Steer away from your competitors:
Add UX claims to your unique selling points.
Most companies lack the capability to put a number on the user experience quality of their products. This is essentially the same as not being able to specify the battery life or the screen size of a smartphone.
This is about to change drastically.
The question is - will your company take the lead in providing data-driven UX claims?
Here is how you can do it.
We start by taking a look at typical technical claims and selling points.
When companies talk about the design qualities of their products, they make claims. Ideally, these claims relate to design qualities that are superior or unique to competitors. Hereby claims become selling points and unique selling points (USPs).
Such claims and unique selling points are well-known when it comes to the technical properties of products. Indeed they are often numerous and quite detailed for any product.
For instance, when we see new product presentations like those from Apple we typically see a lot of graphs that document the performance of the cameras, battery, screen - and the processer as shown in the image below. Such graphs tell a clear story about how and to what extent a competitor is outperformed. Furthermore, these technical claims are always supported by data.
When consumers and companies purchase products, the technical specifications can be gathered in a benchmark overview that allows us to compare products across a number of technical claims.
Below is an example of blood gas analysers used at hospitals.
Technical claims are here to stay, but they are very soon going to be supplemented with User Experience (UX) claims that are detailed, specific - and, most critically: supported with data.
User Experience (UX) claims and selling points.
Two products may have precisely the same technical specifications but still differ enormously in how well they work in the hands of people.
You have very likely experienced this first-hand across many types of consumer electronics, smartphone Apps and webpages. This is why we sometimes even want to pay a premium price for a product despite that it may have similar technical features and functions as a competitor.
Some years ago, IBM ran an internal experiment to explore the “total cost of ownership” of running PC versus Apple computers at their offices. Despite a much higher initial purchase cost per unit, it turned out that Apple computers over a four-year period saved 543 $ pr unit.
What these graphs do not tell us is the whole cost structure behind the help desk numbers. When an employee calls help desk, it is associated with non-productive time, lost work - and immense frustration. Linking the primary UX claims up with these derived effects is the essence of value linking that we will cover in a future article. Sign up to our newsletter below not to miss that one.
What we see here is the real-world difference between the user experience of the two products. This UX quality can be detailed and specified in the same way as technical specifications and thereby be communicated as a data-driven claim and selling point.
And here comes the kicker! VERY few companies - next to no one really - communicate the UX quality of their products beyond “intuitive” or “user friendly”. We are not told precisely how intuitive or how user-friendly.
These vague UX claims would be equivalent to just letting us know that the CPUs from Apple are “good at processing” and that the blood gas analysers are “good at analysing blood”.
In contrast, here is what a true and qualified UX claim looks like:
“The user interface is so intuitive that hospital staff can carry out the basic daily workflows without any training on how to use the new product”
This claim is a truly unique UX selling point as it addresses a pain point for hospitals when they roll out new medical devices.
Roll-out of new hospital devices typically requires that all staff that are to use it needs to attend formal training. That is a huge cost driver and disrupts the ongoing hospital production since critical staff have to be taken out of the daily schedule.
The value of this claim is thus very clear to procurement. Basically, the budget post to train the staff can be set to zero. Only newly educated nurses and doctors unfamiliar with this group of device needs to be trained. The cost saving for training can hereby be several hundred thousand of us dollars. The competitive advantage of such an intuitive advantage is thus clear and quantifiable once detailed to a true and qualified UX claim.
In addition to cost-savings on training, there are additional savings on what can be called “human capital”. Here is how that works. It is always an annoyance having to relearn how to do something you are already very familiar with on a new device. This is even more so for professionals.
The latter perspective, where we consider other derived benefits and positive consequences of a primary UX claim, we refer to as “value linking. Keep this in mind, as we will introduce that tool in a separate post. Sign up to our newsletter not to miss that post.
Now let us have a look at a different type of UX claim: the context of use claims.
Context of use claims
In the previous claim, we saw how a group of hospital staff could seamlessly transition from one device type to a new one without having to undergo any training. This tells us that the user interface is so intuitive that the hospital staff do not have to learn anything anew.
The technical term for such UX claims is “task completion”. the hospital staff are able to complete the daily workflow tasks without making any errors on their first attempt.
Another type of UX claim addresses contextual use factors of UX.
As opposed to who are able to use a given product (e.g., trained vs. untrained), we can also talk about where and under which circumstances a product can be used.
Consider how smartphone screens differ in their ability to be used in bright sunlight. Having a smartphone display that can be used in even the most sunlit contexts is a huge value-driver and something that is being worked on hard to technically realise.
Similarly, we can consider how use contexts can impose demanding constraints on the persons ability to safe and effectively being able to use a product. This context of use perspective is quite a central problem with many types of products.
The quality of existing design is often not intuitive or user friendly enough to support use in demanding, high-intensity contexts such as emergency situations. The user interfaces are simply too complex to support the dimismhed mental performance most people have when we need to act FAST and are stressed by the situation (leadning to what we call cognitive performance drop (or IQ drop for short).
This limitation means that some devices cannot be safely used in emergency situations as people start to make errors or may even cause harm to themselves.
Having a product that designed to be intuitive enough for use in such situations would be a substantial UX claim that qualify as very unique selling point.
From this follows a context of use claim like the one below:
“The user interface is intuitive enough to support safe and effective use even in the most demanding situations found in hospital emergency rooms. ”
Such a context of use claim comes with a strong business case for hospitals, similar to the cost savings on training from the previous example.
A broader and more flexible utilisation of critical equipment to support the effective and timely treatment of patients are the main ingredients of such a business case.
No longer a free lunch. Claims need to be supported by data.
There is a long history of companies claiming qualities about their products which is not supported by any data. Even in regulated industries such as medical technologies (MedTech), there is a tradition of alluding to qualities not backed by data. The book “Usability Testing of Medical Devices” provides a nice overview of marketing claims that might be unsubstantiated.
However, similar to how food and pharma are heavily regulated as to the qualities you can claim about nutritional substitutes, so too have we seen a shift in MedTech. With the new European Medical Device Regulation (MDR), it became much more restrictive what companies can claim about the quality-in-use of their products. Basically, all claims need to be supported by data.
Empty marketing material and a strategic opportunity
For many Med Tech companies, this has meant that claims not backed by data must be removed from their marketing material. As this data often does not exist, many MedTech companies have been forced to scrape their unwarranted claims from their marketing material.
This sets a new agenda where UX claims must be taken as seriously as technical claims. And herein rests a huge strategic opportunity for companies to start documenting their UX claims with data.
Basically, there is an opportunity for companies to enter a marketing void with data-driven UX claims that link directly to strong business cases.
To realise this highly desirable potential, companies need to build competencies in how to generate robust UX claims.
Your next steps to get started with UX claims
A: Book us for a meeting to learn more about the UX claim potential for your products and services.
B: Learn the tools yourself
Attend our 3-day course in Strategic UX Design to learn about the entire process behind UX claims, from UX-driven value propositions to UX requirements to Data-driven UX claims.
C: Read article about effect studies
Do you have X-factor?
Prove the value of your design with effect studies
While it is easy to claim the value - it is much harder to back it up with data.
Read about what effect studies are and how to get the most value from them.
Link to article: www.designpsykologi.dk/proving-the-value-with-effect-studies