Research Resources and Applied Research

Editor's Notes

• #2: As a user experience practitioner, I am fortunate because Wells Fargo has a wealth of resources including dedicated research teams and access to leading industry research sources. Customer Insights, which is part of my customer experience team, manages internal research programs including user tests, collecting and analyzing customer feedback from surveys and customer service contacts, and ethnographic research. This work is used by customer experience and business teams to inform everything from high-level strategy to discrete design decisions. Ethnographic research is our most comprehensive and powerful research tool because it: - Provides a deep understanding of our customers, how they interact with Wells Fargo, and their day-to-day financial behaviors, habits and long-term goalsIllustrates primary customer scenarios and use cases. Some of these scenarios may have particular attributes or constraints that carry implications on how to design the ideal experience. Identifies any issues that customers experience in real-life situationsEnables us to find opportunities for new features and innovations. Whenever we gather real-life, contextual user feedback, there are inevitably useful surprises and “a-ha moments”
• #3: Using the findings from our ethnographic research, Customer Insights developed Customer Personas, “archetypes” that represent customer characteristics, behaviors, tasks, goals, and challenges. This research, along with other business and financial data, also helped us develop the Task Model, a tool that represents all of our customers’ financial tasks along with the frequency, importance, online criticality (how important is it for users to do this task online) and financial impact (as rated by business stakeholders) for each task. UX designers work closely with product managers and business stakeholders, using the personas and task model, to create customer scenarios for each project. These scenarios illustrate use cases and identify the important tasks and challenges that ultimately drive the design and content strategy. Other research, including competitive analyses and user tests, is also used throughout the design process.Recently mycustomer experience team has been also been developing an approach called service design, which is the evolution of user-centered design. Up to now, user-centered design has been grounded in the screen, facilitating online and mobile tasks. Service design, however, recognizes that customers have experiences before, during, and after their screen experience, and just as importantly,  every team member charged with helping the customer, directly or indirectly is also having an experience that impacts their ability to serve the customer. To create the best holistic customer experience, you also have to consider team member experience. Service design is a research and design methodology that allows us to uncover broken experiences and fix them—and it even suggests where there might be opportunities to provide a “signature moment.”