Designing for all: thriving in a competitive consumer landscape

That's great. Thank you. I'm so glad glad that you were all here.

Now let's move on to our first question. We know that in today's rapidly evolving consumer landscape, consumers have more choice than ever. And so one of the ways that brands can stand out from the competition is to have these breakthrough experiences.

How is it that you are ensuring that your brand stands out to deliver best in class experiences against the competition.

Why don't we start with you, Nicole?

Okay. So I think about this in two different ways. One, I'm gonna say voice of the customer.

So I will be celebrating my two year anniversary at Advanced Local this December.

When I joined, I quickly realized that we only had regular feedback loops with our digital subscribers and only via email surveys. So as many of you know, that's not your full user base and that's assuming people are in email, open it, all that good stuff. So to be best in class, we have to know what all of our user types are thinking. So right now, I'm spearheading an initiative, working in a cross functional form with the team to, stand up channels that if you think about the marketing funnel from the anonymous user to getting them to return, then maybe they register with us and then they become a paying customer. We want all those user types when they're using our product in context to be able to give us feedback. So I think it's really important that we hear from everybody and we use that feedback to help us prioritize what should go on our roadmap, what we should focus on.

The second, I would simply say is differentiation and personalization.

When I did assess the two years worth of subscriber data that we had, it was very clear signals that, we are not treating our paying customers any meaningfully differently than we are our casual transactional users. So we have to do better because, I I mean, they may they may not be writing us and saying I want a fully personalized experience, but they're telling us things like something else should happen. I should have more access of something. I should have less of certain things, like maybe less ad units served up to them.

So we are on a journey to think differently and differentiate our user experience based on who you are, what we know about you, where did you come from, and just really optimizing that funnel along the way. And what we really want our paying customers to know is that we know you, we know what you registered for, we know if you've downloaded the app, and we're paying attention. And I think that's the least we can do, and to strengthen our brand, promise to our paying customers.

That is fantastic.

Now, Venika, I understand that you're working on redesigning some experiences to uplevel them for your customers. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Of course.

So United Airlines is the world's largest airline, which comes with a lot of weight because we have a hundred and eight million unique customers. Each customer has a very unique need. So talking on the same means as Nicole mentioned, personalization is a huge, huge thing for us as well because we want to cater to our customers to meet their needs and their expectation in their journey. So when you think about experiences of, let's say, someone who is in frequent travel, maybe takes a flight once in two years, we help them tailor their experience more in terms of we'll help you provide terminal guide, which is a tool that helps you walk through the airport, understand how to get to a different gate when you're connecting, what are the needs that you have.

Do you go through customs? Do you not? Do you take your bags? Do they automatically check them in themselves?

What happens to your strollers? What happens to your wheelchairs if you're traveling with them? So all of these questions will help you answer those questions. But when you think about those very frequent travelers, some of us might be here.

They're like business travelers. We call them as a persona type. They travel too often. They're like, cut the noise.

I know where I'm going. I know how to get to from terminal a to b, and I know what Austin area looks like or where Chicago airport looks like. Right? So we help cater those experiences in personalization, and we are redesigning certain experiences to really up our game in personalization to really help cater to those needs of our customers.

For example, very recently, on fourth of July, which is a huge, huge, huge summer travel day for us, we had flight disruptions, which when servers broke down and bad weather, flights were grounded, no one was flying. So imagine a the crowded airport. And it was a chaos at that time. And what we did was we created a new tool that can help customers rebook their flight.

So we designed new experiences. We redesigned those experiences thinking about our customers in mind. So someone who might need help in rebooking, how do we help them in those guided steps? Versus someone who's a pro at rebooking, make it easy for them.

Give them their options then and there so that they don't have to go and talk to the agents to really help self-service them. So it's really thinking about the cell self-service lens because catering to hundred and eight million user base is really a big deal. And we are trying to champion those experiences as much as we can with personalization as well as using innovative technologies.

So I don't know about you all, but I'm hearing a very strong theme about personalization being used to uplevel experiences. Tara, is there anything that you would add to that?

Yeah. So Best Buy is undergoing a pretty big transformation, from a brand standpoint right now. So if you've opened up the app recently, it might look a lot different from the last time you opened it. One of the big things that we're using is machine learning on our homepage to, you know, personalize the experience even more just like, you know, Vanica is doing and what Nicole is doing.

But I work on the employee side, and I'm supporting the Geek Squad. And when people come into Best Buy, they need help with things and they need things fixed. We you know, your phone breaks, your laptop breaks, you need help. And so what we're doing is we're getting rid of some of our legacy systems that we've had for fifteen years and we're thinking about how can we give the employee a consumer grade tool to help them work better with our customers so that they kind of have a three sixty view about everything that's going on.

So that when they come to the store, we know everything about them. We know some things, you know, that they didn't think that we knew. And, we are able to provide them a much better experience than what they had before. And a lot of that has to do with personalizing the experience even for the employee and giving them some tools to help them with their job.

And if every if you don't know other people at work, you guys could have the same job and be doing things completely differently. And so, the tools that we use are really important to make sure that at least we're best buy that we're able to work really efficiently.

Okay. We'll we'll just take that as a cue to move on to this question. We'll do that. Alright. So as your, your teams are working with different stakeholders and various stakeholder groups, How is it that you're thinking about this balance between, and we got to we talked about this a little bit earlier today about how do you tie to ROI, but think of it more as how you're balancing the business value you're providing with the value that you're designing around these customer experiences.

Why don't we start with you, Veronica, on this one?

United Airlines, as I mentioned, is, is a beast. Right? It's a huge organization. I have I work with stakeholders who have been in their roles for more than twenty years.

I've also met people who have been at the company for more than sixty years. So they spend their lifetime knowing these tools, customers. And when you are in a certain role for a very long time, you feel like you know all the answers. How do you change their mindset?

How do you change their perspective of bringing in a new design perspective, a new design decision?

What we did, on my team is I created and, brought along the value of a design thinking and b, a qualitative research team, which did not exist prior to more than two and a half years ago.

And this awesome rockstar team, cheers to my team members here in the crowd today, this team has really, kind of did a one eighty in terms of how our product owners work with us. They come up with such qualitative strong insights. They bring our stakeholders to the table. When we are creating these, kind of research proposals, they bring the stakeholders to the table.

Okay. Hey, guys. What do you want to ask? They get a skin in the game, and you go and ask them, hey.

What are you looking for? What type of answers are you seeking from our customers? And they feel more invested in those experiences.

This team has also included them when we go do, research studies at the airport. So we are out in the airport talking to the customer, and they are part of that group. They are with us trying to do the same task. They understand it in with a much better perspective of what does it mean to create new experiences. When we do this, when we make them part of the process, they become a shareholder or a stakeholder in those conversations, and they are more than willing to then drive the change that we are seeking. And I think that's, like, the shared goal and shared purpose that really drives innovation and creating better seamless experiences for our customers.

I love what you're saying there about creating a shared goal, a shared vision, but it doesn't always start out that way at first. And Tara, you have some experiences, you know, working with different teams and bringing them along the journey.

Yeah. So just like Vanneco was saying, like, really early on building relationships with your partners are really important. So when I first set started at Best Buy, the team that I'm working with, they hadn't worked with UX design before, and they really didn't know what you user research was. And so I'm introducing all of this to them and having them be able to we we have the luxury of being able to go into stores and, you know, actually talk to people and see what's going on, because those conversations can be in a bubble when you're, you know, in a corporate office or something like that.

Your partners may think that they completely understand the person because they talked to somebody one time five years ago, and that's just not the truth. So I think it's really important to really understand and really build empathy with your partners and build trust with them. And how to build trust with them is to, you know, do these things together, to do workshops together, to have conversations together, and build up that that time together.

I even do funny things like, you know, doing team building activities and things like that just to help us feel more comfortable so that they can trust me more when I'm come up with a really big idea. And like I said, I'm trying to turn a employee facing tool into a consumer grade tool. And, you know, coming up with the with the UX basics, you know, like, this should be more minimal. We tend to overcomplicate things that are employee facing.

So that's really important to me, and, there definitely has to be that balance because at the same time, we're trying to make money and that really matters.

So, I think that there's always a a bridge that you can gap with your partners, and it's really important to meet with them early on in all of them, not just your product partners, your engineering partners, your even your analytics partners, like, whoever it is that you need to meet with. I think it's really important to have constant conversations with them and really make them a part of your team and part of your process.

I completely agree that building empathy and trust is so critical with any stakeholder or team that you're working with. What I'm really curious, to ask Nicole about now is just how are you managing that balance between the customer's needs and and the business needs? Sometimes it feels like it may be a conflict, but maybe it doesn't need to be.

It definitely does feel like it's a conflict. I would say it's a constant balancing act. It's what I spend a good percentage of my weeks, focused on.

So I think about it this way. Make sure you and your team really know what the business goals are and not just, like, look at a brief and say, do we have KPIs on there? Like, really understand what your stakeholders are trying to achieve. Where are they in that journey with that? Maybe what things they have tried in the past and what's failed because oftentimes that tells you where some scars are and where they might be resistant if you're coming out and and proposing a solution or even proposing to test something in a certain way.

Know what the trade offs are and the nuances of that. And the more conversant you as a leader can be and your team can be, the better.

And then take the time to share with your business stakeholders why you have confidence in your UX insights. And so, I've spent a good amount of time the last couple of years trying to prove, you know, the value of qualitative research. You know, I still get the question yet, but that's just five or eight people. Why are we gonna listen to that? Okay. Still having that conversation, but we're gonna, you know, push through to that. So it's always connecting what you're learning and what you set out to do, to how it can improve sort of the bottom line and sort of map it to those goals.

But to get over some of the qualitative research resistance, I'll call it, we do a couple of thing things.

One, if we feel like we have learned something in an individual study, we we have some signals or some trends, but we've heard this over time in other reports and studies. We just say that upfront. I mean, I've we've worked we have a couple of canned slides of, like, it's like, we're here, but, like, we've heard this before. This is how this all fits in. So while we might be coming at you talking, we've talked to ten target users, really, we're looking at hundreds at this point so we can sort of have confidence.

We really also work very closely with our, quantitative research, market research group, and we're always discussing the push pull, the need, the balance of quant and qual because that's the whole story.

We, bring our data scientists in really early. We ask a lot of data questions. I've surprised a lot of people when I joined and wanted to know what's converting, what's our churn rate, and this given UX flow, where's the abandonment? And they're like, well, that's cool that you're asking that. But but getting all of those points of view together is really, key to when you have the recommendations, you have the actual insights that you you can say, I have a lot of confidence in this because of x y z. And then on the flip side, really being honest about, like, hey, this might be a new signal or this might be something that we really should validate before we make this change. Maybe we wanna have a quant follow-up study before we, I don't know, flip check out on its head.

But be honest and open about that and have discussions about that. I feel like that goes a long way of sort of being honest about, like, where are where are you again on that confidence scale of your insights and what else is needed?

I think I could we could talk forever about this. Yes. Yeah. But that's those are stuff.

I was just gonna add in real quick, like, like, what on on my side, you know, employee facing tools, some if we make a big mistake, that can really make a huge dent inefficiency for some for a place like Best Buy. And if we're not finding a cheap way to test ideas and to fail, that could be really expensive for us. And, you know, like like you said, like, having those kinds of insights, but also really understanding the business of where we could, you know, make better efficiencies, where we can help our partners sometimes with the knowledge that we have based on what we know from our, you know, from all of our testing and all of our knowledge that our partners may not realize because they're so focused on making money, you know.

I think I'd like to build on on that point of data. Data is super powerful.

When we show to our people people in product roles and technical roles, they are very analytical. Like, they think from numbers perspective. They are not always very, convinced on the qualitative side, the empathetic side of design. Right?

So when we come with data and numbers and we show them those numbers, it really helps them. For us, for example, numbers would be, like, people visiting our site, people failing in certain task, people achieving a certain task. Right? But then we get further nuance in terms of who these customers are.

If we can tie a story with those numbers and build that story upon with qualitative research, that's incredible to get the buying that you guys are looking for. Yeah.

It makes a huge difference. Fantastic.

K. So for this next question, I'd like for you to tap into your crystal ball. Did you bring them today with you? You did? Okay.

You're good.

Okay. But let's talk about how you think about the future of design and how it's evolving.

There have been a lot of conversations about accessibility and more inclusive design, but it's evolving and it's changing. Where do you see this evolving over the next five years or so?

Nicole.

So I think about this question, a couple of different ways. So one from news and media products.

There's just sort of a big gap in understanding across the age demographics of things I think that the industry has taken for granted before. And so, an example of that is when we do testing, whether we're trying to change a staff bio or we're changing a layout for an article design, we're moving elements around. Our younger demographic are expressing that they don't quite understand the difference between straight up reporting and opinion piece or something from an editorial. So to being inclusive of, like, the context that our different user base might have and that right now it's really important to, be credible and authoritative and be a trusted source of information.

I see us having to go extra lengths and really think differently about how we share the information, show what the source is, show what the process it was for the journalist to get that information out there.

As, you know, generative AI is playing sort of a big role in our industry right now, like being transparent if say, audio was generated by GenAI, or, you know, if if an image was like how transparent we need to be in our product experience is something that we are just beginning to grapple with. Don't have all the answers.

But on the flip side, we've long known that people consume information differently. People have different needs as it relates to really understanding information.

But it's really hard to design, like, take a piece of content and design it five different ways for five different user needs. We are starting to experiment with generative AI in in ways of like taking a straight up full long form article, scraping that data and then reproducing it whether it could be bulleted summaries for a user type that needs sort of a quick scan or flipping that into audio for people who need to hear it rather than read it or maybe they can't read it or flip it into video and people, some people process information better from quick little bite sized information that they can sort of swipe through.

I'm excited by that as a future because, like, again, we've all we've long known that consumption, modes, and needs differ. We just really haven't had the resources at scale to bring that to our user base. And we're starting to maybe see some light there that, that could become a reality for us. That's great. Yeah.

And, Veronica, how are you looking at inclusive design at United Airlines?

For us, accessibility and inclusive are twofold. A, the customers were interactive with their digital channels.

Require government mandate. We have to be accessible. Their website works and all of those things. But the biggest challenge that we work with are, folks who travel with us with disabilities. Right? With someone traveling with a wheelchair, someone has, like, temporary disabilities or supermanently disabilities.

How we tailor their experiences is something we are really emphasized at United right now. For example, we just launched a new tool.

When you are booking a flight, you can actually provide the details of the wheelchair if you're traveling with it, and then we'll cater the search results to tell you which flight would fit that wheelchair. It's huge in terms of the it cut down the cost for, like, call centers where people are asking, yeah, I need to travel with a wheelchair, and you are being on hold with the amazing music that always plays when you are on foot hold.

But it also helps and empowers our customer. It they feel more trust when they're traveling with us because they know we care. They know that we understand them. They know that you we are caring for them, and we are being proactive about their needs.

So then that instills a trust at the beginning of their journey. I think the other things that we are looking for are more like cool on the similar lanes. It's like AI innovations in terms of what can we do being mindful about our customers. Because in that huge customer base, we have baby boomers and we have generation alpha traveling with us.

These are completely different needs of customers. Someone that texting age versus someone that calling age, how do we cater to both of those people? Right? So thinking about conversational search, using voice as a search.

These are the things that we are tinkering on at United right now to really include them in our experiences so that we can help you and cater you in terms of whatever is your comfort level. So we reach out to you rather than you having to adapt to us, from your digital experiences.

And, Tara, do you have anything similar that you're doing? So Best Buy?

And I have very similar, like, even though she's an airline, I'm a retailer. Like, our customers are actually very similar because Best Buy is everybody. And then from our the people that we hire to be Geek Squad agents, sometimes they're right out of high school, and some of them have been working with us for twenty years and they're older. So they're interacting with software differently.

So accessibility inclusivity has been top of mind, and my team hasn't actually really considered that much. It's been an afterthought up until I started on this team. And so something when we started doing our vision work and started thinking about, how we wanted the future of the software to be, accessibility needed to be one of the first things that we do, not one of the last things that we do as a checkbox. And it goes beyond checking, you know, color contrast and things like that.

So recently, I went into the store I went into the stores and I talked to over thirty agents over a week. And I discovered that, you know, probably, like, twenty percent of them were, colorblind and had dyslexia.

And that was something that nobody had ever talked about. We'd never tried to design for that. And there are so many pieces of our software that are color coded red as, like, an action item. Like, like, this does not work for those people because we found out that those handful of people that were color blind, they actually see it as green, which is the opposite of, like, the action that's red.

So this is not we need to use different colors. We need to be careful about the icons that we're using, but it goes beyond that. You need to think about the environment that somebody is using your product. Like, think about are they walking around in a noisy environment?

Are they gonna be riding their bike when they're using your product?

Is somebody gonna be pregnant whenever they're using, you know, on your journey? Like, you know, think about all those other things that you need to do to be inclusive as well as the language that you're using and the images that you're showing. Those are also really important because I think most of us know here that representation matters. And when you see someone that looks like you and the things that you're using, that's really impactful. Mhmm.

I'd like to build on that. I think language, is something that I'm very passionate about. I'm an immigrant. I'm not from here. I do not understand a lot of cultural references as well.

Sometimes I'm sitting in a room and people are talking about some random jargon industry, American language, and I would not get it at all. So I'm always very mindful when we are building these experiences for our international travelers as well because we have a huge customer base. Even people living in America like me for a decade, I might not understand few words because that's not the vocabulary I'm used to. I'm someone who's always confused between the British spelling of colors and American spelling of colors because that's just my mind, how I've been conditioned.

Right? So it's always very powerful to understand the type of customers. And we work with a great editorial team, to really help us build language that a five year old, not five year old, I think it's eight years old can understand from different experiences. So that's like it's not always thought of.

Like language isn't always like a big criteria for inclusive design, but it is a very powerful one.

Yes. Yeah.

And one last thought. Again, I think we could go on forever about this topic.

Being inclusive in your recruiting for your test participants, making sure that you're testing with, a broad spectrum of users as well as just not just thinking about the design for them.

So I I know we're running close to time, but I've just got one more question for you all. I am sitting here very inspired by you all, just the journey that you've been on as I'm sure many people in the audience are. And what I'm I'm just kinda dying to know from you is if you were gonna do this all over again or you had some advice just to impart on us today, if someone who's maybe in the middle of the journey, what would you tell us just to keep going?

I'd say get comfortable with being uncomfortable and pushing yourself in arenas that you probably didn't think you would be if you're in design and wanna be a design leader. So again, it's the business acumen. I mean, what are we doing? Oftentimes, we're just bringing about change. So learn about change management and become conversing in that because that's gonna come up. Yeah.

Negotiating and stakeholder management, all of these really sexy sounding things, but that becomes increasingly part of what your day to day life is.

Mhmm. Great.

I'll same. So, like, I've mentioned before, relationship building is a is a big thing that I wish that I had more courage to do because, you know, as somebody who works in an organization where UX design is pretty new, I really have to kind of shove my way a seat at a table sometimes.

And, you know, if somebody said, no. No. You don't need to be there. I would kind of before, I would kinda be like, yeah.

Okay. I I guess I don't need to be there. But now I'm definitely a lot more I need to be there because I'm representing, you know, so many people that I'm designing for, and my voice needs to be there so that I can represent all these people. So that's something that I've been learning that I wish that I had done a lot earlier.

And, you know, not just speaking up for myself and speaking up for a UX designer or UX research, but also sticking up for the person that I'm designing for and what they need and what they what their pain points are because those things can get lost very easily when you're having those business conversations.

And I think it's really important to to make sure that you're building good relationships so that you have a safe environment to step up.

Yeah.

I think, similar for me is the a lesson that I learned, over time is don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to speak your mind. Don't be afraid to speak your opinion because the best idea should not always trickle down. Like, some people have been in their roles for a very long time. They're stuck on certain ideas. When you speak up, take the courage to speak up, and you never know what conversations you would spark. And I think the other thing that I am very passionate about and I hold, I try to keep very true to that is just be nice.

Just be nice to everyone around you. It makes your day easier because work shouldn't be stress. It should be fun. And when you're nice to people, they tend to agree with you more.

I agree. You can get what you've done, what you want, a lot more if you're just kind. Be kind.

That's a great note for us to end on. Be kind to everyone. Please join me in thanking our panelists for being here.