Seriously Curious: User Experience Research With Marty Gage and Spencer Murrell

CHRIS: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon, and welcome to Seriously Curious, a podcast about all things UX for business strategy and design. I’m your host, Chris Rockwell. I’m a founder and president of human experience firm, Lextant. And today, I’m super excited to be joined by industry legends Marty Gage and Spencer Murrell. They’re authors of “User Experience Research: Discover What Customers Really Want.” And today, we’ll get a chance to hear more about their journey and their unique approaches to understanding and measuring desired experiences. So let’s get into it. Marty and Spencer, welcome.

MARTY AND SPENCER: Thank you.

CHRIS: All right, so, Marty, let’s start with you. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got here.

MARTY: All right. Well, I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I went to college there, and I was taking psychology, and I saw in the back of the book that you could become a human factor psychologist and make things easy to use. And I decided that’s what I was going to devote my life to. And I wound up at one of the leading design firms in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s, Fitch Richardson Smith.

And that’s where I met Spencer and set out to figure out how to make the first step in design thinking, get it right every time, even before it was called design thinking.

CHRIS: Yeah, you guys are doing some amazing, innovative work at Fitch. Spencer, you were there at Fitch too. Tell us how you got there.

SPENCER: I wanted a job that I could make a living drawing stuff. And it took me a while to find. I went to architecture school. It took me a while to find industrial design, and then I went to work at Fitch Richardson Smith, which was the hot place. You know, they had people like Liz Sanders, Marty, you know, a lot of research. And I always found while I was there doing projects that I always got better results if I had some deep insights into users. So I kind of got hooked on needing that thing to get me started.

Then, you know, when Marty came, he was such a lovable goofball that we formed a, you know, a friendship. And then we just started trying to solve the problem. You know, what kind of insights
the designers need to get inspired. Yeah, that’s how it started. 

CHRIS: Yeah. I was going to ask about that. Like, how did that come about? So you are doing some work together, and we’re learning from each other. I think one of the interesting things is, you know, as a human factors guy like Marty, I think we found quickly that what we were doing in human factors wasn’t as impactful in design. So tell us about how that sort of process came about between the two of you.

SPENCER: That’s a good question. You know, I guess Liz Sanders taught me what kind of insight fueled my creativity. You know, we were doing a project for a company called Iomega, you know, and it was basically a disk drive company. And they had some technology that they could put more storage on their particular disk than anybody else. But it was her research that sort of set the tone for the design because people didn’t think about removable mass storage, which was the category. You know, nobody thinks about anything like that. They think about, you know, archiving their stuff. They call it their stuff.

And even that insight to know that people think about it as their stuff gave the whole design exercise a very casual and human approach to computer peripherals. You know, they were in color and,
you know, we did almost everything we could think of to make them approachable. And then I was hooked after that. 

CHRIS: That Iomega drive wound up being the precursor to the USB drives. I mean, everything that we use today that all originated at Fitch.

SPENCER: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yep.

CHRIS: So you guys are both, you know, clearly passionate about design and strategy and business. I mean, what motivates you to get up in the morning when you think about what industry is doing and whether they’re successful products? I mean, like we did.

SPENCER: You know what I’m going to say. Yeah, half of the new products fail. They used to tell me 40 years ago when I was in college, 40 years ago.

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: They said half of every new product introduced fails in the marketplace. And nothing has changed in 40 years. And that’s what motivates me. There’s got to be a better way of doing stuff. I think we found it. I think we put it in the book. We just got to convince more people that it is the way to do it.

CHRIS: Yeah. Marty?

MARTY: There’s nothing better than seeing your work on the shelf in a store and hearing that it sold like crazy. So that is the ultimate joy. And being a researcher on the strategic end. And that can take years to see results. So it’s always great when you see that happen. Nowadays, I think the thing that really excites me is aligning teams on what the user wants. And, it’s not that easy, but it’s a lot of fun.

CHRIS: Yeah. I think when I started Lextant, I thought I was in the user experience business, but the more I mean it, I think we’re in the alignment business first. I mean, it’s such a critical part.

SPENCER: We are fighting against the flow. People think they know their customers and they want to guess and they want to get started right away.

CHRIS: Right?

SPENCER: And holy cow, what a disaster. It’s been over 40 years. 

CHRIS: Yeah. Guessing leads with a lot of that 50% failure thing. Yeah. So I think yeah. Be on a mission to not guess, you know, everyone’s heard about design thinking now right? I mean, it seems to be that one of the good things, I suppose, is that a lot of industries are now aware of the importance of experience. But design thinking is a little bit there. You know, the jury’s out.

SPENCER: People are, hot or cold about it.To tell you the truth, hot or cold.

CHRIS: Yeah. So, I mean, what is it about the design thinking process that you think works or doesn’t work? Marty?

MARTY: Well, I think as we talk about in the book, it works when you modify it a little bit to not think about empathy, but think about defining value, what people really value, you know, just a month ago, we were testing an idea and we knew what people valued because we had done the upfront research. And in terms of smart products in the home and. So there’s a really hit me when you when you test something, there’s the decision, you know, do you like the idea is an interesting all these questions. But when you really hone in on what’s the value that an idea has, it always gets down to a really thin sliver of why this thing has a reason to exist on the planet, and a lot of times it’s not there.

CHRIS: Yeah.

MARTY: So yeah, and ideas we’re testing. It’s not there. So really isolating that that value detail
is kind of my new thing these days.

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah. Don’t bother making it intuitive and easy to use if it doesn’t have any value in the first place.

MARTY: It’s got to have a reason to exist.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. So the book gets into that in a lot of depth. Right. How do we identify value? So let’s talk about that. So the book’s fantastic by the way. It looks great. I’m curious how both students and industry have been receiving it, but tell us about the book and how it came about.

MARTY: I don’t know, we always were going to write a book. And then when the dean from Scad, you can step anytime you want better a process and took us out to lunch and said he had a certification in 3D modeling, a certification in Adobe. He needed certification and upfront research. And of all the people he’d seen, we were the people that seemed like we knew what we’re doing more than anybody else. Would we help him do a certification? And of course, we said, sure, and 

SPENCER: I don’t think we knew what we were signing up for.

MARTY: No, we didn’t.

CHRIS: It’s a big job.

MARTY: And that forced us to write the book. And I think the best thing about that is we knew we had to tell, figure out what can you do in ten weeks? So it forced us to get the basics in the book and not try and tell everything about everything. So I think that was a real blessing to have to have limitations.

SPENCER: Constraints always help you solve a problem.

CHRIS: Yeah. So, Spencer, that was an involved process working with Scad to develop that. How is it being used by the professors down there and the students?

SPENCER: Well, you know, they rolled it out. I think with industrial designers first, I’m not sure. But now even all the majors take it. Even advertising takes its course. And they were certified last year. They were certifying, sort of. If you get an A in this class, you get a certification certificate. And the certificate was they were issuing 140 a quarter. So that’s almost, what does that 420 kids a year, something like that. And, but they’re opening it up to more majors, so I’m sure it’s going to be 500 kids quarter pretty soon. 

CHRIS: Right. So they graduate with Alexa and certification and design research marketing and then what kind of other receptivity have you had from other universities or academics?

MARTY: Well, you know, everywhere I run into somebody, they tell me I’m teaching the book. Hey, I’m teaching your book. I just did the idea say conference and three professors said, “hey, we’re using your book. It’s on our syllabus.”

CHRIS: So this was a lot of work clearly for you guys. But so why do it? I mean, you know, why is it important for us to influence the next generation of designers and researchers that are coming out?

SPENCER: Because you got to leave something behind. You know, I think we’ve learned a lot and we’ve learned it the hard way. You know, it’s been trial and error. It’s taken us 30 years. I’m embarrassed every time I say that we should have gotten here sooner. But now we have a process that we can repeat and get to be successful every time.

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: And rather than just keep that a secret in Columbus, Ohio, I think everybody needs to be exposed to it. I think we need to flip this 50% failure number. I think we need to cut it half. 

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah. So the approaches, I mean, as you say, have been honed and developed over years with companies like P&G and Honda and HP, huge companies. So, how’s the book being received
in industry? I mean, what are we hearing from industry? Marty?

MARTY: Well, you know, everybody wants us to come talk about it. we were you and I, we talked to that consortium yesterday. We talked to GM, Prudential Ford. We were up at whirlpool.So everybody wants to hear about it. 

CHRIS: Yeah. 

MARTY: So I guess that’s good. And it’s USAA buying a whole bunch of books. Yeah I’ve heard. 

CHRIS: Yeah. For their entire design program, which is amazing.

SPENCER: Well you know, with grassroots marketing, which is what we’re doing.

CHRIS: Right. 

SPENCER: It’s going to take awhile. But I expect to see this accelerate.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things with the sort of rise of UX and experience centricity, I mean, now we’re seeing user experience focus at the enterprise level of business. We never saw that right before. it seems and the huge influx in hiring around UX, it seems like there’s a need for skill development. And I think we’re hearing from design and business leadership, hey, we need to hone these skills. And so I think they’re looking to the book and to, you know, folks like yourselves to help them figure out how to really help, these newly minted UX folks, you know, get the latest and greatest and, how to do this kind of work. So we stress, you know, that any research program needs to create clarity, alignment, and action. Spencer, So talk to us a little bit about the anatomy of an ideal experience.

SPENCER:  Once upon a time we had a client, Microsoft. We had done a big research project, and we had all our key insights up on the wall. And he goes, how do you organize this? What one of these insights called it? Feel?

CHRIS: Yeah. 

SPENCER: We were oh, here we are. And then we had to write an article for I.T. asset or I.T. magazine. I think it was called Audio Magazine at the time. And I remember you saying, what are we going to call these insights? And I just pulled it out of my butt right there on the spot. But it made all the sense in the world. You know, at the heart of an experience is an emotion. And that’s what defines an experience. You know, you’re either going to feel great or you’re going to feel like a dumb ass, you know, after you use something. And that’s the thing you’re going to remember. So the heart of an experience is an emotion. Emotion is fueled by benefits. As Marty said, that’s where the value lies. And given a target audience, they might want those benefits delivered in different ways. That’s what we would call a feature. And then there’s this thing that could be called a design attribute. We call it a sensory cue because it’s more than a visual design attribute. And it’s the thing that people look at something or touch something or taste something. They experience it through their senses and subconsciously they give it meaning. And that and that meaning is I look at that cup, it’s black, it’s smooth. I think it’s high tech. They give it that meaning. It’s all subconscious to them. They don’t know why they think that’s high tech. 

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: We have to go in and figure out, why does that signal high tech to you? And then we can give a designer a palette to paint with, like, you know, black and smooth and, you know, white graphics says hi tech to this contingent.

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: So that’s what it is. Basically, it’s a way to organize research insights, to tell the story of an experience in a way that you can act on. Its features, features and sensory cues are the design part. the benefits and the emotion are the value proposition or the messaging part of the equation.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah.

MARTY: I think it’s important to remember when we did the design, we got it much bigger than that. We have clients that are sensory scientists at CPG companies. And so for them, their formulation can have meaning, whether it’s clear or wide or milky or how thick it is bended part of 

SPENCER: Suspended particles.

MARTY: Suspended particles, the viscosity of it, the way it behaves when it dispenses
is the way it’s absorbed into the skin. So it really covers any element that you interact with, Spencer says. Not just just not just products or services.

CHRIS: Yeah. So it’s really like, it’s consumer driven design semantics. Right? Is what we’re doing is unearthing that. And for me, it’s like it’s when I think of sensory cues or design attributes, it really goes beyond that. It’s like any aspect of design, right? We’re having experiences every day. We experience the world in sensory and interactive ways that deliver features that are either valuable or not, that deliver benefits. They’re either useful or not. Right. And then we feel a certain way we trust it or we’re confident or not. So I love that organizing principle because I think, you can’t you know, we talk often about you can’t design anything without the why. It provides the why. It gives us the field and the goalposts for design.

SPENCER: You know, it also gives you confidence that this thing, you’re designing it down here to feature and century.

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: Is going to provide the benefit in the emotional. resulted from the experience. So I think it gives companies confidence that they’re doing the right thing.

CHRIS: Yeah, I think too with like the, age of automation and AI and things like that, you know, you take these words like, trustworthy, like, people have to trust that if you’re gonna put your kid in the in the rear
seat of an autonomous, you know, Uber, you know, the question is, what’s going to make you trust that experience? How do you define it from a consumer perspective and activate it? I love that, the way that you guys are using that to take these kind of slippery words like trust or easy or confidence and creating really concrete definitions of that at the interactive level

SPENCER: And that you know how to deliver it.

CHRIS: Right, right. So, you know, the experience you’re creating is going to deliver on trust and confidence in these things. And these first moments are true. Spencer, you know, when you think about insights, you know, it’s pretty well established now how we can go get great insights. But, how do you sort of connect those to the things and the strategy you make? What’s that process? And, I know you’ve done a ton of work in that space. And, tell me a little bit about, I think what you’re calling it, you’re calling Insight Translation in the book. Yeah.

SPENCER: I think that there’s probably earth shattering research in a drawer or a hard drive in every company in the United States about the world.

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: And I think that the reason that it’s sitting in that drawer is because people didn’t understand how to use it, didn’t understand at first of all, didn’t believe it was true and don’t know how to use it. And so it’s I translation I call that the innovation gap. You know, you got to believe it’s the truth. So we have to prove to them that we’ve done a rigorous process and we’ve talked to the right people and so that they see it, it represents the people they are targeting. It’s the truth. And then you gotta show them in a simple way. And we’ve standardized making one page frameworks that organize all the key insights on a single page. So it’s easy to share with the organization and to tell the story of what the user wants and, to my point, that’s the first hurdle in alignment. They got to agree. It’s the truth, I believe it. This is what consumers want. After that, we got to figure out what to do do about it as a company. You know, they’ll have every company. They’ll have any category. You go in and we do category, our brand agnostic research. So we’ll come up with an ideal automotive experience. Ford might do it one way. GM might do it one way, Honda might do it another way. And they’ll do it based on what their brand stands for, what their internal capabilities are, how fast they want to get it to the market. So we work with the clients to translate the voice of the customer into their framework so that we can create a strategy. It’s sort of a co-created strategy, with the consumer, with us in them to see how we’re going to deliver that experience.

MARTY: And the interesting thing, I think, is, you see, our clients are now having to train them
on how to do insight translation because they all see the value. And yeah, effectively communicating there.

SPENCER: Absolutely. You know, the first thing is it’s got to be clear. You got to understand the research report. Yeah I remember I had a research report from one of our competitors. This was early in 2000. It was 110 pages long. And it was eight pages of golden, eight pages of gold. and so we always strive to get those eight pages or five pages of gold upfront. So you don’t miss it in 108 pages, you know. So, you know, it’s structuring how we report the research is is the first step to getting people to the,

CHRIS: You know, the days of, lots of black text on white paper over for sure. Yeah. I think, you know, I think one of my experiences has been, you know, in the past, it’s like a whole bunch of research occurs, some miracle happens in a product, shoots out the other side. It’s like being able to create a systematic process to connect research insights to design strategy and implementation. I mean, it’s critical to getting, you know, to that 50%.

SPENCER: Yeah. That’s right.

CHRIS: So, you know, don’t do all this research and then guess, you know, use a systematic way to connect it. Marty, there’s a lot of garbage in, garbage out when it comes to research. I think, you know, you mentioned there’s a lot of research in draws and, and there’s nothing worse in my mind than doing a whole bunch of research and then having everybody go, so what? You know, like, what do we do with it or or having it sort of mislead the organization. Like how do you decide, you know, how do you get beyond methods and really understand how to engage with people? You talk about art and science, right when it comes to research. Tell us a little bit about, well,

MARTY: I think you got to start with business. I one of the things that keeps going through my head
these days is how many times I read design briefs in the 90s, and there was about a business outcome
that they were seeking to achieve. And I was like, oh, I don’t know what to do with that. I skipped the design business outcome, I think, and it’s not been until recently that I’ve really been able to just easily and systematically say, okay, if this is what they can achieve as a business, this is the information they need to get out of people’s heads. And then once you are aligned on the information you need to go out of people’s heads.  There’s lots of ways to go do it, but I think you can’t argue about what the information is you need to achieve your business results. That should be pretty clear cut, right?

CHRIS: So how do you ladder what we’re doing up to the business KPIs? Sometimes it’s simple. Sometimes people need to evaluate a concept to know if people can use it. And it’s intuitive and that’s fine. That’s great. In fact, we have to do a lot of that, but we can’t lose sight of the business impact that we can make. In fact, I think sometimes as designers and researchers, it’s one of the reasons we miss opportunities to lead the organization. You know, I think we’ve heard some design teams even today who are still in this sort of like feature request space, like they’re just, you know, kind of answering requests for new features and the like. And that’s not a leadership position. So I think when you have this knowledge and you know how to translate it and connect it to business results, that puts designers in a leadership position moving forward.

SPENCER: Absolutely.

MARTY: There’s all kinds of all these design conferences. There’s a lot of wonky, wacky ideas for how to design stuff and how to innovate stuff and innovation games and innovation techniques. I picked up a book conference, the last conference I was at, all these innovation techniques, and they all are trying to compensate for the fact that you don’t know what people want in the first and the all of these bazillion of techniques, I just feel like they would all just fall to the wayside. If you had a clear understanding of the experiences people desire and what needs to happen to make them feel that way.

CHRIS: Yeah, creativity isn’t the problem, right? It’s it’s it’s, you know, I think these companies that we’re working with, they can invent anything. I mean, they’re amazing. With technology, it’s a matter of understanding what problem to solve or what the opportunity looks like. And then being able to harness and channel all that. So you’re absolutely right about that. Give them a clear definition and things can go fast. That’s the other thing that we hear. We’re hearing all the time. Right. Like we need to go faster. You know, I mean, can you, agile your way into success on this scale?

SPENCER: If you guess. Right? You know, I say, you know, if whatever you got the word, if you start with up front, it’s got to influence what’s come out with it. The other end. And if it’s a bad guess, no matter how well you execute it, it’s not going to have the value the customers are looking for. So yeah. I think that if you do the foundational research up front, it can feed a lot of initiatives and you can move really fast.

CHRIS: Yeah. 

SPENCER: And get it right. 

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: So that’s the combination we’re looking for.

MARTY: If you think about it, the big thing you hear in the business world is sustainable growth. Nobody wants a one hit wonder, oh we got this product right. And then all the others failed. So if you agile which is you guess test you guessed eight tests fail and you fail until you get it right. Even if you get it right after five tries, there’s no guarantee you’re going to have sustainable growth because you don’t know why you got it right that one time and how to repeat that success over and over.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. That’s the problem with AB testing. I mean to me it’s like fast food. It’s like, you know, big data is attractive, makes you feel good in the short term, but eventually you pay for it, right. Eventually you’re down the road in the wrong direction. So this gives you a foundation. I mean, how long are companies using these kinds of insights from these ideal experience programs?

MARTY: Well, I think the longest we’ve heard was 17 years.

CHRIS: I remember the Carhartt built these. We built these six feet tall personas for the garden. They use those for 15 years. I still think they’re up in their offices.

MARTY: So yeah. So I think you got to think about this. It’s not initiative based. It’s more of a strategic foundation for a sustainable growth future.

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah I think about that, that, head and shoulders program because I worked on that with you. I remember being in Mexico and like, looking at mustard and mayonnaise and people’s hands and trying to get a sense for. Is that the right sensory, you know, experience? I remember that, but that was transformative for me because, you know, at the time, Head and Shoulders was like an $800 million brand or something like that, and they were able to completely redesign. And the thing that was the big “Ah-ha” for me was that, you know, when people used Anti-Dandruff shampoo, they were reminded that their head was sick. Right? You know. 

SPENCER: It was even designed to look like this. And initially.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah, it’s a green goo and, white blue. All right. So yeah. So people would hide it and things like that. But now it’s the biggest hair brand in shampoo. Yeah, in the world. And, and you know, it’s beautiful. And so it’s amazing how, how impactful.

MARTY: Our first multi-sensory stimulus kit.

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing.

MARTY: Started really exploring with that stuff. I think the other thing we got to say about agile is that everybody assumes they are going to get it right the first time, and somehow fast and success have become synonymous. And yeah, they’re not. Yeah. It’s about failing fast, not getting it right on the first try.

CHRIS:Yeah. And then you look at, the cost benefit analysis that ConAgra did on us when they compared the amount of time and money they spent redoing the banquet brand versus the Marie Calendar’s brand, which was way more SKUs. And they found that when they used the approach that we used versus the, guess at it, mock up a whole frozen food aisle, eye tracking, test it not like the results and do it again. that they did it in, it was half the time and a third less money form. So it’s faster and cheaper to do this. Yeah. And oh, I know this. It also worked in the marketplace. So don’t forget that I had 30% growth. So there it was. It worked. 

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah. The strategic leadership team was making decisions in what, two hours? And before it was taking them two weeks or something like that. Right.

MARTY: We had an alignment of 37 minutes on Marie Calendar’s senior leadership.

CHRIS: So this is the key to going fast. You know, tell us how this is being used for future mobility. It’s a big place that we’re applying in right now when it comes to, you know, the future of autonomous and smart and connected, electrified kind of experiences and smart cities. You know, you can use this, you know, kind of idea for anything, right?

MARTY: You can use it for anything. Yeah. We’ve done it for buildings. We’ve done it for food, we’ve done it for spaces, you name it. In terms of mobility, the first thing that would come to mind would be, Dodge, Ram. We figured out what the ideal towing and hauling experience was, and it served as their foundation for innovation for multiple years. And then they came back when it was time to figure out
how to make an electric ram truck. And how do you make an electric Ram truck that’s a better truck than a combustion truck? So that’s the first one that comes to mind. I don’t know if you got any thoughts, Spencer? 

CHRIS: Luxury, I think was interesting. You know, though, I think that’s one of those slippery words. Well, we’re going to make it luxurious here. What does that mean? So being able to develop a consumer definition of a luxury and connect that to high technology, I thought was really powerful.

MARTY: That was really cool. And I thought the way you can connect why luxury matters outside of the automotive category at the life level, all the way down to how you make it a great experience in the information and controls within your vehicle.

CHRIS: Yeah. Connectedness is another one of those throwaway words we’re going to and that’s everywhere. You know, we’re going to make a connected product. Well, what does that mean? You know, so the idea of what is. Yeah. What is connected and what, you know, where’s the value in that sort of software hardware combined journey.

MARTY: You know, you know, when we made that smart model five years ago and it still holds true. And it was a synthesis of all the things, the way a user described smart and what people wanted. And the one bucket connected. When we first made it, I thought, oh yeah, that’s boring. That’s no, like, sure it should. Bluetooth two. There’s some Bluetooth to that. But now it’s not about connecting, it’s about seamless. And seamless is the hardest thing to get right because it shows every time. There’s no alignment in organization. Yeah, it comes out as an own seamless experience for the user.

CHRIS: Yeah, you can see where all the lines are drawn in the organization. Right. So Marty, you talk about business results and you know, there’s a lot of customer satisfaction measurement happening out there, right? CSat and Net Promoter Score and things like that, and JD power, like, you know, how does this impact measurement?

MARTY: Well, I’m going to defer to one of my clients. Sogra from HP and she has really studied this in great detail. And she and I presented on this back in the summer, the User Experience Professionals Association. And she’s measured all this. And she has found that this stuff in these desired experiences will predict NPS scores. And if you follow these metrics, these experience metrics, when you measure that is based on what people want, you’ll have high MPS scores. And if you ignore them, you’re going to wind up in tiger teams in war rooms trying to fix stuff. The other thing that I thought was interesting that she’s found is this also highly correlates with click data. So you will see when somebody is, you know, the holy grail to create an account or to sign up for subscription when they fall off. Right when they fall off. You can take that straight back to the experience metrics, and it’ll show you what you didn’t do and why they fell off and quit clicking for you.

CHRIS: So when we talk about experience metrics, Spencer, I mean, we talked about the ideal experience framework, right? If that’s what if you know that that’s what people seek, 

SPENCER: That’s the value they seek,

CHRIS: Then don’t measure satisfaction.

SPENCER: That’s right. That’s right. You know, it seems to me to be the most obvious thing in the flipping world that you ask people what they want. Then you make something based on that, and then you test what they made based on what people want in the first place. You know, it’s just so simple. 

CHRIS: Yeah.

SPENCER: An idea that I don’t think people see the power yet. But as Marty pointed out, you know, the people that are pursuing it actually can improve their performance as an organization.

CHRIS: Yeah. So, if you take something like satisfaction, it’s not like if you have a low satisfaction score or net Promoter score. Let’s take that one. I hear this one a lot, like, okay, well, we scored 40 on Net Promoter Score, but we want to be a 70. I was like, okay, well, how do you do that? 

SPENCER: Now What?

CHRIS: Yeah. Yeah. To your point, Marty, it’s not diagnostic, right? You don’t know where in the experience to go. You know, change things. And Net Promoter Score is kind of by definition, you know, it’s not predictive of anything necessarily, right? I mean, you, I guess, you know, somewhat, whether or not people would refer to your product, but, you know, like you say, you don’t know why or, how to then, you know, do that twice if you need it to be true.

MARTY: I think we should remember that Net Promoter scores also have a negative side. You can get a -70, right? Right. Yeah. Right. You would tell people don’t buy this. Whatever you do, do not buy this. So. Right, right. So I think the net promoter scores there the industry standard and you know, isn’t it. It’s Spencer and I had the good fortune to actually hear the guy that invented net promoter scores talk. We were doing a presentation for a day at Prudential, and I thought he had a great presentation. And it was what he said that made a lot of sense. If we could ask one question, what would be the one question we would ask? And that’s how they came up with the Net Promoter Score. So but as he points out, they’ve been abused. And, he had to write another book to set the record straight.

CHRIS: I think it’s a simple and elegant measure. And it’s really I mean, everybody can wrap their head around it. I think that’s one of the great things about it. the idea of, would you promote or refer this experience to somebody else? and I like the idea of combining like experience metrics, like if you know that people want to, need to trust this experience or need to feel confident or needs to be luxurious in, you know, the you know, how to deliver that through the experience and the features and the benefits and go measure those things and connect it to Net Promoter score. Right. And connect it even further to your business KPIs. So you understand how to use metrics to really impact your business. I think that is something that our, when you see companies making massive investments in user experience, hiring
hundreds of people and, and, doing this at the enterprise level, the next question from a business leader’s mind is going to be, is the investment worth it? And if we cannot measure the impact of the work that we do, then we won’t be successful. So I think it’s important for us to understand measurement around our work and experience metrics specifically, I think gets us to that.

SPENCER: I think as a designer, you’re always terrified to get in front of your stuff in front of a focus group. You know, I can remember we did a project for stoves, and I went with stainless steel, and everybody in the focus group said it looked like a stove in a prison. Five years later, every flipping appliance in town was stainless steel, you know?

CHRIS: Right. 

SPENCER: We were asking the wrong question. You know, we should have said, does this look professional or whatever, you know, but we didn’t do the research up front. We just made something. We were guessing. Yeah,

CHRIS: I think it’s interesting. And some of that, that work. You know, when you think about design semantics, you can test those things, right? And color material finish. And you can connect it to the value drivers of an experience. You know, I think, you know, you put a knob in the center of a washer panel. It looks easy. You move it off to the side and it looks difficult, you know, and it’s like, yeah,

SPENCER: It’s crazy,  but you know, knowing that just knowing that from a consumer perspective gives you so much power.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So Martin Spencer, we’ve been talking about experience metrics and the important next level of that. How do we connect that to business Outcomes. We were talking about that. You know, sometimes we talked about the business value of design, and had experience. Metrics help us.

MARTY: Well, you know, ever since I started doing this in 1989, you kept hearing about the business value of design and design and business. We had a theme, one year for our annual meeting. I think it was Design is Business or something like that as well.

SPENCER: Designers always felt like second class citizens. We always felt like we had the answer, but nobody was listening.

MARTY: And I really have I recently, I don’t ever since I read the book, I got all that out of my head. And I have this whole new train of thoughts. And one of them is when it comes to everybody says design with a big D is really because it’s about alignment. And design is still fighting to have this business credibility, because you’re still not getting organizations aligned on what people want. And until you do that, it’s all just witchcraft.

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. I think too, on the business value piece, companies are spending, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to bring new products and services to market. I think one of the big questions is where do they invest in the experience? Right. Which aspects of which moments of truth, which aspects of the experience? I think the experience metrics, things you’ve been talking about can help businesses connect experiential value to where they spend on the experience. Right. And yeah, and where they can trade off like, well, maybe you don’t need to invest in this aspect of the experience because it’s not as important. But this moment of truth is the most important. So I think that the next evolution for experienced metrics is sort of tying it to value management, which I think is a huge opportunity for us as an industry.

MARTY: I think, you know, we were talking about that yesterday at the consortium piece when we got to the quantitative aspects for the Lincoln Luxury pieces. To your point, you can then go in and quantify
in terms of the desired experience, what’s going to have the most impact on the overall outcome, right. And make smart investments and make smart choices because business is all about making choices.

CHRIS: Okay, so you’ve heard it here, folks. Stop guessing and gain influence as designers in your company. Marty and Spencer, I really want to thank you guys for being here. Really appreciate the time today and the conversation. And more than that, appreciate your friendship and our partnership together and look forward to future success. If you want to learn more about the book, you can get it anywhere, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere you can, purchase a book. Contact us at Lextant. If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve talked about today, and you want to learn more and gain some skills in this area of desired experience and experience measurement. Thanks, everyone for joining us on our first episode of Seriously Curious. We look forward to seeing you in future episodes. If you want more information on Lextant and the kind of work that we’re doing here, don’t hesitate to reach out to Lextant.com.

Thank you.