customer group for a product, experience, or policy. Personas provide an actionable narrative that leverages both qualitative and qualitative research. First and foremost, a well-crafted persona allows the business to gain greater empathy for the customers who will benefit from the initiative.
Personas are artifacts created early in a project when teams are gaining a better understanding of the problem they are looking to solve and the people (customers) who are impacted by a new or improved product or service. The recommendation is that employees spend 2 hours every six weeks observing their customers as they use their products and services; this cannot always happen. HCD, as a philosophy, argues that understanding informs solutions, but many times businesses rush to a solution and make risky assumptions in a one-size-fits-all approach.
Rather than making business decisions based only on what is viable or feasible to the organization, a well-crafted persona allows organizations to inform their decisions based on what is desirable to their customers. For personas to be useful artifacts, please do not treat them as an unchangeable fact. Instead, personas tell the story of a customer type based on what the organization knows now, which could be subject to change the more they learn about and involve their customers in the process. Further, useful personas should not be customer stories or pretty pictures that collect dust on a shelf somewhere. Smart teams may create trading cards or full-size cardboard cutouts, whatever it takes to channel the customer perspective across levels within an organization making business decisions that impact these key stakeholders.
Learn more
In part 2, we will define and discuss the value of journey maps. HCQIS is committed to helping our team members learn more about HCD to help us better support customers. Here are three ways you can learn more today:
ROB FAY
Rob currently leads the CCSQ Human-Centered Design Center of Excellence (HCD CoE). The HCD CoE is an organization that impacts the way the CCSQ delivers policy, products and services to its customers. Through the provision of education, support and resources, he promotes the continued implementation and usage of HCD best practices and seeks to fulfill the charge of OMB Circular A-11 Section 280 (i.e., “Managing Customer Experience and Service Delivery”). For over 20 years Rob has focused on making products and services delightful and easy to use by leading research and design initiatives at government agencies like CMS, NIH, and USPTO and commercial organizations including Blackboard and Allegis Group. Rob holds a Master of Information Management and a Master of Science in Marriage & Family Therapy from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Measuring and improving the user experience of your product or service requires a plan and an understanding of who your users are. Whether your goal is to introduce guidance and processes for measuring user experience, or trying to scale UX in your organization, a well-devised plan will improve your chances of success. In addition, it can play a critical role in convincing stakeholders to invest in UX and make it an essential part of your product development process.
Key Areas to Consider When Creating a User Experience Measurement Plan
- Create a Communication Process
- UX Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Benchmarking Results
- Continuous Improvement
- UX Measurement Plan Summary