My Dear Friends of Figma in Hi and welcome to my config talk i’m sarah a senior ux designer at canyon bicycles which is based in germany i’ll tell you a little bit more about canyon in a bit as you just said i’m based in hamburg germany but i’m originally from colorado in the united states and i’m super thrilled to be here to talk with you.
Today a little bit about contradictory user needs and to tell you how we’ve been working with them recently at canyon so without further ado let’s jump right in so i want to start out with a hot take our users have different needs okay obviously this is not such a hot take this is actually extremely common.
Maybe in terms of roles or actors jobs to be done maybe you work in e-commerce and you have business-to-business users and also b2c maybe you work on a product that’s working software and you have both end users and administrators obviously this is extremely common and it’s our job as designers to design for.
This disparity the actual hot take that i’d like to make is that maybe there’s some friction in your user base maybe there are actually contradictory user needs that are much easier to minimize because it isn’t quite so obvious so that’s just something to keep in mind as i’m talking today let me give you an.
Example of some more obvious conflicting user needs so let’s talk about cookies so for those of you who are not in europe in the year 2020 we actually had a very massive big thing where we had to install a new third-party cooker cookie banner on websites and online shops prior to this.
Time customers to websites and online shops needed to be able to opt out of third-party cookies so they could had to find that somewhere on the site but with this new law that went into effect in 2020 customers actually had to opt in to third party cookies and what’s even more they actually couldn’t access any of the content on your website until they had.
Opted in to third-party cookies so in 2019 when we were preparing for this big change i was actually working at an e-commerce company which provided online shops for small to medium businesses and obviously we had two very distinct types of users we had the merchants who were booking our shops and selling their goods online and then we had their.
Customers which we referred to as end customers and obviously in this case they had very contradictory needs the end customers had a need for informed consent a right to privacy they wanted to know exactly what was being tracked and of course the merchants needed things to stay like they were right they needed their customers to very quickly.
Accept the cookies so they could continue to track them and market to their customers so in this case who won well after a lot of debate and discussion we realized we needed to prioritize the needs of the merchants because they were the ones who are actually paying for our services so we weren’t the only ones.
As you can see here these are some anonymous examples of current existing cookie banners on european e-commerce websites and as you can see there are some ux anti-patterns that we’re trying to prioritize the needs of the merchants over the end customer or the business needs um.
So let’s talk just a little bit that was an example let’s talk just a little bit about our role as designers and how we talk about our users so of course our users are not a monolith right the way that we some of the strategies that we think about that we use to think about our users or talk about our users.
Are actually pretty problematic i’m looking at you user personas user personas create real like artificial representations of idealized users with absolutely no recognition of the complexities of their lives how their needs interact and how their needs actually counteract with other users needs at canyon we don’t use user.
Personas we actually use behavioral archetypes which makes a lot of sense we are a bicycle company so we can talk about how frequently our users ride their bikes for example where they’re writing to and then we also use user spectra which i’ll introduce to you in a few minutes what i something i want to say i really.
Recognize how difficult it is to talk about users without reverting back into binaries yeah we have either this type of user or that type of user and in fact you’re probably going to hear me making that mistake even during this talk which is just to say that this is not a switch that we can just flip on and off to think about and talk about our users.
Differently it’s actually a practice that i would like to invite you to take on as well and that lets me give a nice little plug for inclusive design as well what is our role if it is not trying to speak about and understand our users differently so that we can design for the full complexity of their lives so what do we do with contradictory user.
Needs well something i really love from katie sherwin is is she sort of says from nielsen norman group she says let’s aim to meet contradictory user needs as much as we can let’s design good enough for both so one strategy to do this is prioritization this is an example i just.
Gave you with the cookie banner project right we prioritized the merchant needs over the end customer needs obviously prioritization depends on your company it depends on your business goals but it could even be beyond that maybe you’ve been sort of prioritizing one set of user needs with your last releases right and now you’ve actually.
Chosen to prioritize a different set of user needs because they’ve been somewhat underserved by your releases in the last few months or years ultimately what’s important is just that you find a way to collaboratively prioritize these conflicting user needs a second strategy which actually goes along quite well with prioritization is.
Accommodations so this is designing for a way a designing in a way that minimizes harm for all different user types so obviously with these ux anti-patterns in terms of the cookie banner while we did need to prioritize the merchant needs we did as much as we could to accommodate for the end users as well.
And this might sound very abstract you might be thinking i don’t know what to do how to do that but you actually probably do already know how to do this obviously user needs and business needs are not always in conflict but occasionally they are and when that does happen and we do need to prioritize the business needs.
It’s our job as designers to make accommodations so that we can do as little harm to the user as possible i’ll also give you some more examples of accommodations in the in the future so enough theory let’s talk about bikes and contradictory user needs for online bike shoppers so just to tell you a little.
Bit about canyon we are actually the world’s largest direct to consumer bicycle company that means we sell our bikes online all around the world we don’t have any storefronts and we started about 25 years ago in the performance road cycling industry and then we moved into.
Performance mountain bikes and we’re still quite well known for very high quality high performance bicycles about five years ago we moved into some newer markets including e-bikes and urban and city bikes and something that we found during the first coved lockdown into in 2020 as you can imagine all of a sudden e-commerce was.
Very big everyone was shopping online stores were closed maybe also gyms were closed people were stuck at home they were looking for opportunities to get outside and be more active we saw a huge bike boom people were buying way more bikes online which was obviously wonderful but something that we noticed as this was happening is.
That we were starting to see that maybe our target customer base was changing a little bit so we undertook some user research my team started conducting remote user interviews all around the world our consumer insights manager julia montevani started leading focus groups internationally and we also undertook a.
Really large user intercepts research project this is actually a picture of julia and i interviewing an e-bike user in minneapolis and this was such a cool project we went across the united states and did essentially guerrilla ux research where we stood in high traffic places stopped people who were riding by on e-bikes and.
Then just asked them questions like why did you pick this e-bike what do you like about it what don’t you like about it how do you feel about cycling in the in your city and it was so informative as we started to understand the new types of target customers that we were reaching online so at this point with all of this.
Research research that’s when we started to develop our user spectra so this first one is the non-enthusiast to enthusiast spectrum so again these are not two different types of customers this is a spectrum and all of our customers fall somewhere along this spectrum let me tell you a little bit about them.
So for people more on the side of the enthusiast side of the spectrum this was our traditional customer prior to the pandemic these are performance oriented cyclists they know all of the parts of the bike they probably know how to do their own repairs they’re very passionate about performance cycling and in terms of how they shop online for.
Bicycles they want lots of details lots of technical information really need to deep dive into dive deep into the information to make an informed decision about which bike to buy but as i said we started recognizing that we had some new types of users of customers so we sort of established that on this side of the spectrum the.
Non-enthusiast side these were people who were newer to cycling they didn’t know much about bicycles maybe they didn’t know even the names of all the parts of the bike and we found that they actually needed extra guidance throughout the online bike bank process as you may or may not know performance bicycles or bicycles in.
General are generally made up of a lot of third-party components and parts and people on the enthusiast side of the spectrum are very knowledgeable and very passionate about these configurations of different third-party components and so for people on the non-enthusiast side we really need to support them to make the right decision for them and we also.
Found that they were very easily overwhelmed by too much information on the website there was a second spectrum that we looked at which was the first time browser versus the returning visitor so first time browsers need a lot of time to navigate our website we have a huge portfolio of bikes so they spend a.
Lot of time trying to differentiate between the bikes understand which one is best for them compare different bikes to get down to the bike that is best for them and so in terms of online behavior there’s lots of time spent on pages throughout the customer journey in order to decide on a bike on the other hand we have returning.
Visitors so what we found out from our research is that our customers generally spend an average of three months browsing and continuing to come back to our website before they make a purchase and depending on where they are in that pre-purchase phase they might be just coming back to check one small thing for comparison purposes or maybe they’re.
Coming back to see if the availability has changed or the delivery dates have been updated or perhaps they’re at the very very end of this pre-purchase customer journey and they’re coming back to our website not to consume any content at all but to actually add the bike to the cart and check out so clearly this is a much different.
Behavior when shopping online they move much more quickly through the site they view fewer pages and they spend a lot less time on pages particularly earlier in the customer journey so you can already see with these two spectra we’re starting to talk about some very contradictory user needs there was a third spectrum we were.
Really curious about investigating which was something having to do with our urban and city bikes customers versus performance bicycle customers and the question that we had was you know just does this third spectrum actually overlay the first spectrum could we say that non-enthusiasts were the ones shopping for our urban and city bikes.
And enthusiasts were shopping for our performance bikes and what we found out from our research um no sorry yeah good was no unfortunately not it’s just not that simple we can’t actually design a different experience for a different type of user on our website because of course urban and city.
Bikes customers are often non-enthusiasts but we might have actually enthusiasts who already own a few of our performance bikes who are now looking for a city bike to get around every day or maybe they’re buying a bike for someone in their family and then on the other hand we have newer cyclists who’d like to try.
Out road cycling or mountain biking so we actually need to be able to serve the needs of all the customers across the spectra with our website so after we did this research we realized our product detail pages or pdps this is an example here this is the the page where you would actually it’s a pretty integral part of the e-commerce.
Uh site it’s where you would actually choose your color select your size and add your bike to cart to your cart so that you could check out so we realized that these pages the product detail pages have been designed for and prioritize the needs of our enthusiasts of people on that side of the spectrum.
Of course this is not a huge surprise these were actually the the people that we were serving for the last few decades right but we also saw that it provided some obstacles for returning visitors as well what does that mean well we had a very long pdp a very long scroll all the information was expanded there was lots.
Of technical information and technical images and it was a bit hard to navigate between the different parts if you were looking for something specific so when we got the task of redesigning our product detail page we set a goal for ourselves how can we redesign the pdp to meet the needs of our customers across the spectra.
So let me show you a little bit about what we did and very excitingly these features actually went live today so you can check them out on canyon.com so as i said the prior pdp was very technical very spec focused lots of details this is one example this is our bike geometry table so as you can see.
There’s a lot of specific data here in terms of head tube angles and millimeters and if you find yourself on the enthusiast side of the spectrum you might see this table and you might think yay fantastic so much data i can’t wait to dive in and start to understand which bike is best for me but if you’re more.
On the non-enthusiast side of the spectrum you might see this table and think oh my god too much data this is overwhelming it’s confusing i don’t know what this means i feel stupid and at the worst case you might actually abandon our site in order to find a less complicated buying experience so what we did was we started to create.
Some accommodations for all of our types of users we added more interactive elements which allow enthusiasts to get the information that they’re looking for but they’re hidden behind interactions so that non-enthusiasts don’t get overwhelmed so this is an example of our geometry table now it’s behind an overlay so we’ve added a little bit of.
Friction to the enthusiast journey an extra click but for us we determined it was worth it so as not to scare away the non-enthusiasts here’s another example we used to have a very long scroll through technical images one after another many of them with very technical text if you know what slacker angles mean no problem for.
You but if you don’t it’s a bit overwhelming for for you and for people who don’t know much about bikes again we made it a bit more interactive and put it behind an interaction this is clearly more modern and dynamic anyway uh don’t worry this is actually an early ux prototype and figma it does not look.
Like this live it’s been made much more beautiful and nice to use by our senior digital product designer george beatty but as you can see we by condensing this we’ve actually shortened the pdp by a third and in some cases by up to a half which of course is beneficial to all of our customers this was our component highlight slider.
So this is really like the technical mecha of our page this is where you would find very technical images and text highlighting the components or the parts of the bike that are usps for the model great for people on the enthusiast side a little overwhelming for non-enthusiasts so again we made it more interactive put it behind an overlay the.
Point here is we didn’t get rid of any information it’s still accessible it’s consistent across all product detail pages so enthusiasts can find it in the same place on every single page but it’s no longer a stumbling block for all users so we didn’t stop with the bottom half of the pdp we also added more.
Information overlays to help non-enthusiasts make decisions we identified which of our bikes across all of our portfolio are more attractive to newer cyclists and updated the content with more lifestyle images and we also looked at copy so for these bikes that are more attractive for newer cyclists rather than focusing on technical.
Specifications we focus more on use case right and in just in general we have more visual scannable and emotional images so these are obviously the first steps we are not finished we have a lot left to do uh coming up we will be continuing to transition copy and images to this new.
Design we will track kpis and do a lot more usability testing on different types of users and our team is really committed to continuous improvement so we will continue to take feedback and try to iterate so that we can really meet the needs of our customers across the spectrum so that’s pretty much it for me my aim.
For this talk was really to share with you a little bit about what we’ve been doing at canyon and to inspire you to move forward in your own work to keep an eye on how you can also design for users with contradictory needs just a few takeaways i’d like to leave you with the first one is no more boxes let’s try to think about our users.
Differently let’s try to talk about them differently and let’s challenge our own assumptions and the assumptions of our colleagues in terms of your future features do that hard work to figure out where the your users contradict each other and don’t forget sometimes that’s actually much harder to spot than role-based.
Contradictory needs where relevant prioritize collaboratively but don’t forget to accommodate right ultimately do no harm or do as little harm as possible and finally what about your existing product and features is there any friction between user needs that you maybe haven’t been aware of is there.
Anything you can do about it today where in your product could you play around with accommodations how much leeway do you have so ultimately i want to say thank you and i really want to invite you to go forth and represent the wonderfully complicated and contradictory user base that uses your products and relies on.
Them every single day as a designer only you can be their advocate and give them a voice so i just want to say thank you so much for attending my talk it has been such a pleasure to be here i also want to give a huge thank you to figma and the entire config team this has been an absolute dream.
Please stay in contact you can find my twitter handle and my linkedin and if this is exciting for you this intersection between ux design and bicycles then come work with us we’re actually hiring you can find all of our open positions at career.canyon.com thank you so much and enjoy the rest of.
Config you
In this session, Sarah will explore ways to design for diverse user needs and present user research about the unique users …
Figma Official Channel,who,love,designing,figma, design, product design, tips, tricks, UI design, ux design, app design, figma design, design for figma, FigJam tutorial, prototyping, collaboration, UX tutorial, Design tips, whiteboard, Figma tutorial, Config, Config 2022, design system, product:none, audience:designer, language:english, format:standard, produced_by:marketing, theme:other, event:config, series:none, type:other, level:intermediate, primary_feature:none, secondary_feature:,