UX Research Strategies for Success in Highly Regulated Industries

all right I guess we'll go ahead and get started again hopefully you guys enjoyed those memes there yeah um so hello everybody my name is Jing Kang I am a project analyst here accelerant research and you know I just wanted to thank everybody for joining us it's uh it's it's exceeded my expectations for how well this conference could have possibly gotten we've gotten great engagement you know people have been active as well as they can given these circumstances and it's just been a great kind of a great opportunity to know that we're all in to feel connected to everybody else you know that we're all in this together right so you know a couple of Graham rules would like to set up before we begin the next presentation if you've been with us and stay one you know sorry for repeating these again but you know first things first like we were at the mercy of our technology you know just about everybody in the United States is on zoom' or any other video conferencing platform and you know as such we might experience some issues but you know we're doing the best we can here and you know we've we haven't had any we haven't had too many issues so far but you know we just want everyone to be understanding that things could possibly Apple second thing you know be respectful I mean we're all professionals here but there's just something about being able to hide behind your computer screen that brings out the trolling and everybody but you know we just want everybody to be to handle themselves respectfully as professionals as they would in any you know real in-person conference and you know also as with any real in-person conference you know this is an opportunity to network engage and you know interact with other professionals in the space you know we've gotten some good engagement at the end for question answers and as well as good use of our hashtags and we'd like to continue that and so I'd like to introduce our next speaker we have Chrissy from Regions Bank you know you can't have a conference in Charlotte you know not even a virtual one hosted in Charlotte without having someone from a bank give a talk and you know she's here to talk to us about rooster strategies for success in highly regulated fields and she's the VP of usability user research and accessibility and so you know personally I'll hand the mic off to you really looking forward to your presentation great thank you so much Jim I really appreciate it and thanks Bill also for this great opportunity I'm really looking forward to spending some time this afternoon with you all and sharing some of my insights so Jen actually funny funny story though we I have a completely distributed team and we are all over the southeast we even have some members in Michigan but I'm actually located in Tampa so let me just start to share my screen here okay are you all seeing my screen okay fantastic great so as Jen mentioned I'm a user experience strategist researcher visual designer and UX mentor I've been doing user experience research for over three decades and that includes both research and the design field and I'm currently I lead a team of usability accessibility and user researchers at Regions Bank so I'm really excited to share some of these insights with you that I have learned through these three decades of experience and I hope you can find them really helpful when we think about design and development we oftentimes are thinking about it in terms of how something needs to be to be built but in order to be truly successful we really need to first figure out the what and the why we all know that user research and getting feedback is the foundation from which all great products are built and it really answers the fundamental question of product development which is what should be built and are we building it right and as user researchers we answer these questions by collecting the qualitative and quantitative data to form a really deep understanding of our customers we're also looking to understand the competitive landscape business objective objectives and these things help us to define the best possible path forward but what is getting this feedback from your customers was hard what if it was like so hard that you weren't really sure that you were building the right thing or building the right thing the right way I have had the great opportunity over the past three decades to work in regulated fields and non regulated industries and after years of working and loving the agency life I joined Regions Bank in 2018 to grow and manage their in-house UX research team and I quickly learned that you know the truth is working in a regulated industry slows the research process down and why is that I mean not that long ago websites apps and digital products even enterprise software got away with inferior user experiences because customers have no choice but to use those digital tools but now this is all changing and it really presents a very unique challenge to the regulated industry this is because your customers are moving quickly and non highly regulated industries seem to be able to move a little bit more nimbly than the regulated industries but your customers expectations of the experience that they have with your product are based on the experience that they have with any other app or product regardless of the level of regulation so in 2020 the need to get products to market even faster is going to push the boundaries of the regulated industry to a whole new level these industries that have really been reluctant to move fast they've been really slow to move towards innovation and customer experience they're going to have to change the way that they think but there's a reason why industries in regulated industries move so slowly and that's because we need to be obsessed with the safety of our customers protecting their privacy and their well-being but as the interfaces are going to continue to improve our customers are going to demand better experiences so what do we do about that well today I want to share some tips that I have found to be really successful working in regulated fields this strategy is not linear although it kind it you know five tips but it's not linear these are things that you can do to help elevate your research practice whether you're in a regulated industry or not and so we're going to talk about identifying constraints we're going to talk about making friends reaching out moving left and documenting your process so what is this about regulations and constraints well just a little tip non regulated industries are burdened with the same constraints just like regulated industries it all comes down to the accepted level of risk so constraints when we think about them we shouldn't be thinking about them as like a barrier or a roadblock they're really kind of boundaries or like an outline that helps us to explore creative solutions that are going to lead to building the very best products so when we start a project we have to first accept that there are constraints and there are going to be constraints that we can change that are kind of a little bit squishy and then there are constraints that we simply cannot change and the first step is to identify what can be changed and what cannot and here are some of the constraints that you should be thinking about these are not all of the constraints but these are the things that typically surface in regulated industries ISO privacy technology accessibility and SOP we'll talk a little bit about that so let's talk about ISO anybody in user experience probably has heard of iso 9241 it's the international standard for human centered design and ergonomics the iso standard is national or international and while they're not actual regulations they're frequently referenced by laws and legal rulings and so we can almost treat them with the same kind of severity as a law because they're oftentimes embedded in laws and really it's like the ultimate best practice for design so well not all companies adhere to the iso standards it's really important to understand your company's position either way if you want to level up and kind of stand out from the crowd you could start by adopting and incorporating the standards into your practice technology is another constraint these are the assumptions that we make and the existing constraints so assumptions and the constraints that are already there about development languages platforms hardware software all of the things that your company is going to use or already has in place that will affect your project your product or the project that you're working on and these usually are constraints that are put on you by your company and these decisions because they usually happen at levels kind of across the the company they're kind of hard to change their hard to change quickly anyway and that makes it even more important to identify right up front because it could potentially change the course of your research and product development another constraint that gets a lot of precedent in the news is accessibility so imagine a business owner was talking to an architect and they're building a new office building both the business owner and the architect would not even hesitate to add wheelchair accessible parking spots handrails or a rain upon the curb to allow people with disabilities to access the building so it's kind of crazy that there's a hesitancy or a delay to adopt digital accessibility but those same considerations need to be made to access the company's digital properties and in 2017 the Americans with Disabilities Act or you know we call that the ABA they revised section 508 which includes private entities so this means that everybody is responsible for adopting the web content accessibility guidelines which are commonly referred to as wicked the type of business that you work for and your own company's position on accessibility and a DA is going to determine the degree to which you're responsible for adhering to these guidelines even still it's again it's really important that you understand right up front what your company's position is unaccessible 'ti because it will be enforced legally when we're talking about privacy this is something that's on the top of everybody's mind there are seem to be more fraud events and data breaches and privacy breaches than ever before and it's really kind of a double-edged sword for regulated industries because we are obligated to protect customers data but we're also trying to balance that risk and the value of collecting customer data and UX research is not held to the same grueling privacy standards that academic research is bound to and it's for really good reason in academic research a lot of times it takes a really long time and product design really can't afford to take that much time because if we developed at that same time line the product we're developing could be at risk of being irrelevant by the time we wrap up the research however we are designing for humans and after all I mean that requires the same level of care and ethical considerations that they apply in the academic research world no matter what as researchers we're responsible to protect our participants personal data to protect our customers information and to safeguard their well-being a classic example of this Facebook learned this the hard way back in 2014 they published a study that they had actually conducted in 2012 they presented the minitor they manipulated than the news feeds of almost 700,000 Facebook users without their consent and they received severe criticism for this ethical violation for this experiment as you can imagine people were really upset because there were a lot of negative ramifications that resulted from this study they were showing people positive news feeds and negative news feeds and then they were monitoring to see what kind of posts these people would actually place the negative news speeds were quite damaging to the people who were unwittingly participating in this research so this is something that we have to be very careful of and cognizant of and it is our responsibility to do that after Facebook ran this report in 2014 a poll that was run by the Guardian showed that 84 percent of respondents lost trust in Facebook which is really damaging every company large or small public or private has a set of standard operating procedures these instructions kind of detail how the company is going to conduct their business some standard operating procedures are really detailed and others not so much but either way you need to know what your company's procedures are within the standard operating procedure there's usually an established guideline for risk tolerance and whether whether they have documented or not every company has a level or risk that they think is acceptable to operate within so understanding those parameters is really important because it's going to help you to understand what types of tools you can use to gather research and it's also going to give you an indication of how many hoops you might have to jump through to onboard that new tool or to recruit participants or what level of risk you can expose your customers to to balance gathering customer feedback and protecting their data so this standard operating procedure is probably the most important thing to understand when you start a project because it's also going to help you understand your timeline the audit tool the audit process for new tools is possibly the most frustrating part of conducting research and highly regulated fields but knowledge is power and so having an understanding of how long that onboarding process is going to take it's just going to help you to plan better research so moving on to the second tip I call this making friends and what I'm specifically talking about is making friends with your legal and compliance Department these partners can help you advocate on your behalf and on the behalf of the customer and they can fight some of the typical battles for you that might be a little bit difficult for for you to fight it on your own lawyers have an easier time listening to lawyers than they do to regular researchers so that type of dialogue from one attorney to another typically has a greater chance of success here's an example we all know that excessive terms and conditions' statements are rarely read by your users and even if they were the language that's used in them is usually at a high school or collegiate level so it's likely not really understood by the majority of your users anyway but elite legal advocate can help to find solutions how to meet those legal requirements of displaying the terms and conditions while also considering the customer what we know for sure research has showed us over and over again is when when companies put customers first we know that the net effect of this is increased advocacy loyalty increased cross selling and increased revenue and this is especially true during times of crisis so recent research from Forrester surfaced specific guidance for insurance and financial industries to forego the terms and conditions in favor of more empathetic approaches like direct links to requesting deferrals and getting federal aid when they're trying to demonstrate this is our Kovan response Cobin 19 response so I think this is something really important to consider that although the terms and conditions that we that we constantly put in front of our customers is important and has a place there are ways that we can make them a little bit more human and be more empathetic to our customers the best research moving on to number three which is reaching out the best research happens with happy high-performing teams I firmly believe that and I am super fortunate to work with a fantastic group of people at regions so huge props to my team a lot of them are have been listening over the past couple of days to to the conference but when we start research projects at regions we always start with secondary research and this is a really good thing to do as the project is ramping up and you're kind of waiting for the project to be defined you can start to reach out using secondary research why you know reinvent the wheel see what's out there already and then as you start to refine your research plan sometimes it just makes sense to reach out and find a research partner some of the benefits of outsourcing research are that you can move a lot faster if you're conducting then you are able to sometimes if you're conducting research in-house inviting people outside of your organization to conduct the research oftentimes can bring like a new kind of innovative perspective that sometimes the leadership in your organization might seem to be more easily to adopt then in-house solutions it also really helps you to think outside the box yesterday Susan Lawson mentioned that there are times to do DIY and times to hire out and it's I couldn't agree more with her presentation so here are some things to consider when you're thinking about reaching out how big is your problem how urgent is your problem and what type of access and ability do you have to recruit participants sometimes it's really hard to recruit participants and it's a lot easier if you use a recruiting company and you can either use a recruiting company and do the research on your own or you can use a recruiting company and have them do the research as well and moderation you also have to ask yourself like can you legally contact your customers you absolutely have to follow the do-not-call requirements and then take a look at your team how much experience do you have conducting this research on the team and as bill mentioned yesterday as well it's also it's always really good to learn new things but it's also really important to recognize when you're going to be spread too thin so you also have to think about your budget and your team's capacity so a really important protip to think about when you're reaching out is under most regulations vendors and third parties are bound to the exact same requirements that in-house teams are now this isn't widely enforced but it's also really important to understand that so you need to make sure that you're asking the right questions of the third-party research partner and you have to be prepared to research that to protect your organization as well to tip for move left this is my mantra you want to move fast and move as far left as you possibly can in an ideal world user research is a key player in the entire lifecycle of product development and the lifecycle diagram that you're looking at on the right kind of looks something like that you start with strategy and then discovery analysis design and production and it's kind of a never-ending loop of those five things and this diagram was is visualized by Matt bosha Elenin you can find that in the UX collective product design playbook so this chart really illustrates that ideal product life cycle from left to right as we go through the process but in reality the product life cycle can sometimes look like this and the Messier the projects become the more important it is to be involved in the early stages or as far left of the likes lifecycle as possible and one thing that a side effect of this is that it prevents designers and developers from being order takers it's so frustrating when you have people at the top of the house kind of making decisions and then handing off a project to a designer or developer and saying go make this so we try to really prevent that that order-taking mentality by being as far left in the process as possible that way we're not wasting time we can do the research early and often and that research is informing the design and development of the products that we're building if you wait too late in the process there's not enough time to inform the product development like it should be so that's a huge risk because you can possibly be building the wrong thing or be building the thing the right thing the wrong way so trying to move as far left as you possibly can can save your organization time and money and the fifth tip is to document your process even the most well established research practices are under scrutiny and they can all be audited which is a highly risk risk risky proposition so it's a best practice to document your process whether you're in a regulated field or a non regulated field or whether you're a designer a developer a scrum master or a product owner regulated fields however have additional responsibilities and risk because they're responsible for things like HIPAA requirements and WIC hag or the accessibility guidance and this is simply because you can't get sued for bad design or a bad app idea but you can get sued for a HIPAA violation or a wick tag violation and the consequences are pretty severe an ad a non compliance violation starts at seventy five hundred seventy five thousand dollars and that's for the initial ad a violation and subsequent violations are a hundred and fifty thousand dollars so this can be extremely risky and costly so it's very important to understand that audits are dependent upon the documentation of your process and that's how you can prevent not only by documenting the process but using it as a method to actually do the work so doing research and regulated industries presents unique challenges and here's those were some best practices that are valid regardless of whether you're in a regulated industry or a non regulated industry and if you follow these tips you're going to be able to elevate your own research practice and competition in the digital space really is raising the bar for us all smaller more nimble well-funded aggressive and hungry startups though those companies are going to challenge these well-established companies recently I read a PricewaterhouseCoopers study that revealed that the financial industry alone eighty eight percent of banks insures investment managers they're concerned that they're going to lose revenue to innovators in the coming year and that's in 2020 so when we're talking about that revenue we're talking about twenty four percent of revenue is thought to be at risk that's a massive amount of money that is is going to be that's on the line for companies that are not willing to step up and and use some of these strategies to become innovative and move a little bit faster so when you think about the the game of product development it's really going to be won by the companies that are focusing on challenging themselves and their teams to balance innovation compliance and putting their customer needs really front and center I hope you found these tips really helpful and good luck elevating your research practice I'll see if there are any questions cool well thank you so much everyone I really appreciate it bill I don't I'm not able to see any of the questions so if you see any let me know definitely will and don't think you can get away so quickly because I have a couple of questions so I love your your portion about making friends internally you've got legal you've got supply chain management you've got all of these bodies within an organization especially financial services where you sit that you know the tendency of the internal researcher is to kind of view these folks as almost adversarial or roadblocks to getting done what they want to get done what are your tips for how and when to reach out to these folks how to engage with them so I think that the advice to always do it early and often is is the best advice so what I did when I joined Regions was I started to just investigate in my own company to try to find who all these people were and I just started putting meetings on their calendars to start building the relationship and through just investigative research understanding how we can help each other and really presenting the meeting topics more of how can we partner how can I help you and I think a lot of times when you are reaching out to folks sometimes they're a little bit wary of like what do you you know what are you trying to to do what is your objective and I think if you keep the conversation very much a mutual how can we help each other kind of conversation I think that is the absolute key and then set up a cadence of regular communication with them so that you don't just have a meeting and then drop off their calendar for a couple of months just have a check-in and I try to do that like once a month or once every other month just have a check in with these folks and and develop this report and this relationship with them yeah I love it you know when I was I'd spent some time on the corporate side in financial services and you know waiting until you need them is the worst time to engage with these folks so I love the cadence idea and then it makes perfect sense and you know while we were chatting we did get a couple of questions coming through and I can read those off to you actually yeah so I I see them now so from okay so from Erin Taylor how is Cove it affecting the way you're looking at new technologies to help your research reduce due to restricted budgets or increase due to needs to be more efficient so this is really interesting night and I want to say Erin and I'm in a unique position because I mentioned my fabulous team I'm a huge fan I'm a super fan but my team is entirely distributed so we we work remotely and so the transition to the Cova kind of quarantine was really natural for all of us and we had already been working for several years in this remote kind of research capacity so I'm a fan of remote research just because it saves time and money so it hasn't really impacted us so much because we were already in that group we were just really important fortunate to be in that place nick has a great question how do you balance that engaging all the decision-makers with having too many cooks in the kitchen this is a problem that we face I think all enterprise organizations face the same problem when you're a small company it seems to make sense to have four or five decision-makers in a room and and have the meeting you know or decisions you know the product decisions move forward fairly quickly and what happens a lot of times in enterprise organizations is you have 20 people but all of a sudden come into a meeting and it becomes this crazy zoo like environment where no decision can be made what I found to be really successful is defining right upfront how many people need to be there and why and what we do you a couple folks on my team have been doing some design sprints the Google Ventures design sprint method and in order to prevent that a great tip is to have the people the core people in the room for the meeting where the working meeting where things are happening and then invite all the other people the the people on the outside of the circle to kind of a half hour this is what we did today meeting at the end of the day so that those people can feel connected but you're limiting the working group group to a smaller number of people that can be a little bit more nimble and agile so as long as you can keep all of the cooks in the kitchen informed you can eliminate a lot of them from actually being in the kitchen as long as you can communicate to them what you're actually doing okay so let's see here we have from an anonymous attendee what are some benefits to using a smaller research organization or a combined research recruitment agency so one of the big benefits to using not not necessarily a smaller research organization but an in-house research organization is to make sure that that embedded knowledge that the company has is kind of staying there also if design recommendations come out of the research you have your design team that is already using their brand standards and sometimes you know and I can say this because I used to work in an agency an agency will come in as the research arm of upper regulated industry and saying we can change everything about this but they don't really have the benefit of identifying all those constraints that I mentioned in the beginning so they can present these solutions that don't work with that enterprise organization because they don't have the benefit of the embedded knowledge so that's one benefit to kind of staying in-house and smaller is you can kind of eliminate the trade-off is you're eliminating some of that waste that happens with ideas that can't be implemented and you're balancing that with some innovative ideas so as long as you can can mitigate that risk you can come up with a really great happy solution by outsourcing and then I think just to kind of speak to the recruitment agency I think recruitment agencies are fantastic the only downside of that is they're costly but if you have the budget for recruitment agencies it saves so much time and headache in the research process and then your primary researchers are really focused on doing the research as opposed to doing the recruiting which which can be very tedious you okay so let's see are there any other questions Darlene wanted to see the second to last slide again are the slides being built the slides are being sent out right with your permission okay yes yeah yeah so Darlene I'll send you the slides then you can look at it for as long as you'd like and we had a couple of requests Tracy and death it looks like just for you to elaborate a little more on the the move left concept oh okay yes absolutely so this is I don't know I don't think I go into this phrase but when you're thinking about like that development cycle of moving from left to right a lot of times research design strategy ends up being a little bit on the right-hand side and if you're in an organization that say the business analysts are doing a lot of the work on the left-hand side they're coming up with the strategy they're determining what you're going to be building and then they hand it off to a designer or developer the trouble with that is the designer and developer who have this knowledge they're professionals themselves they've been excluded from the strategy component and they end up being order takers because by then you've got a timeline you've got a deadline things have to be done so then the mantra to move left is to get as far ahead of the actual design and development as possible so if you can be there when that first thought is happening about hey let's build this new feature or this product and the researchers can start to research and understand the customer need as far left in the past as possible they can start to define what that product is actually going to look like what it's going to do what problem it is truly solving or if it should not be built at all and that's kind a unique data collection researcher role that if it's not used as far left in the process as possible too many things have too many dominoes have fallen to to actually go back and course correct so it's super important to get as far left as you can when those decisions are being made so that there is no course correction necessary you're defining that best path best possible path forward and and then you're delivering the right product to solve these customer problems okay and then here's a comment lots of companies are not a DA compliant how would you how would you approach them considering doing research on whether they are a DA compliant okay so this is this is it a little bit of an easier task just because it's a law and the cost of not being a DA compliant is extremely severe there are there are folks out there that randomly go through the internet and test you can run tests on sites and find adaa violations and then they they sue the company and this is happening right or and left it happens to large companies small companies all companies there's the whole group of people out there doing that and so the risk is real and it's and it's something that because it's a law you have to you have to do it so I would start by by running a test to say where those violations might occur suggest ways to remediate those violations and possibly even share the websites that show the guidance which is all public information the guidance for how to remediate those problems let's see so Nick is asking do you have any examples of projects that you and the team are especially proud of I can I can share a project that that I'm particularly proud of this project we identified that there are lots of folks in the financial world that are underserved and as a bank we have a responsibility it's a core tenant of regions to serve the underserved population but we really needed to find out what what their pain points were and in order to do that the whole team got together and we had a series of focus groups that were catered to the underserved population and we knew that if you conduct a focus group in a research facility with the underserved population you might not be able to form that connection that you need to form so the team actually went to community centers and we partnered with volunteer organizations so that we could access people who truly were underserved and we met them where they were to get feedback on what their problems were what they thought about banks and how we could truly help them so this was a very human very empathy driven research project that the team did just got crazy great results and I'm really really proud of the work that they did there okay I think I feel like those are all the questions bill do you see any other questions that I missed I don't think so you're my own commentary is just that it's refreshing to hear you know someone from what is otherwise a very rigid industry talking about creativity and innovation and figuring out ways to you know to deal with the parameters that you're given you know I think it's the you know the takeaway that any researcher can grab from this you know it's inspiring and it's something that we should all be kind of constantly thinking about it and you know looking toward ways that we can you know deal with the circumstances that we have because you know given the environment that we're in there is likely to be more regulation likely to be more pressure put on the internal researcher to get scrappy figure things out and make it happen to deliver information and insights so very much appreciate the presentation I believe Christie is gonna stick around for for some of the other sessions so you know grab her feel free to just speak with her on chat or to take conversations off line on social Chrissy thank you so much thank you so much for having me bill it was a pleasure awesome so we got 15 minutes until the top of the hour so everybody grab a bite get yourself a cup of coffee network with one another I'm going to throw out a topic that you can be talking about it and sharing we did this one yesterday you know it was fun so we're gonna try it again the one thing that we don't have as a virtual conference is the exhibit hall and the swag that everyone loves to get from conducting or participating in conferences so if you are in your remote office if you have you know those those pieces of swag that you've gotten from from conferences of yesterday snap a pic share with us throw it in the chat we're looking to see those you know those pins with the teeth marks on them the things you've actually taken home with you that aren't sitting in your office drawer you know you share them with us and we can all kind of get a chuckle out of it with that we'll sign off for a few minutes and we'll see you guys at the top of the hour