The Latest in Product Design Trends and Technologies I TechTrends I J.P. Morgan

foreign [Music] s techtrends is a podcast series it provides perspective on the latest trends in technology fintech and digital in today's episode we're going to talk about the principles of product design and how technology is enabling future advancements and expanding the landscape I'm Anish Bomani Chief product officer for Commercial Banking and joining me today is Karen Hanson Chief design officer for Consumer and Community banking here at JPMorgan Chase Karen welcome to Tech trends wow thanks Anish I'm really happy to be here product design is a growing industry and it used to only include specialty roles like UI designers or ux or things like that but that's changing now right with customers wanting easier to use more personalized Services can you describe in your own words what product design is today and how it's evolved in the digital age yeah what I would say is product designers are thinking a lot more about what we are doing as well as how we might do it in a way that helps customers to feel very positively about it so product designers think a lot about what is the benefit to the customer is that benefit compelling and if not how can we make it more compelling as well is it easy to obtain that benefit and finally does it make people feel good and those are essentially the three vectors that matter and in order to accomplish that yes visual design still matters right colors and fonts and weights padding but more so even it's about the customer journey and it's about thinking through the actual experience they are going to be having the highs and the lows and how we might make the highs higher and the lows lower so it involves things such as you know Journey Maps it involves really deeply understanding that customer it also involves making sure the broader team meaning product management technology data and design that they all have deep empathy for that customer and that they're working together around the same customer problem and they're also working together around the same metric for Success how do you make sure all those folks are aligned like that right it's one thing to say you have empathy for a customer it's another thing to actually experience what that customer is going through and what their what their hopes and dreams are and what they try to do in their day-to-day life or anything like that how do product teams designers Engineers sort of get that sort of proximity to the customer alrighty so you know asking how we keep people aligned is a really great question and especially how do we keep the broader team aligned around the customer the best method we have found is to make sure that that quad the engineers designers product managers and also data scientists are all understanding that customer together and they're looking at them from the customer's perspective so for example in our payments organization we brought together about a hundred people and we also brought together about 40 customers and we did co-design sessions with those customers over a two-day period and the focus wasn't on a particular type of payment or the actual mechanics around the payment but it was around understanding how do people think about paying their friends and their family and their bills and how do they juggle that and what that activity did is it helped the team understand customers have that shared understanding and also incredibly importantly understand how their sliver that they might be working on fits into the broader part of that customer's life so that's a great way to align the team and to ensure that as we go into 2023 we're all operating with similar context yeah I think that's a great point I mean basically what you're saying is get proximate to the customer and what they're trying to do right one of the one of the the first things that I remember learning in this space is hey look you don't want to serve customers the way you want to serve them you want to serve them the way they want to be served and like they don't live to deal with banking they have their lives they want to deal with and baking is just part of that so how do you become part of their experience and their goals and things like that it sounds like that's a lot of what you focus on there too absolutely and frankly in the absence a very deliberate and explicit focus on the customer in their experience it's all too easy for us to start to design according to our organizational structure and no customer cares about our organizational structure Conway's law is Alive and Well in in American Business right so so with the acceleration of Technology driving client and customer need needs and we talk a lot about the consumerization of banking as people get used to certain experiences in their day-to-day life how do you design to keep Pace with Trends especially at a global firm the size of JPMorgan Chase no so what we look at when we go into a space is we don't only look at what are we doing and what are other people that are in our same space doing but we also look at very analogous experiences which is important for inspiration and again no matter what product you're working on whatever your customer does with your product is a very tiny slipper of their day and they're spending much more time using other experiences than they are yours right so it's very important we'd be thinking about what's great out there to bring in now I will say with technology there's so much going on that is tremendously exciting right whether it's AI you know stronger predictive models whether it's you know moving to the cloud which allows us to innovate more quickly all of that is all to the good and again we still need to stay grounded on what's the customer problem that we're trying to solve with stronger Technologies we're able to take riskier bets because we're able to test those through a b testing and through small samples even more rigorously which allows us to have greater confidence right without data it's hard to be as bold as you can be with data yeah and you talked a lot about the quad the the product leads the design leads the engineering technology leads and the data leads how do designers and technologists at I would say data scientists and product folks collaborate to bring a product to market right how do you find that right balance between you know pushing the envelope with technology and the creative and the customer needs and the things like that yeah I mean I think that a lot of it is getting grounded on the customer problem you're trying to solve and how you're going to measure success then being very explicit in your rationale of why you're doing what you're doing and why you're making the decision that you're making so for example you know product management one of the areas of tremendous value that they add is the alignment around that goal and also inspiring the team towards a very Clear Vision in addition their job is to prioritize but to prioritize with a very strong rationale that everybody else can get behind similarly on the design side the designer's job is to figure out is the customer benefit strong enough if not what else do we need to do and how might we create an experience in which people are not only successful but feeling good often in our space it's about feeling confident and about feeling smart and again the designer has to be incredibly explicit with their rationale so everybody else can understand and push back if it doesn't make sense to them technology same thing why would we be using this stack birth this is that stack why is it worth it to invest an additional five months to move to a new technology it just has to be an explicit rationale and as long as the team is aligned we're good to go but again the different functions have different areas on which they're going to be making those particular calls yeah but I think that's an important point the alignment between those functions is really crucial because you know I've seen teams I'm sure you have as well where okay the product team cares about you know these outcomes for the business and the design Keen cares about this level customer satisfaction and the tech team cares about the modernization of the infrastructure or the you know the the stack that they're building on or things like that and really all three of those groups need to care about each other's areas as well right the product team does need to care that how do I you know modernize the stack so I can get to Market faster and the design team does need to care about the business outcomes and the product team does need to care about the customer satisfaction right so I think cross incentivizing those teams is really crucial absolutely and I'll tell you you know I've worked in the past at other companies one of the practices that those companies do very well is they are incredibly focused on making sure that team has concrete measurable goals and they're shared and in some cases teams are even ranked according to who exceeded expectations or did not exceed expectations and then after you rank those teams then you start to look at individual performance but if a team isn't killing it it's unlikely any of the individuals did as well right when which is again really an interesting model for saying guess what you are one team and you are going to thrive or not together right right coming back to design so speed to Market uh efficiency are very key to keeping companies competitive we're no different from anybody else around that and providing a great customer experience right you want to react quickly to what the what the market is telling you you want to Rack quickly to competitive Dynamics things like that as well how do you gauge a product success and how do you know when it might be time to Pivot I mean I think a lot of it has to do with you need to look at the base rates you have for your own particular products right so I would always be looking at it as did it get the customer the value we expected so for example if we're going after a space where we believe that one of the outcomes we want is we want customers to save more money okay well then that's our measure for success and the question becomes using this particular feature or product did the customer save more money or not and how quickly did it take for them to save more money or not right and then in addition you want to see not only did people go to use it because that's an indicator it might be valuable but where they repeat users that's an even better indicator that it might be value valuable to them and ultimately again did they accomplish the goal that they wanted right did they get the benefit they were seeking then we can have other measures as well such as you know success rates is obviously an important usability metric but in addition how long does it take people to get that or what is the quality of the experience we're using something internally called CX gaps which are customer experience gaps and this is where the team including product management design lead technologists and Lead data scientist walk through the five most common flows and note all of the customer experience gaps that are present that's a great measure of quality so one of the things that's always interesting and you and I have talked in the past about the importance of measuring outcomes rather than delivery or things like that as well but a lot of those outcomes can be somewhat far off in the distance and hard to sort of get a read early on right yet sometimes you have to adjust as you go so how do you think about whether it might be leaving haters whether it might be you know some sort of early measures of success that you think are going to lead you to that Downstream sort of outcome that you're trying to get the customer benefit or things like that I think the framing of what's a leading indicator versus what's a lagging indicator that's very very important and so for example when you think about you know how are we helping customers to save more money a leading indicator might be are they engaging in a practice right or a tool that we believe will help that that's the leading indicator the lagging indicators did they actually put more money in their bank account right are they actually growing their savings so that's incredibly important but again I think the behavioral indicators are the best ones such as those success rates a lot of times people focus quite a bit on sentiment or what people report right self-report and there's nothing wrong with that that can be very useful inspirationally but I will tell you that because it is only a small sample of people that actually report and because there are so many confounding variables that can impact the results it's simply not nearly as useful as behavioral measures yeah I think that's another important Point too right because you know we traditionally I think as an industry have always relied on things like surveys or customer feedback or whatever but there's some often a difference between what people say and what people do right and you know there's now so many you know different and varied analytical tools that you can use to measure you know Mouse clicks and how long people hover over a certain part of the site and whatever and they say yeah I don't use that yeah but you know what 90 of the people are always going to that same part of the the page or that screen or things like that so I how do you think about blending both sort of those data benchmarks and behavioral measures that you mentioned there and things like customer service which still do have a place don't they they absolutely have a place and I think again if we go back to the framework of we need to provide a strong customer benefit right that value and it needs to be easy for them to get that and we want them to feel good then those really are the three bases for your measures one is did you get the outcome you're looking for the second is were you able to successfully get that success measures our behavioral and then finally how did you feel about it well that's sentiment right and sentiment matters and sentiment might be net promoter score it might be csat or osat or you know there's many many many out there and frankly I think what's most important is that you're leveraging what you did before so you can look for change over time the other bit I'll say around measurement is it's important not only to look at an A B test but to look at cohorts over time right so when people first start using something perhaps it's a little bit more um slow or inefficient for them but over time it may become even more efficient than what they had been doing previously so that's also important to be checking out you know that that's a you mentioned a b testing a few times right and first of all can you describe for people that aren't familiar with that term uh what that what that means and then secondly how you use that as part of the ongoing life cycle of a product and your design work yeah so I think the simplest way to talk about a b testing is actually in some ways the most superficial and the least exciting but it's simply like you know if you change the wording on a button and you send five percent of your population to that new button label do they click through more quickly are they more likely to go there than the population that did not see that button label change that's a very minor change you can also do that type of testing in which you know there's one variable that's different uh on a much bigger Paradigm shifts as well which allows you to really understand how are people operating differently or how are the outcomes changing depending upon the stimulus in this case the application or the style of application that you're putting in front of them but it's an incredibly effective tool for helping us to understand the impacts of what we're doing right and we can learn on just a smaller sample before we release something to the broader population so that is incredibly important for everyone to know and I expect our designers to be leaders in experimentation along with our data scientists it can't be something that's the data scientist job it has to be everybody on the quad is a part of it yeah one of the things I always like about a b testing is it allows you to isolate individual components and sort of look at root cause of things I remember an example with a product that we had a number of years ago and yeah we made a bunch of sweeping changes to it and didn't get the results we wanted out of that when we started to get into it it's like well we don't know what happened because we changed 16 things at once all to everybody right and it was only when you go back and you say okay do this one over here and what was the reaction you got okay that was good great now do this one over here and now do the two together and you can sort of you know we talk a lot about Agile development and and be able to move quickly and things like that enables you to sort of make small changes and increments and and sort of see the value or lack thereof of those rather than doing these big bang kind of releases where you know if something doesn't work you don't know why it doesn't work right say there's an important role for judgment as well and you know there's a story here when I first joined I've been here for about 18 months and we were doing a release of the bottom navigation and you know what we had was not ready for prime time um and there was a lot of pressure to put it out because you know name drop somebody important wanted it out by a certain date that's the word that was going around on the street and it's interesting you know it turns out that was a myth right that often uh people assume that very senior leaders want something out by a certain date but the reality is most cases those senior leaders want something of quality to go out something that's going to be positive for our customers and so in this case we just had a conversation with this very senior leader and said hey we can release it in June and it's going to be mediocre at best or we can release it in August and it's gonna be pretty darn good and the team's gonna feel proud and the person was like well of course you should release it in August right but it's interesting that in some cases there are these assumptions that are out there the date matters lot more than it does and in some cases day matters but often it is not nearly as important as we think it is and quality and that judgment matters as well yeah that's a great Point that's a great Point uh let's shift gears a little bit to people right so uh technological advancements have completely revamped product design as we once knew it right what do today's product design workers look like here at JPMorgan Chase or in your career what you've seen and what skills do product designers need to have and what are you looking for when you grow your team yeah I mean so there are certain tools that product designers use but frankly the tools are not differentiators uh because anyone can learn any tool right that's not the value the real value is in the solving of customer problems and solving them in such a way that customers can't imagine going back to what they had before but I would say as well that it is increasingly important for people to understand technology and even for there to be some coding expertise and ability we've actually recently launched career Pathways in the product design space and we have about you know 18 different skills that are important and people are choosing which ones are going to be their Majors if you will and which ones will be their minors we don't expect everybody to be good or even okay at all 16 of these but importantly one of those vectors is about front end coding right and Technology because without knowledge of how the systems work we simply cannot be effective that does not mean that the customer's experience reflects how the systems were work shouldn't right but that means we know enough that we can help the team think through how else might we do this I think that's an important point just having an appreciation for all the components that go into the product and how it all fits together and you know also might Identify some constraints that you have to work with that you weren't aware of or uh you know help you remove some constraints that might exists uh that people hadn't thought about before there as well absolutely and I will say as well the other bit that we've been working a lot on with the team is helping everybody to look at that end-to-end experience because in many cases it's very easy depending upon how the organization works for people to Simply look at the part of the product or the product that they have full control over as opposed to thinking well what happens when someone goes from the mobile app into the branch yeah oh does that work and what happens when you move into a zoom call with your advisor how do you work together on the artifacts that are in front of you so those are very important as well for us to elevate the altitude at which we're looking and also to frankly make sure we're looking through the lens of that individual who that we're serving yeah I think that focus on the end-to-end experience is really important right because a lot of people tend to think about okay well you're just described designing the the front end the screens that people go to or how easy it is to find certain things and yeah that's a big part of it but you know something I've been saying now for years is like the experience is the product right it's it's not just how do you buy something it's how do you buy something and get it delivered all the way to your house in a reasonable time or how do you deal with customer service issues when they come up or what happens when you get off the happy path is exactly the design so all of that has to come into sort of Designing that end-to-end experience would you say absolutely you know and it's interesting there are always some experiences out there that are good ones to point to and frankly even in the electric car space there's been a ton of work around the experiences that literally go from consideration all the way through to servicing and you know beyond yeah um one question I always like to ask is we are a large company one of the largest in the world right but not everybody has the resources of a JPMorgan Chase right so what advice would you give to small companies that might not have their own design teams or to have just a handful of people but are looking to keep Pace with the evolution of product design and stay competitive yeah I mean I think what I would say is you know there's two areas I would focus on one is really understanding your customer and spending time with them and getting to know what is it that they're trying to do but most importantly why right to ask like the seven whys why is that why is that important why is that important that will help you get down to true what is truly valued the other bit I would say is to look at items such as a journey map observe your customer trying to accomplish their goal and see how are they doing it when are they writing on sticky notes when are they grimacing right what are the highs and the lows and then you can take a step back and think about well how might we do this differently the other bit I would say is when you do have screens which you probably will you can print those out and you can show them to customers you can say great circle on here everything you use on a daily basis cross on anything you don't use more than once a quarter you would be surprised by how much we internally may think something is important whereas the customer doesn't actually ever use it right so these are some very basic techniques to help make sure that that customers experience is at the Forefront I would also say there are a number of design pattern libraries out there that can be used you can run with those using what people are already used to is never a bad idea yeah so I think the messages really get proximate to the customer you know understand what their issues are watch them work uh let's say one of the most eye-open experiences I ever had was with one of the products we use internally we're watching somebody describe how she uses it says okay well I love this thing over here I don't know what this big thing is over here and everybody's Quest falling because they spend 90 of the time building this thing over here that nobody ever used and and you know the aha moment was hey you know if we had this conversation six months ago we could have saved ourselves a lot of time absolutely yeah and that's you know and again I think that what's important also for our employees is that there's really three factors that motivate people and help them feel satisfied at work one is their purpose to their work it often is going to revolve around the customer whether that customer is you know a consumer on the street or an internal developer or an employee in the call center or in the branch but is there a purpose the second one is is there clear progress that they're making which goes back to that outcome and that metric that teams can use to see the impact that they're having and then finally do they have enjoyable relationships with the people around them that's great that's a great framework to think about it right so do you like what you do are you making a difference can you measure your success and do you like the people you work with that's a great uh that's a great way to think about it yeah so Karen I'm gonna ask you to get out your crystal ball and look forward however far you want to look forward couple years five years ten years what is the future of product design look like and what exciting Trends do you see emerging yeah there's going to be a lot to do around anticipation and so how are we being predictive in ways that are very helpful to people and that help them feel comforted as opposed to irritated right and so I'll even just give you a simple example um when I go to you know when I get in my car in the afternoon uh the car often assumes that I'm going to my daughter's school and it is wrong a lot of the time uh although I often drive to her school I don't always drive to her school and so when I am being told that I'm going to the wrong place when I'm going to pick up some groceries it's incredibly irritating so that is a mistake in anticipation so the question becomes how are we able to anticipate more accurately and or how do we allow there to be a graceful shift when we are predicting incorrectly right so again in order to do that we have to be thinking through what might happen what else might happen what else might happen and how do we do those graceful you know oh sorry right or oh looks like uh looks like you're actually not going here right how do we start to fade that out or do so in a way that is amenable to the experience right so I think that's going to be a huge area of focus I also think that we're continued to see focus on micro transitions we're going to see a lot more animation in order to better highlight what's important or not particularly as we're increasingly on the move all right as we're starting to see our experiences increasingly in autos and in other areas because again it becomes what's most important and what's not as important and those micro interactions are going to be important signals it's fascinating right it's always interesting to think about how different people consume different things we always talk about designing for you know today we talk about designing for mobile first right to keep it easy because everybody wants everything on their phone but my point is you can design it for a five inch screen you're going to have to make it simpler even if it's on a much bigger screen if you think about the car it's the same sort of thing if you're designing it to be done in a car while you're driving even if you're not driving in the car and you're sitting at a desk it's going to be that much easier to use absolutely and there's so much more noise already right between the map and between you know the acceleration and and end well Karen thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your great insights on this important topic oh it's my pleasure thank you so much for having me and to all of our listeners if you enjoyed this episode remember you can subscribe and rate US on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen tune in next time foreign [Music]

2022-12-21 00:50

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