Parallax scrolling One Pager for Avance - a web-based app that helps biologists analyze and visualize large data sets. Great to see more Single Page sites in this sector.
by Rob Hope via One Page Love
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Interview: How CarTrawler Stays Focused on the Customer Experience
Customer-centricity is essential to building meaningful relationships with customers. And ultimately, your organisation’s success.
In this interview, Deborah Clarke, Director of UX at CarTrawler talks to Sofia Quintero, Founder at NomNom. They discuss the interdependent roles of User Experience and Customer Experience, and why testing and communication are critical keys to organisational success.
Deborah Clarke, Director of UX at CarTrawler
Hi Deborah! To get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about CarTrawler and your role there?
My role is Head of UX but in reality, UX as a function in CarTrawler is actually more like a full product development team. I currently manage a team of Engineers, Researchers, Product Managers and Designers, who are all working towards producing and creating the best possible product that we can for our users.
It’s actually quite refreshing to have UX as a core part of what we do – rather than being restricted to the design discipline. In this way, everyone on the team owns UX and it has become synonymous with Product Development.
Our mission as a company is about simplifying how the world travels through innovative technologies. I suppose you could say we’re sort of like a hybrid of a travel company and a technology company.
What’s it like to run product and design and UX in such a large company as opposed to, say, early-stage start-ups that have a smaller structure and fewer people?
I think when you’re in a small team, it’s very easy to get everyone to buy into the same purpose, mission and ideas. But as you broaden the team and the organisation itself grows, broader commercial mandates and objectives come into play.
I think that’s when it becomes even more important to focus on clarity of purpose and efficient delivery. More specifically, crafting a compelling roadmap and building a culture across the team around what we create and how we build.
How do you keep your mission and vision aligned with all your teams in a complex, multi-faceted environment?
‘Customer-centricity’ is a long-term goal for any organisation in that it takes a long time to build relationships with customers that are meaningful. Most businesses are inherently focused on shorter-term goals like revenue and profitability which can often challenge this thinking. However, short-term commercial goals are indeed necessary to get us to longer-term customer-centricity!
I think as you grow in an organisation, it’s about being clear about what it actually means to embody the customer and drive customer-centric thinking throughout the business. For me, it ultimately comes back to understanding what the end-customer really wants and building on that.
What is your definition of UX and how, if at all, is it different from customer experience?
I think customer experience is actually distinct from the user experience, in the same way that an offline interaction is different from an online interaction. When we craft our products, we do need to think about both the offline and the online experience. CX includes every touch-point a customer has with your brand, whether it’s contact via phone, in person or online. It’s really all-encompassing.
Whereas UX is specifically focused on the online experience that aims to actually make the product, website or app easy and enjoyable to use. I suppose that the distinction is there, but customer experience also encapsulates user experience and the two are inextricably linked.
For example, if a user experience includes an easy-to-use website when purchasing travel along with an app that helps with the journey, but the experience when reaching the customer service desk is poor, then the overall experience could be viewed negatively. Conversely, if you find it difficult to purchase travel on the website, you might never actually even get to the customer experience step. So I think the two need to be woven together in order to give customers a consistent experience, whether it’s online or offline.
Do you have within your organisation, a team that is focused on overall customer experience as well as the user experience, and do they overlap?
We have a UX Team, which is our Product Development Team, and then we have what we call our Customer Centre of Excellence (CCE). The latter handles most of the responsibility for the CX piece. Interestingly enough, however, our CCE recently produced a customer journey map to document what our customer experience actually involves – mapping all of the departments that actually affect each touch-point of that customer journey.
The most fascinating thing about this is that while one specific business unit is technically deemed responsible for customer experience, the customer journey map revealed that in fact, every single other department in the business also has influence on what that customer experience is going to look like in the end.
So rather than saying, “Yeah, we have the perfect solution,” I think sometimes, it’s around surfacing what you’ve learned and thinking about the ways in which the different business units are actually driving change within a customer’s experience. For instance, how Finance, Marketing or even just hiring the right people have as much of an impact and in some cases more of an impact on our customers. It’s about thinking that through and viewing things through a different lens.
So while we take responsibility for both within the organisation and within different departments, it’s actually incumbent upon all units and departments to understand what customer and user experience mean in practice.
What advice would you give to someone that is just starting their career in UX and may want, at some point in the future, to join a larger organisation like yours?
I think my advice is kind of two-fold – specifically in terms of UX and more generally, in terms of how we operate within these larger-scale organisations.
If we talk about UX specifically, I think the first thing I would say is work on the craft of understanding your end-user or customer. Because ultimately, you can’t get to where you’re looking to go without actually having an inherent passion or drive to understand what an end-user or a customer is actually looking for. That’s the foundation of engaging people with product, building things that they actually need, understanding why they need some things and not others. It also encompasses an understanding of the successes and failures of business – it’s as much about learning as anything else.
On a broader scale, certainly something I’ve learned through my own experience is the importance of mastering the art of efficient creation. I think, all too often, it’s very easy to get caught up in the research and forget to act. In reality, sometimes you just need to act because ultimately today’s digital world is moving at such a pace that we’re actually all struggling to keep up. The expectations of a user are changing every single day.
Recognize that we are operating in an environment that is constantly changing and evolving. The sooner you get things out there – and learn what works and what doesn’t – the better off you’re going to be.
Are there any common mistakes that people tend to make at the beginning of their careers that those reading this might be able to recognise in themselves?
Sure. I’ve seen lots of people thinking that they have the right solution without actually thinking about the end-user. Or embedding and investing so much into one area without thinking about the bigger picture. I also think getting caught up in the commercial reality can be negative to the creative process.
At CarTrawler, we do a lot of A/B testing on our products because we hold the philosophy that testing is actually for learning and the future success of our products. In other words, if you were to strictly look at A/B testing within a commercial environment, what people start to think about is the wins or the losses that come out of the A/B test.
So they start to say, “Oh, well, that led to an increase of X% in conversion,” and it’s all about whether that user converted or not. Sure this is an important success metric to measure, but sometimes it’s the losses that are actually our most valuable learning experiences. The more that we put the things that we’ve created out there and have them used and tested, the more we’ll learn. The future success of our products is dictated by the speed of our delivery and how our users respond.
Do you have any other advice or insights you’d like to share with our audience?
Yes, one final point. When we think about UX and CX we need be forward thinking about the integrated experiences they are – what it means to contextualise a customer’s or user’s experience in real time.
Phones are the devices that travel with us and therefore bridge the gap between UX and CX – they can tell us when to leave based on traffic conditions, order our coffee on the way to work, pay for our groceries through one tap – hubs of frictionless experience.
About CarTrawler: CarTrawler (www.cartrawler.com) is the world’s leading B2B technology platform. They build high-yield partnerships for travel businesses such as airlines, online travel agents and accommodation providers by connecting their customers with car rental, private transfers, bus and rail connections all over the world. CarTrawler also owns and operates Cabforce, Holiday Autos and arguscarhire.com brands and is located in Dublin, Ireland, with additional offices in Boston, London and Helsinki.
About Deborah Clarke: Deborah is the Head of UX at CarTrawler. Learn more about Deborah here.
About NomNom: NomNom is all your customer feedback and user research in one place. Learn from customer faster and share insights with your team easily. Learn more about NomNom here.
The post Interview: How CarTrawler Stays Focused on the Customer Experience appeared first on UX Mastery.
by Sofia Quintero via UX Mastery
5 Ways to Add Variety to Your YouTube Channel
Want to add more video to your YouTube channel? Wondering how to develop a content plan for YouTube? Adding the right variety of video to your YouTube channel is ideal for driving conversions and engagement. In this article, you’ll discover five types of YouTube video to add to your business channel. #1: Create a Featured Video [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
by Ana Gotter via
Interview with Kris Borchers, JS Foundation Executive Director
As part of Open Source Week 2016, we took a look at the JS Foundation, an organization whose mission it is to create a center of gravity for the open source JavaScript ecosystem. Backed by such big names as IBM and Samsung, they offer technical governance and mentoring to a host of well-known projects such as ESLint, jQuery, Lodash and Webpack.
Recently, we were lucky enough to catch up with Kris Borchers, the JS Foundation's Executive Director. We asked Kris all about the foundation, its inner workings and how people can get involved. Enjoy!
Elio: Thank you Kris for joining us today!
Kris: My pleasure.
Elio: For those that might not know you, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Kris: Sure. I started my career with a Bachelor of Applied Computer Science degree with which I could not get a job directly out of college, as the tech bubble had just burst. After teaching myself web development and working through a couple of jobs at small companies doing tech support to web consulting, I decided to go work at a university where I then also earned a Master of Applied Computer Science and an MBA. From there I took over the external web presence and intranet website and applications for a community college, and while there, began contributing to the jQuery project as my first venture into more than just consuming open source. I eventually earned my way onto the jQuery UI team and some time later while working as the JavaScript lead on a mobile team at Red Hat, I was asked to join the board of directors of the jQuery Foundation. Eventually the Executive Director at the time moved on to another opportunity and I interviewed and was hired for the role. Then, in October of last year I guided the jQuery Foundation through the transition to the JS Foundation and here we are today.
Elio: Wow. Quite a journey. Could you tell us more about how the jQuery Foundation transitioned to the JS Foundation? What role did you play in the process?
Kris: The JS Foundation was the natural evolutionary next step from the jQuery Foundation. I ran the jQuery Foundation as Executive Director for about 3 years. As we grew in terms of the number and types of projects we served, as well as the other initiatives we cared about, it became clear that an update to our name, brand and organizational structure was in order. I drove that process for about the last 1.5 - 2 years to get us fully transitioned into this new organization.
Elio: So what is the foundation attempting to do for the JS community/ecosystem?
Kris: We are working to create a center of gravity and focal point for innovation and collaboration across the entire JavaScript ecosystem.
Elio: Can you elaborate on what that means and on how do you intend to do it?
Kris: So one of the main ideas we have been talking about is the idea of innovating together and there are sort of 3 pillars to that idea: Community, Collaboration and Continuity. By fostering a large and healthy JavaScript community around the projects at the JS Foundation, we provide a location and mechanism that encourages collaboration within and among those projects as well as with the rest of the JS community. We then provide principles and guidelines for that community and the individual project communities to implement and follow which promote larger, more diverse contributor bases. This then leads to long-term stability and sustainability for the projects, or continuity, because having them all start with “C” looked and sounded better.
Elio: I see. How do you intend to encourage further innovative uses of JavaScript?
One area we are really starting to see growing interest and amazing use cases for JavaScript is in the IoT space. We currently have two projects really gaining steam in that segment in JerryScript and Node-RED.
JerryScript, originally created by Samsung, is an ECMA 5.1 compliant fully-functional JavaScript engine for memory constrained devices. This allows you to write JavaScript and run it on small microcontrollers with less than 64kb of RAM and less than 200kb of ROM and have direct access to device APIs which is pretty amazing.
Node-RED, originally created by IBM, is a flow-based programming environment built on Node.js – commonly used in the IoT space – and aimed at creating event-driven applications that can easily integrate APIs and services.
Between these two projects and a number of our other projects and partnerships, we will continue to push JavaScript deeper into IoT and other tech sectors.
Continue reading %Interview with Kris Borchers, JS Foundation Executive Director%
by Elio Qoshi via SitePoint
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