Integrating UX Into A Traditional Culture

Annmarie Kiddle at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/mYMdQnQXLZk

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The Financial Times and its engagement score

[00:00:01] I'm Annmarie, and I'm head of UX at the Financial Times. I was brought in about two and a half years ago to bring in the UX capability and to grow a team, which I'm doing, and they're all brilliant. I've been in digital for about 20 years, and I've been in UX since 2000, so I've been doing it for decades.

[00:00:29] How many of you here have heard of the Financial Times? That's a pretty good majority of you. This year it's 130 years old. We've been writing about financial and business news for the last hundred years plus. How many of you read the Financial Times on a daily or weekly basis? Ah, a few of you. You guys are smart. Well, I'm not surprised that the majority of you don't, because it's actually quite an expensive service. Those of you that do are one of our 920,000 paying customers, and I imagine, because you're here at this conference, you're one of the 720,000 digital-only subscribers.

[00:01:22] If you are one of those people, you'll know that we operate a strict paywall, and we were pretty much innovators in that space. When everyone went online, publishers said, oh, content should be free, content should be free. But we've got an amazing journalist team, an amazing newsroom at the Financial Times, and what we write about is really valuable, and the business said, no, we need to make people pay for this, whether they're accessing it via digital or not. We're a publisher, but commercially we're a subscription-based digital company. The majority of the business runs through technology. All of our content, which is getting far richer and far more digital, from a journalist in the newsroom, is delivered through technology. It's a full tech stack.

[00:02:19] So why am I here to talk about introducing UX into a traditional culture, especially as our biggest measure of success is our engagement score? The technology team, the engineers at the FT, have built our own analytics tool. The newsroom uses it to see which topics and articles they're writing about are trending, but we also use it in the product team to measure how successful the things we're designing are. We do that with a score, a calculation of three things: recency, how recently you've been to the site; frequency, how often you come; and volume, how much content you consume when you're there.

Why design needed to change

[00:03:12] We're a very evidence-based business. We've got this technology, we've got the data, we've got analytics. But the reason we weren't designing things well enough, and the reason we weren't designing things that really delivered the content to our readers, was that we weren't customer-centered enough, and UX is all about customer centricity. You had product, delivery and technology teams working really well together, but the design team was sitting over there on a table. Somebody talked about pixel-perfect designs: really perfecting their designs, not talking to tech. They'd hand it over, and tech would say, well, I'm not building that. It just wasn't very collaborative, so we had to change it.

[00:03:58] When I came in, I really wanted to help everyone understand this. People think of design as just the look and feel, just the interaction, just the usability. No, it's not, not at all. It's about solving real customer problems. You guys will know that, because that's what you do on a regular basis, but lots of people in businesses don't realize that, at the end of the day, what your customers are using is about how we solve the problems properly, and that's from tech to design.

[00:04:33] So we needed to get our stakeholders on board. We also needed to get away from the things you've been talking about in this conference as well, stakeholders demanding requirements, the newsroom coming to us and saying, we want to do this, we should be doing this. We had to help them realize that actually it's about understanding what your objective is and what your customers need, and finding the right solution for that. More importantly, it was about helping the delivery teams understand how UX and design thinking could influence the way they were designing and building products.

Finding our version of lean UX

[00:05:17] So what made the difference? What did we do? We had to find our version of lean UX. We've seen a thousand diagrams at this conference, which is great, because everyone's got a slightly different process. But Lean UX is a great book, by Jeff Gothelf; I think that's how you pronounce his name. If you haven't read it, read it, because it's great. He talks about removing waste, validating regularly, and getting away from a deliverables business, so it is about outcome-driven design. But I think what's really important is making sure that the classic part of the design process, really understanding customers, their behaviors, their attitudes, their pain points, defining what those problems might be, and then finding the solution for them, is part of what we should be doing.

[00:06:09] The first change, very simple, is just to get to know our customers, really obsessively. Our customers are really time-poor. Lots of businesses say their customers are time-poor, but there's a lot taking their attention, and they need to know that they've read everything they could to make them look great. They're a variety of different people. We have CFOs, down to the real people on the ground who are putting reports together. Lots of different people need to use our product, and we need to know why, and then it's about incorporating that throughout the iterations and the life cycle of the product.

[00:06:55] A couple of things we do at the Financial Times: we've got a fantastic research team. We're very privileged; we've got a great research team, and we've brought them more into the fold, using the research that the business has done on its customers and really bringing that into the product process. That's our boardroom. It's very nice, it's on the river in London, and we get people to come in. We call them customer councils, and we get them to tell us how they use the product and what they need it for, and really interesting things come out of that.

[00:07:37] One thing that did come out of it was this. We also have a paper, and a lot of customers said, well, I can complete the paper, but when I go online I can't complete it. It's such a different mental model. You might roll your eyes, but for them, they know they've captured all that daily information. So it was about finding out why they thought they couldn't find it all online, and we came up with some ideas to help them keep up with all of that information on a daily basis, which are more around following topics.

Collaborative ideation and the wider picture

[00:08:23] The other thing we've introduced is getting everyone to ideate collaboratively. It's really, really important for everyone, including stakeholders, to actually ideate together. When we run design sprints and design sessions, the developers and the customer services people are there. We're doing it collaboratively together, and some of the best ideas come out of those sessions. And no more rock stars. As designers we all like to think we've got the best idea, but actually everyone's got ideas, and ideas can come from anywhere. So it's about the team doing it together.

[00:09:09] The other thing we wanted to introduce was designing features in the context of the wider picture. One thing I did with the team when I first joined was getting them to do a touch point map. We talked about journey mapping; Richard from Capital One did a great presentation about digitizing this and making it a real-time tool, and I definitely think that's the next wave for this kind of tool. But what it does help you do as a designer is look at the customer journey end-to-end, through the funnel from acquisition and subscription through to heavy engagement, super engagement. It really helps you understand all those parts of the process, and by doing this exercise we actually uncovered a really good idea for improving the way we delivered messages on the site that was more holistic.

[00:10:11] The other thing is working closer with the design system. If you're familiar with the FT, and probably FT engineering, because it's pretty good, you might have read some of our blogs, and you might be aware of Origami, which is the way we document our design patterns. But we'd got to the stage where designers weren't feeding into Origami, and the developers who were building Origami were sitting in a silo again. So we brought them back into the fold.

How teams changed

[00:10:44] How have teams changed? Fundamentally, we've embedded UX and UI into the teams. We run streams across different programs, so FT.com has different streams across the funnel: one in conversion, one in retention, one in personalization. We make sure those teams sit together, work together and collaborate together. You'll have a handful of developers, a UX, a UI, a BA and a product manager working together, and user experience is at every stage of the product life cycle: discovering and defining what the problem is, understanding the problem and why you're doing it, through to ideating, prototyping, then testing it with users, iterating and deploying it. The whole team needs to be aware of the success of the product they're building for their customers at each point, and share that together.

[00:11:48] But we didn't just roll this out big bang. We had to start small, test it and scale, the best way to do anything. We started with a couple of teams, and success grew from people working more collaboratively together, and we were delivering really good stuff. Now, the thing people ask me for most is, have you got any UX designers? I'm like, God, if I could hire them fast enough I would give you one right now, because it's the best thing.

[00:12:22] The other thing we've done, to ensure consistency overall across several teams, is that there's a principal UX designer and a principal UI designer who are there to coordinate the consistency and the quality of the user experience across the whole thing. So teams working in conversion are still designing the same kind of customer experience for the FT that people in engagement and personalization are designing.

Results and what's next

[00:12:55] Ultimately, it has made a difference. We've got better journeys through our site. We validate ideas quickly. You can come up with several ideas, get them in front of our customers in those customer councils, get the feedback and the insight, and it really helps us develop products quicker. We've got a more joined-up experience across channels. We have a responsive site and an app, and we need to ensure the experience is consistent across both. It's not going to be exactly the same, because we need to be using more native things in the app, but it's cohesive: when you come and access anything at the FT, it's a recognizable experience, and it's an FT experience.

[00:13:47] We're building something called x-components as well, and the developers can tell you far more about this. I'm sure there's a blog post on it. We're designing the same component but releasing it to two different channels, so if you can, read about that, because it's really interesting. And ultimately it's led to more successful outcomes. We increased click-through rates on the onward journey when we improved the component at the bottom of the page for recommended stories. Just updating that increased click-through rate by 15%. Introducing topic-based onboarding, which seems very simple now, rather than article-based onboarding, actually helped raise click-through rates to the myFT experience by 20%. And ultimately we've got happier teams and happier stakeholders, and that's a much better measure of success for delivering great products.

[00:15:00] But nothing's perfect. You'll never get it right, and we've still got lots to do. Even though we understand our customers, we've got our personas and we're finding out about them all the time, we don't really have anything in our physical working space that reminds us of them every day. So we need to start getting some visible artifacts on the walls, so everyone is reminded who they're designing for. Then there's striking the balance between the discovery, the learning, and actually the making. I think that's always a challenge. Designers always want to discover more than they sometimes have time for, but ultimately it's about shipping stuff, so it's getting that balance right. And then it's about maturing our design systems. And we're hiring, so if anyone is interested in a UX job at the FT, please let me know. Thank you very much.