September, 2009 – An Award-Winning Commitment to Usability: Verizon Turns HFI Training into Improved Service for Customers and Wins Industry Awards for Online Customer Service Excellence

April McGee: Hello! I'm April McGee, Regional Vice-President from Human Factors International and welcome to today's live webcast. Today's webcast is entitled "An Award-Winning Commitment to Usability", where Verizon turns HFI's training to an improved service for customers. I'm here with Mark Studness, Director of E-Commerce at Verizon, welcome Mark.

Mark Studness: Thank you.

April McGee: And thank you so much for being here with us today. Before we start, before we get into our topic, I just want to give several reminders. You can request a case study about Verizon's success and a white paper about HFI training using the links just above the video screen. You can also submit questions during the broadcast by using the button on the lower right-hand corner of your screen. Okay, so now we are going to go ahead and get started. And the first I'd like, Mark, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about your team.

Mark Studness: Okay, sure. So I'm part of Verizon.com team, Director of E-Commerce for Verizon. My team has overall responsibility for the business performance of many aspects of Verizon.com namely the support components of that. So what we mean by that – we set goals for improving our online experience and for meeting transaction rates and so forth. Our team really develops the strategies, both short and long-term strategies to realize those goals. So, in a sense, they really manage the end-to-end customer experience for our online support performance.

April McGee: Okay. Mark, tell us a little bit about the training aspect, how far in HFI's training has your team been involved in that?

Mark Studness: Yeah, so one of the things that is a part of our responsibilities is creating initiatives or re-design efforts, improvement efforts from the conceptual board and then working with all of our experts in Verizon, from our Marketing, from our Product Management, and from our really world-class Usability and Design teams that we have in Verizon and our world-class Engineering team. So we work with all those components to, as a key to deliver the best, we strive to deliver the best experience for our customers. What we've done, an although we're not the Usability team, my team is not particularly the Usability team, we work with the Usability and Design teams so that, since usability is such a key component to delivering customer experience, we wanted to invest in our team's skill set. So we selected HFI's Certified Usability Analyst program to do that and we've actually trained all of our front-line folks who are managing the website to become CUAs. So it's been a really good experience for us and we'll talk more about that.

April McGee: Okay. Our numbers here tell us that 58 people at Verizon have gone through the training as well as 28 from your team alone. You have quite a few people who have gone through. I'm going to talk just a little bit, very briefly about HFI's certification program. It's a ten-day training course, it's instructor-led, it's research based but the main thing here is we give you practical tips, techniques, process in how to incorporate usability and to make it into your everyday process and as Mark said, his team has gone through it and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through. I'm going to switch now though and talk somewhat more specifically about the two Verizon websites that we're focusing on today. One is the eSupport site and the other is the My Verizon Account site. So let's first talk about the support site. Mark, tell us about the support, Verizon support environment.

Mark Studness: Okay, sure. So at Verizon, we have been evolving over the last couple of years and really expanding our product line from beyond traditional voice service to internet service, wireless service to and you know, leading Files TV service. With each of those product lines, as you can imagine, there is a lot of support content, a lot of account management applications and our goal was to really make that a seamless experience for our customers, to need support and who prefer to work online and as many of the folks in the audience know and it's no surprise to you, more and more customers are choosing to interact with companies online.

April McGee: Exactly.

Mark Studness: We at Verizon really strive - it's one of our core values to deliver the best service and online is one of the key components to our service mix so that's kind of the environment we are in at Verizon.

April McGee: So let's take a look now, we're going to begin a little bit. Let's take a look now, as folks can see, here's a preview of what we're going to be talking about. On the left we have the Account Management original homepage and on the right is the eSupport homepage. Let's dig in now, first of all, tell us about your approach is at Verizon to addressing user needs in general.

Mark Studness: So we as a team really strive continuously to evolve our online experiences and we take parts of the site, piece by piece, and what we do is to do an overhaul and these are two areas where we really needed to do a good overhaul on to make sure we've got the leading and best-in-class experience for our customers. So when we embarked upon this, what we did was took a step back and when we looked at it we realized that it's really the staff that produces the best online experiences and taking a lesson out of the book to integrate is invest it. We thought, you know, step one is to invest in our team and make sure that they had the best-in-class training, the best-in-class skills so that they will be well-equipped to tackle many of the problems and challenges we had as we embarked on re-design efforts. So that's really core to our strategy, is making sure our teams really have the best-in-class training and skills. Secondly, we wanted to tackle the problem of, or the challenge of making a seamless experience across the many different services that we have.

April McGee: Right.

Mark Studness: And developing that unified experience and then most importantly, we as a big communications and entertainment provider have a very diverse mix of customers and so we wanted to make sure we kept all of their needs in mind and develop the site to meet their needs.

April McGee: Okay so that's wonderful aspect because it's all about the clients, about the customers. Let's go ahead and talk about those customer segments that Verizon has. Who are they? Tell us a little bit about them.

Mark Studness: Sure, this picture depicts our key customer segments starting with singles who are younger and very mobile, who want instant gratification, instant access to information and as well as use the web for a lot of social networking and entertainment functions so we had to keep their needs in mind as we embarked on these re-design efforts. Families, a little bit different, in many cases, it's the mother of the house that makes all of the family decisions and she wants to be, she wants to make sure that when she goes into our online experience that she can do her critical Bill Pay and viewing the bills and assessing that efficiently and then also, ensuring that they are leveraging the parental control features for their television and internet that Verizon provides in an easy manner. Thirdly, in our mature audience, little bit of myths with our mature audience, many people think that they are not internet-centric but in fact, more and more of that segment is growing very fast, turning to online and as many as 50% of them are online at least once a day so we had to care for their needs as well.

April McGee: Now you know, the interesting thing that you brought up here and it's one of the questions that I often get from clients who I work with and also, invariably we look at this in the classes that we teach, and they say, "I have so many user segments that we are dealing with, that are, you know they have different needs. We can just to do this once; you know one site one experience that we are crafting for them." So they had different users like yours and they have to design for them all. So what was your approach to that? What would you tell them?

Mark Studness: I will agree with your clients, it is very challenging to do that, to support multiple different segments with one experience. One of the ways that we can do, one of the ways that we utilized was to develop personas segments and then really care for those personas in the design interval so that we make sure that we're working on a design wireframe that when we view it through the personas eyes that it cares for their, that it cares for their custom, that it cares for their experience as well as the other ones. We would do that intermittently so that we ensured we didn't over-emphasize on one versus the other.

April McGee: Okay. So let's go ahead and now we're going to look at what the audiences were seeing. This is the original Verizon support page. What can you tell us about this page?

Mark Studness: Okay, yeah this is an earlier version of our support page and a couple of things that we were trying to solve for was, number one, that seamless integration of product material that looked for, in this site as you drilled down to the levels of content, it became increasingly difficult to navigate back to another product. So if you were deep into phone support and you had another question about another product, you had to go back down and then back down to another area. Secondly, as you can see, it doesn't really call out the different products that we have here, visually. So you can hunt for them and get that information but it wasn't there visually and as I said earlier, people who are coming to our support site really want fast, immediate access to that information so that was another thing that we were trying to solve for.

April McGee: So let's go ahead and look at, here's the new version of the page. It's the new and improved re-design and what I want to do, let's go right ahead. Let's look at the more specifically - have a closer look at that. Mark, walk us through the changes that you made from the original version to, based on the training, what you incorporated into the process that led you, and we see the outcome in your design.

Mark Studness: Okay, sure. Yeah, we're very pleased with this result and I have to give credits to you again, it is the staff that did this, it's the team. From my team work, from the usability team, the design teams and the engineering team really jointly came up with this and applied the good usability practices along the way to get us there but a couple of things that we want to highlight, right here is number one, the navigation in the box, so you'll see a tabbed navigation for each of our product lines and the great thing about that is that no matter how deep you go into the site for particular content that you want on a particular product, you're only one click away from another product so it solves our, it met our goal of being able to do cross-product navigation very easily.

April McGee: So you don't have silos anymore.

Mark Studness: Exactly.

April McGee: That's what we call pogo-sticking, you go into one place, you have to come out, you have to go back in and what you've done here is to remedy that.

Mark Studness: Yeah and number two, search for our support. Search is a very crucial way for customers to access content and we put the search boxes there but there's more behind the search. We've integrated all of the content areas for the different products into one search system and that allowed customers to do global searches across and we implemented some elements in there so that we can select a particular product area in that search and help to make it more relevant if you're interested in a particular product. Then we have some other things about recent searches, most popular searches that we put in there. Again, another great way to help customers get to their support information quickly and efficiently and then a few more other things about this page, is that as you can see visually with the icons, it's very apparent – the different product lines, that and the support areas behind them. So you can click on any one of those and go to a homepage for that product line as well as right from this page, we included the most popular quick links that are relevant to those products there. So again, it's all about efficiency in getting that content to the customer as fast as possible for the products.

April McGee: The quick links are on the areas where I think they are on the right, correct?

Mark Studness: Yeah, there are quick links underneath those. Each of these icons are pertinent to each of these products.

April McGee: Okay.

Mark Studness: Then there are more global links that we have on the right.

April McGee: Because the thing that you were mentioning to us about the ones that are there on the right is that the way that you've positioned them there is the way that they get more, noticed more easily.

Mark Studness: Yes.

April McGee: Talk about that for a little bit.

Mark Studness: Sure that was one thing that we learned too. Again, not too much of a surprise for your usability audience but the concept of banner blindness...

April McGee: We've all heard of that one.

Mark Studness: We started to make some graphical and very colorful areas on that right side with those links in there and customers weren't just seeing it because of banner blindness. So we ended up keeping very simple links on the right and being cautious about not putting banners there because they tend to not see the whole right column when you put banners on that side.

April McGee: So this is really a case of simplification rather than embellishment that did the trick.

Mark Studness: Absolutely.

April McGee: Alright. So that's one area of your eSupport site. Let's look at the, let's dig in a little bit. You mentioned before that this in integrated with a variety of your products, let's dig in and tell us, this is the TV section of your site, so tell us more about it.

Mark Studness: Sure, to talk a little bit about it, this is an example of a product level homepage so it has our TV product support area and one of the highlights I'd like to call out on this page is about "See our Virtual Agent" what we did is we know customers are looking for an engaging way to access our knowledge base. So we utilized the technology calls as Virtual Agent technology just as a more engaging way with an avatar to ask questions and get an answer. I think we have more about that on the next slide.

April McGee: We do.

Mark Studness: Now one of the things you often see the Virtual Agent and people or some sites have designers use it because you know, they feel it adds more of a human touch but we often see it in context of shopping. You're online, you're at a shopping site and you have the agent there to assist you is shopping. This is not a shopping site, this is a support site yet you're using the agent here and you mentioned that it has worked well for you. So tell us about how it works here on the support site.

Mark Studness: Sure. One of the great features about this agent is that when you ask a question, it dips into the knowledge base and it will provide the answers but it will also navigate you automatically to the right area of the website.

April McGee: It actually takes the customer where the customer needs to go.

Mark Studness: That's right.

April McGee: Perfect.

Mark Studness: So again, in the spirit if what we've learned, what we've learned in our usability testing and in our focus groups is that customers want immediate and quick access to support content so that was another way for us to deliver that more quickly so it saves them a step of having to see the links from a knowledge base search and have to click and select one. This sends them right there at the same time.

April McGee: Okay, good, alright. So we're searching a little bit here again within the area of eSupport. This part of the site, this is looking at the homepage of the site and one of the things that we are seeing is that forums are becoming more and more popular. Now tell us about how you at Verizon integrated forums right here in your eSupport site.

Mark Studness: Okay, sure. Yeah forums have been a very nice feature that we have added to our support mix where customers can help each other, resolve questions, answer questions and resolve problems and what we found out is that customers wanted to have this information more exposed as part of our overall mix of support. So here's where you see that example where we actually brought up content, customer-generated content in our forums of a support nature right to the homepage in our support mix and it gives the ability, the quick ability to see that it's there and it's a lot deeper I think, as we show them the next page. They can actually get into the support forums and begin engaging in question and answer and it adds to that knowledge base as well which is getting bigger and bigger every day, questions and answers.

April McGee: Now Mark, you bring up a point here because then we are talking about forums, we are talking about social media, type of an application and one of the things that I hear in my classes and what our customers talk about is you know, many designers are starting to look at how they can incorporate it and they are sensitive to the fact that there are benefits to having some forums but there are also some risks to it. Tell us what you see in some benefits in having the forums incorporated right into your homepage and in the eSupport area.

Mark Studness: Sure. I think the number one benefit is that it gives a whole new breadth of support content for our customers.

April McGee: Okay.

Mark Studness: Because in the forums customers are free to ask any questions about Verizon products or maybe connecting their Verizon services to other things. Think about the internet, they're connecting it to a webcam and routers and in our TV, there is you know television and home entertainment system and so forth. So when customers have a question, they can ask any question on the forums and by and large, there is some expert out there who can answer that question. So it really expands our knowledge base of support content to deliver it better. We've had lots of positive reviews about that. The other good thing is that it's in a language really that the customer-friendly because it's the customer asking the question and other customers responding back to those questions so it's really in a good dialogue format.

April McGee: That kind of gets to what you were talking about before. You were talking about how you have a variety, a varied audience, varied customer segments and we know how important nomenclature is and how important terminology is and often we become, we start struggling with you know, "What do we call it?", "How do we phrase this?", "How do we make sure that the people will know what we're talking about?" and you've just pointed out there relating that the customers do it for us. Customers are speaking to a customer and we know that they speak to each other they understand so it's important there. Another component of your eSupport site is the articles themselves. So we talked about the forums, we've talked about how you've integrated with the product areas, let's talk about the articles themselves.

Mark Studness: Sure, so this is an example of one of the articles that we displayed at the home page and as you drill down. So this is, one of the things that we learned is that customers – they need a navigation that will enable them to get into the content and that's what you see on the left, a persistent navigation. As you go deeper into the site you're still able to navigate between article levels always maintaining those tabs that I talked about earlier where we are only one click away from the other products and then incorporating some of the things that the web does very well, multimedia content. So in this example, we are highlighting in Box B, some of the video support that we have that's pertinent to our TV and remote controls. Many customers like you and I, am sure, think it's much nicer to watch a video instructing something versus having to read it in a text format. So that was one of our goals, it was one of the things that we learned that had customers really clamoring for that and that we wanted to do that, provide that multimedia content in an easy way. Now we had a lot of this before but again as part of the re-design, we put it in a way that customers could get to it more efficiently.

April McGee: I think that's either, you talk about customers getting into things you know navigation is the key part of that and you're bringing us to one of the big take-aways in our courses is how important navigation is. If they, you know we have a saying, if the user can't find it, no matter how wonderful it is, no matter how much design effort you put it, if they ca't find it, the function isn't there.

Mark Studness: Absolutely.

April McGee: So the fact that you have been able to surface that and make it easy for customers to get particularly in a support whether they are coming for help, they're coming have their questions answered, facilitating that and letting them get it quickly and easily. Alright so that was a quick view through the eSupport area of your site. Overall what would you say, Mark, is your biggest learning that you have experienced in the re-design of that eSupport page?

Mark Studness: I would say that the biggest learning was stay true to the principles of usability and user experience. I think that you know, we like many companies, we have aggressive deadlines. It was very difficult to maintain, to insert usability activities into the schedule but it pays off in the end. So that's number one because if we had not done that throughout the course of these re-designs, we would not have been able to learn and course correct early in the cycle versus late in the cycle. We're in a cycle so I think that's one of the biggest ones and then some of the learning I've already talked about that it is, for support it's all about speed, efficiency and being able to get it in a format or media that you will utilize.

April McGee: Now you just brought up an interesting point when you talked about that course correction. About being able to do some testing and validation and correct the course that you're going, that you're going down and again coming from the e-commerce team, one of the things that we've often experienced or are often experienced is that people often feel hesitant about that assessment piece and you know we're all in a quick deadline and we have quick timelines to get through, you know why do I want to stop and see, find out about bad news and what we can do about it. You've brought up here and what you've seen is that you've really seen the benefit in taking that course correction in a course.

Mark Studness: Absolutely. Just from economics, it's much more cost-advantageous to find earlier in the design versus later in the development cycle and you know, but when your goal is to really do the best, it's much better to have that customer feedback early in the design phase than after, later in the design phase, you know, two days after launch and you're struggling in production, it's definitely, we have learned valuable to do it early.

April McGee: Better to find it out ahead. Okay. Alright, so that was a look at the eSupport area, let's now switch gears a little bit and go to the My Verizon Account Management site. Now as we start to look at this part, I'm just going to say that anyone in the audience listening, this will probably look familiar to you, particularly if you, like me, have a Verizon account. Look at the Account Management area what we are seeing here, this is the earlier version of the Account Management homepage and this is what it looked like at your starting point. I'm going to switch here and now what we are looking at is the re-designed version. So kind of walk us through the updates that have been made here, what are the key areas for people who are using this for their online account management?

Mark Studness: Okay, sure. So a couple of things about this, about what we've learned in this re-design effort is that number one, you know, confirm that paying your bill, viewing your bill and paying your bill are a critical component to our account management My Verizon site but what we also learned and what we acted upon is that customers want to more and more interact with their product features online. So many of our products now, virtually all of our products have an online component to those so from our Files TV where you can program your DVR...

April McGee: Oh, okay.

Mark Studness: Broadband where you can set up your personal web space and access your e-mail, our phone now you can, you can access your call history and voice mails over the web and our wireless components where you are able to do a whole plethora of things online. Customers wanted easy access to those things so we really evolved what was formerly My Account or My Verizon to encompass those activities. We called them product engagement activities. So that's what you'll see here as identified by the area pointing to B are tabs pointing into those product areas so customers can easily get access to those. While maintaining an A, a very up-front summary of the key information from your bill and as we said earlier, also keeping relevant support links on the right there that you see close at hand. So this home page solved for a couple of things, keeping the support, I'm sorry, keeping the billing information relevant and pertinent and having access to all of the product applications that the customer has with us and also providing relevant support links.

April McGee: Now this is interesting because again, one of the terms that people are often, and that I had to search for over and over again, is that, you know you want, is that whole issue of breadth. So many things that you want to be able to expose your customers to and often you know, designers find it hard, they fell, "I've got one shot at it and I've got to get everything out there" and just put it all there and just let them go at it. What you've done here is you've described that you kept in mind the whole time that "Yeah, we want to, we know that they are coming for their account information and we have that but we also want to expose them to other things that they can do beyond their account but we didn't lose sight of the account information and that's still there" so you've got to be able to maintain that balance in servicing and say here are what their needs are, let's focus, keeping their personas in mind, keeping their context and scenarios in mind.

Mark Studness: That's why designing a usability process keeps you always in check, in the sense you have different checkpoints with the customer and user groups and they will keep you on the track. If you over-emphasize on one element and under-emphasize on another. They'll let you know right away and that's, it just keeps you focused that way.

April McGee: Okay. Now I want to get back to what you were talking about the main focus for many of your customers is their bill. Let's go ahead and look at that then. Let's just take a quick look here at the billing online. What can you tell us about this?

Mark Studness: Sure. This is just an example of the re-designed page and again, we're trying to keep it simple and providing a summary view so this is what we call a summary view of the billing components of your Verizon bill with the ability to drill down to actually get the details of the full bill, if you like, in a PDF or even download it to Quicken if you like. Then what we also include in there is line level explanations because if you have a question about a particular line level you can actually click and get that information there. So rather than, so we did all that in a way that tries not to clog the screen, tries to give the relevant information in various levels from a summary view to a detailed view.

April McGee: And when we were talking earlier, you were telling that some of the questions that customer would have about their bill or not just about the bill itself but in interpreting or understanding what the components are here, we talked about lingo and being able to speak the customer's language so in looking at things like how much is due, the total due, you give them the ability to you see what is that, right here, what are my charges, so everything about helping you understand not just about what they are and how to pay it, but you really kind of walk them through, you help them through that process as well by telling them about things on this page.

Mark Studness: Yeah, that is our goal again as we looked at our segments to make sure that the site was usable and efficient for customers to get the information that they need.

April McGee: Okay, so that's looking at the bill. Now we're still here in the Verizon Account Management area but this is where we're looking at the services, My Services, tell us about that, what's this page for?

Mark Studness: Okay so this is where again, in our effort to integrate, online access to all your services within the new My Verizon that we designed and putting them in a page where you could do just that. So if you're a Verizon customer and you subscribe to Verizon services, the services that you subscribe to I should say, will be represented on this page and then from here, you can then link into various online functions there so I spoke earlier about managing your TV, scheduling the Video On Demand for your Files TV, accessing your web control functions, the back-up and sharing, or your online web space, and even with your home phone, accessing your voice mail and call detail records, call logs in real-time from this site so it's a place where you come and really can engage with your products.

April McGee: So when we looked at the Account Management area, we looked at the first things that you re-designed the eSupport area, now in the Account Management, what would you say is the key take-away from this part of the re-design?

Mark Studness: I think the key thing is to not forget the basics when designing this site because there are a lot of, we have a lot of online applications that we can bring to there for our customers and many, some of our first iterations over-emphasized on some of those to the expense of some of the primary ones like paying, viewing your bill and paying your bill so it was a balance. Customers must like the new things but they certainly didn't want to lose the old things so going through the usability process and then engineering the user experience, we went through much iteration and we got the right balance for our customers then that was the biggest learning, it was about balance.

April McGee: Okay, so let's look at it overall. If we had to kind of you know, put it in a nutshell and say you know the experiences that you have gone through, that your group has gone through, what have been the results of re-designs? We've talked about the re-designs but tell us about your experience.

Mark Studness: Okay, sure. What we see is, number one, the integration of our experiences into a more simplified and more seamless for our customers so for eSupport, we are able to in one experience, provide all of our products in a very nice and easy way for our customers and it was gratifying to see our customers respond positively to that and similarly, on the Account Management, on My Verizon functions the same thing. So for our applications, instead of having different areas to go to, having them all unified into one area with the ability for customers to access their preferences as long as, as well as we're not losing the fact that key functions like managing your bill and paying your bill are always kept front and centre.

April McGee: And this is an interesting point about the integration and it's kind of the way of the future, well it's not the way for the future but a way for the present that a lot of companies are going in a strategic way and Verizon has gone there, it took a little time to bring together services, bring together customer segments and what customers really want is that one-stop shop integrated experience you're treating them like you know them, they have different services from you and you're pulling those all together in one booth so you've gone and you know, you've had that experience again, not to be too modest here, Mark, one thing to point out that a side benefit of that for Verizon has actually been some awards that have come out of this, or as a result of your activity, tell us a little bit about that.

Mark Studness: Yes. We're very proud of those awards but I have say that the first and the foremost, it's the team that really set out to deliver customer service that was the whole goal of this project to deliver the best customer experience. We're pleased to have the industry recognition that customer respect. They reviewed competitors, our major competitors and awarded us the Best in Class for both account management and eSupport and earlier in this year, the Association of Support Professionals awarded us as one of the top ten support sites. So we're very proud of those, of that industry recognition but for us, it's really all about the customers.

April McGee: So let us say congratulations to you.

Mark Studness: Thank you.

April McGee: On behalf of the team.

Mark Studness: On behalf of the team, the team is the one that really did it.

April McGee: Okay. Now we've talked a little about the re-design, we've talked about the integration, we've talked about the awards that are from, that are coming out of this. You know what everybody wants to hear when you really start getting down to the rubber meets the road; it's the dollars and cents. So walk us through a little bit here, what has been for you at Verizon, the bottom line of having gone through the re-design effort.

Mark Studness: Yeah, I think that we are very analytical in our management of our website, managing transactions and really setting goals and targets and so forth. One of the best validations of the support or the success of the site is that we're seeing much bigger increase, a healthy 38% increase in traffic so customers are voting with their clicks and utilizing the site. It's a very healthy increase and because these transactions are all online, there is a by-product which is savings to us at Verizon because we're more efficient in supporting and servicing our customers so we're seeing in 2009 already almost a $50 million increment in savings so pretty healthy results for these design activities.

April McGee: And Mark, let me just say that one the things that you, that is really clear here and has, you know you've mentioned this, is that you brought up the issue of metrics and how important these metrics are both to understanding what the real impact is so you know, you have, you've got a good sense beforehand of what the value of, of what you're customers were saying about it, you talked about transactions, you talked customers about voting with their clicks, and it's really - that's really a key element of usability of incorporating that measure that you can have something that comes out and you can say, "Yeah, this really did make a big difference to us."

Mark Studness: Absolutely, without metrics, measuring before and after, you really don't know what your impact is and that's a core part of our culture. We want to do a lot of things, we want to try a lot of tests but most importantly, learn from those and the only way you're going to learn by incorporating metrics as a part of that process.

April McGee: We, in closing then, we've gone through we've looked at the eSupport site, we've looked at the Account Management site, we've looked a little about your process, how as you mention this is the e-commerce team and what's really notable here for our usability team members and our usability viewers is that this is the e-commerce team and not the usability team, it's really critical to recognize. In looking at that whole process and incorporating it with training, what was the, in closing would you say, some of the key lessons that you've learned in the whole journey of the re-design?

Mark Studness: I think that number one is that really fundamentally recognize that it is the team that does all of the great work that yield the results of the website so investing heavily in those skill sets is important and to getting the best results out of that and specifically with the HFI training, it also had a number of positive benefits for us. Number one, it gave us the common vocabulary so that as we talk about schedules, initiatives and objectives, we had a common vocabulary or the mechanics of how we're going to do them and then secondly, it's about engineering usability and user experience into the process so now as the business owners, our folks are very fluent in making sure that we make the right amount of time to test all through the developmental life cycle so that we end up with a good result. So fundamentally, those are the two biggest lessons learned and then thirdly and it's kind of a by-product of that, is the core of user experience management and usability training should have engineering checkpoints so you're constantly listening to the voice of your customers and they are a part of the process and not something that's done after the fact or feedback that's provided later. So those three areas are, I think, fundamental in things that we've really learned and gained a new appreciation for.

April McGee: You're right, it doesn't happen by accident. It happens by purposefully engineering it into the process and then you monitor the data that you're looking at all the time and that you're listening to all the time. Okay, to wrap up then, what we have really been talking about here in this whole process and your journey and the acknowledgements that have arrived and the awards that you've gotten, we're looking at that institutionalization and that's a mouthful but when we talk about institutionalization, what we're really talking about is making usability routine, incorporating it into the fabric and our founder, Eric Schaffer, addressed that when he published his book "Institutionalization of Usability" because it's really about, as you said, the overall process and it's about staffing and equipping your staff and training is definitely a part of that but more importantly or rather equally important is having an executive champion, someone like Mark here who is really willing to go to effect, recognizes the key, advantages of it and makes sure that those things happen throughout the life cycle and that they are integrated and incorporated and it's not a one-time effort. It's not tacked on at the end; it's not something we do only if we have time. But it is something we really continuously. We do it, we monitor, we check, we go back, we check again and then we keep incorporating into the cycle. So that's what it really is going to be, that's part of the winning formula and even though that word is a mouthful, that's what gets us to that era.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:

April McGee: So now let's go ahead and I think, Mark, that we have some time for questions?

Mark Studness: Great.

April McGee: Let us start here and the first one that we've gotten here is how has the CUA (the Certified Usability Analyst) training program impacted your relationship with other groups at Verizon, including the usability team?

Mark Studness: That's a great question because as I said earlier, one of the ways is that it has given a common language to talk about – usability attributes and so forth but I think that the usability team really appreciates it that the folks who are really set, the folks who are working to it to develop initiatives and so forth understand now clearly, the importance of designing usability metrices into the overall timelines and to the overall schedules. It's also helped us as a group, you know many of you folks in the audience, that there is a tendency a lot of times to make design decisions by a committee, by an internal committee and often times the highest ranking person in the meeting have an influence. By incorporating usability and testing results into the process. We make those decisions, we don't, we make less of those decisions and we let the customers make more of those decisions, which is very, very important. We struggle some times because a lot of times, many times, our customers will vote on something that is not what we thought it would be and I recall a particular instance where we had to, none of us really liked what the customer had voted for, and not one customer, I was going to say customers, but at the end of the day, we picked what the customer wanted. So that's another shared thing that is a part of the training, we all recognize the value of that and we recognize that and we have to listen to what the customers are asking for or the way they design it or the terms that they would use, and accept that is the way to do it.

April McGee: They're the expert and sometimes you find out surprising things but then to have that confidence to go with it, that's the way it all rolled out, successfully although. Alright, next question we have here, in this economic climate, many of my clients have found it tough to make a case for user experience training. What tips can you give them?

Mark Studness: Yeah, another good question, it's difficult times. I would say that first having a metrics based analysis is the key. In this day and age, you have to be able to talk about the bottom line and ROI. The ROI that you will receive from an improved customer experience is in orders of magnitude better. You don't include usability testing in the process, you don't incorporate that process. It's a very modest amount of money to spend for this training in comparison to the project cost, the overall project cost that we have. In most companies, employees are going to be working on many, many projects. That cost can really advertise any project. It's difficult because you don't see the result till the end of the project but it is a core ingredient. I would encourage you to champion it within your own companies.

April McGee: So what you're really saying is that we need some foresight to know the impact. You are going to reap the benefit even though it is only the beginning but when you're looking beyond just the end of tomorrow, it really is going to come back for you.

Mark Studness: Absolutely.

April McGee: Okay, next question. Often usability is overlooked or compressed out of the development process in order to meet aggressive timelines. We all know about those timelines. How do you justify including usability activity in the schedule?

Mark Studness: Another good question. It's really very challenging as well, challenging for us. We have many projects with short-term deadlines and deliverables that we have to do and the training has showed us the main different levels of usability that you can insert into the process so even when you have a very short-term deliverable, there is a usability technique or tool that you can use in that instance to get some good customer feedback to make that short-term initiative or very tight initiative much better. We put a lot of mistakes, sometimes we want to rush to put something into production only to re-architect it a little bit and by doing it with even the quick project, getting other eyes to look at it, customers to look at it, they'll find things in an instant that would have cost us a lot more if we had to implement it and later correct it.

April McGee: And I think that one of the things that you're bringing up here is that there are, when it is a part of the process, there are tools and techniques and ways that you can approach it, that aren't labor-intensive, that aren't time-intensive but will really give you back a quick win.

Mark Studness: Absolutely.

April McGee: Okay, alright, question number four. Do you see user-centered design usability as a strategic activity or part of the overall process?

Mark Studness: Yes, I think we do. When we are now looking at more, longer term projects, strategic projects - the concept of user-centered design and engineering usability and customer experience into the overall is more and more talked about in the higher level. It is truly, when you are developing online experiences, the key critical component because with an online experience many of you know, many of the audience know, alternate experiences are only a click away so customers are very intolerant of poor experiences online. We see that incorporating the best user-centered practices is critical and strategic for us in developing website experiences.

April McGee: Okay. Here's another good question. Did you use high-fidelity or a low-fidelity prototype when you were testing? Did you use paper, a prototyping tool or did you hand-code the prototype?

Mark Studness: That's an excellent question. I say yes. We used all of those. One thing that is of particular interest to me, often times in the past, by the time a design would get to me it would be a high-fidelity design. It would have already been, you know, not too far from production so there would be really no opportunity to change that. By the time you get to high-fidelity designs, you have a bunch of people who are really married to that design and not really ready to hear feedback.

April McGee: Right.

Mark Studness: They can be very defensive. They've put a lot of time and effort into the design so what we now include in our process, is very, very low-fidelity aka handwritten prototypes in the process. We are likely to require two or three widely different approaches to the design so that we can take those to our customers and have them look at it, not in a high-fidelity manner such that design teams have become married to them, in a low-fidelity where it is much easier to change and hear and accept and to implement what customers are saying.

April McGee: You know, it's something that we in the usability team talk about a lot, is that you kind of see a trend going more towards the high-fidelity typing where one of the things that I see even customers are more likely to give you consistent, kind of true to form feedback on something that you know isn't all final copy, you know done at the end, and they are much more willing to give you the kind of critical feedback that you are looking for so coming to that, it's actually a benefit.

Okay, here's another question. What about the risks of customer-generated information especially within a support context? What do you have to say about that one?

Mark Studness: Yeah, that's an interesting question. In our forms, we have been really, pleasantly surprised, I shouldn't say pleasantly surprised. We've been really pleased with the level of interaction on our forums. There is a little bit of a risk because part of developing a forum is making sure it's authentic.

April McGee: Right.

Mark Studness: And making sure that it's transparent and you know, what we embarked is that if we were to deliver best-in-class customer service, we thought that forums could add a new component and it has but the rest of the thought was, "what about this content that you really can't control?" Well as we found out, customers, there are a lot of people who want to help others and as questions came in, other customers would answer those. We do have moderators on the site, not censors, but moderators, in case in the event you know, somebody posts inappropriate language and so forth, they'll break that out. Again, they don't take things down but just make sure it's a safe environment for everyone to interact and we have been very, very pleased and I think our customers recognize it and often times, the content there is even more credible.

April McGee: Yeah, that's important.

Mark Studness: Because they're coming from customers to customers. You know, our philosophy is that we will do whatever it takes to serve our customers and we were willing to take that risk and we have been pleasantly, we've been pleased with the turnout.

April McGee: We've actually seen data too on that, that the more transparent and candid that a company is with their customers, the more credible they are with their customers, loyalty actually brings in customers.

Okay, next here. How do you measure if a re-design has been a success? In other words, how do you measure user experience?

Mark Studness: So for us, we measure, as I said earlier, in terms of the overall performance of that site.

April McGee: Okay.

Mark Studness: So we measure it by "Are more customers using it now?" "Are they doing more transactions now?" "And what is the feedback about those transactions?" If you have a new application, you know, it's pretty easy to see what the flow through is for those transactions. If it's a re-design of an older application, we do the before and after on those and then secondly, we also always have direct customer feedback on our site and specifically round the times of launching re-designs. We really drill down and get real customer feedback post-launch to measure that so at the end of the day, we boil it down to how many increased transactions before and after can we attribute to that design? Then we place a value on that.

April McGee: I think these questions, your topic here Mark, seems to be really hitting home for people because they have a lot of questions about how do you do this? So here's another one.

Mark Studness: Sure.

April McGee: Who manages usability testing? Is it the usability team, is it the design team or is it your team, the e-commerce team?

Mark Studness: I would say yes to that as well.

April McGee: Okay.

Mark Studness: That everyone has a stake in managing that usability team so to speak, in terms of reporting structures, we have applied development organization where the usability team resides but in terms of engineering the process, my team engineers the entire process and makes sure that there is usability designed into that process. The design teams obviously make sure, that we make sure that the design activities are integrated with the usability activities and they do as well, the design teams more than anybody, want that usability feedback so that they can make sure that their designs are on course. The usability teams don't directly report to me but I feel like we are one big team.

April McGee: Right.

Mark Studness: That we are all, that we are leveraging each other and we are shaping the process so we utilize them in the right way.

April McGee: And the thing that, I think one of the things that is coming out of this, Mark, is you're speaking to is a fact that usability is a concentrated effort from many disciplines, many different areas of expertise and the more that you have different areas involved and working together, that's going to be one of the keys to your success. It's not owned by any one person that you know, you're able to bring together. Okay.

Alright, let's see, so let's go to our next question here, a lot of questions about testing here. Does Verizon handle all of its website creative and user experience internally or does Verizon also depend on creative vendors?

Mark Studness: We use a mix of both. We have what I'll call, a world-class design team in-house at Verizon and we also use best-of-class companies to help us in our design efforts. So it is a mix of both in terms of internal and external.

April McGee: Okay. Do you have a policy that updated and new features on your site must be usability-tested prior to release?

Mark Studness: I would say we have internal governance - an internal policy in our group that we must make sure that those pages are usability-tested in advance, now as I spoke earlier, there are varying degrees of usability testing...

April McGee: Right.

Mark Studness: And we've all lived through you know, projects that come up and they must be implemented in another day so how much we can get done on those is subject to the needs of the business at that particular time but in general, for any project that we are embarking on, we engineer usability into them.

April McGee: That's what we're talking about, you've made it routine and you have different ways of making it routine, different assessment methods but you have some way of addressing that and making sure that before it goes out the door, someone has looked at it, someone has assured that the customer's eyes have looked at it.

Mark Studness: Absolutely.

April McGee: Well, I think we have time for a couple more questions here. Are you considering opportunities for up-selling to customers during the re-design process or are you focusing exclusively on customers - getting things done? Seems like we're kind of looking at the test of what customers are doing – is it the efficiency or are you looking at the broader, at the up-selling?

Mark Studness: Yeah, I'd say that a number one primary goal in account management and support is meeting that need of the customer. That's it so that is the number one. We know that we have multiple products that customers enjoy or benefit from, and during that process if we have an opportunity to highlight one of those we do, do that. So I think I talked about one of the services pages there. If you don't have one of our products and you're eligible for it, if you are in a fibers territory and you can get a fiber-optic product for internet or for TV, we will present to you a banner to tell you a little more about that product and we think that's a relevant thing to do since you already have some products with us, we want to give you that we have the ability of that but we didn't overdo it. Again, using the usability process, we didn't overdo it to the exclusion or the detriment from the core functions of those sites.

April McGee: Okay, I think we have time just for a couple more. Here's a one that would be an interesting one. How many are on your design team versus your usability team versus your e-commerce team? So what are the numbers there?

Mark Studness: That's a good question.

April McGee: Yeah.

Mark Studness: I think...

April McGee: I think that an approximate would be okay too.

Mark Studness: Yeah. I don't have the numbers for all of the teams.

April McGee: Maybe you could give a comparison, you know proportionately or something?

Mark Studness: Sure, let me think. For the usability, I don't know, I honestly don't know because they don't report to me.

April McGee: Okay.

Mark Studness: I don't know how many people there are. In the design teams, we use a mix of internal and external. The design teams are not under me as well so I don't know the number. I can't tell you the number. In the overall e-commerce team, I think, for our components I think is somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred or so people.

April McGee: Okay. I think one of the things that, I'm not sure if the question was getting at but if when we look at Eric's book about institutionalization, he talks about the numbers of people who when you have a usability team, it's good to have a percentage allocated for usability to help make successful and certainly there are organizations where you have one or two and that is, you know, it's a good start but I think if you get a team like yours where you have a good, solid e-commerce team, you have the usability team, it makes it a lot easier to make usability routine and implement you know, the training that you've talked about, to dedicate it to the metrics that you've talked about so definitely, when you look at a range that makes it easier for you to do.

Okay, and let's see here. How does your team interact and work with Marketing or product service owners? Now you talked about your lovely e-commerce team, how does your team interact with them or is that part of your responsibility?

Mark Studness: We interact with them. We have the product owners and Marketing who are responsible for that so we work with them very closely. So as our Marketing teams engage in new marketing campaigns, primarily for sales activities of our products, part of our function is online sales so we engage with them to make sure we've got the right prices and promotions available as well as any of the new campaign creative that is associated with the campaigns that we are running, so it's very close-knit relationship and then with the...

April McGee: Product service owners

Mark Studness: Then with the product and services, we work very closely with them so as they are developing new features and functions for their products, there is now more and more, there is an online component to these features and functions and we work with them to make sure that there is a home for that within our online properties and then it's integrated nicely for our customers so that they don't have to search around for those online components for the products.

April McGee: Okay. Here is a question about timeline, Mark, and it's kind of interesting, numbers, metrics, timelines...you can see that they want to put this right to the use here. So this question is how long did the re-designs of the sections take from concept to going live?

Mark Studness: Okay, that's a good question. It's important to call out that the re-designs are an iterative process so there is a before and after, there's actually a couple of steps in between those where we would launch iterations into that process. I would say for, you know, one of our latest re-deigns things are getting very, very good at doing it really fast still, with robust usability, our latest eSupport re-design probably took 3-4 months to do end-to-end. Some of our other ones did take longer or shorter but it is a good gauge.

April McGee: Okay. Following up to the question on who manages usability testing so you said it is kind of shared responsibility on this, the participant is asking, who analyzes and reports the results of the usability tests? We're all getting nitty-gritty here.

Mark Studness: We sure are. So actually it is the usability team that does the reports, that does those results. They produce the summary after each test and then we act on that accordingly.

April McGee: Okay, well Mark, thank you so much for being with us here today. Thank you for sharing your story about the success of Verizon.com. We would like to wrap up, to let you know that there is another upcoming broadcast that's coming out on October 22nd as well as you can also click to, as we mentioned before, to access the case study about Verizon.com and also the white paper available on our website as well. So again, thank you again so much for being here today.

Mark Studness: My pleasure. Thank you.

April McGee: I thank all of you for listening and I appreciate the time.

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