Q&A: Gavin Lew

As one of the company’s founders, User Centric Managing Director Gavin Lew has spent over 15 years shaping the user experience field.  UX Nuggets recently sat down with Lew to not only capture his insight and expertise, but dig underneath the surface to juicier topics: client expectations, the economy and the risks he’s taken that have made him so successful.

Q.    In your experience, what’s the biggest challenge a company faces after user experience research results are delivered?

A.    Execution. It’s always about affecting change. A very common challenge in our field is that we can identify issues but tend not to have actionable recommendations. The field is well aware of this problem. One thing we’ve done at User Centric to try to change that, and we think it goes a long way, is maintaining transparency. When I first started out in the usability field, I was trained at a consulting company to—I’ll be honest—withhold information. There are two dimensions with that statement. The thought was that when you delivered your insight, you wanted to be the smartest person in the room so that the client hires you. The second component is that when consulting firms have a sales force, they’re only thinking about next quarter’s revenue stream. These philosophies fail and leave clients in the dark because it does not promote change. User Centric strives to be the company that we would’ve hired, so we discuss actionable recommendations from our findings as they occur. We’re transparent from the very beginning of a project and we’ve been able witness success form two stand points: a corporate perspective, where we’ve researched the product development life cycle and we observe how tasks actually get done, as well as the consulting perspective, where we observe tasks that must really get done.  We make sure that we’re transparent throughout the entire process and companies are able to see user trends and the possibility of change.

Q.    What must a company be willing to do in order to consider their end-users?

A.     At User Centric, we try our best to understand what should happen in the user experience, and what is practically feasible and technically possible based on what elements are already in place. An engineer, a coder, nobody wants to build a bad product, but sometimes designers are just unaware. There are fifteen ways to make sure a customer can see a number of items on an interface, but designers don’t always have the context of the user process. Our job is not to sway the engineering or IT department. I’ve found that IT is pretty smart and pretty creative—it’s that they just never knew it. So User Centric prefers to leverage their creativity and strives to involve designers earlier in the process—anything we design, anything we research, they see it. What that does, in some ways, makes User Centric the liaison and let the design team become a part of the changes. I hear designers say, “Wow I never thought the user would do these things.” So all of a sudden they’re added to the process of change. This is what User Centric calls “expanding the sweet spot:” user needs, business needs and taking a bigger slice of creativity by getting IT involved earlier.

Q. How does an established corporation implement user-centric design, while maintaining the traditions and culture that have made it so successful? How does User Centric help its clients achieve this balance?

A. Sometimes, companies truly believe that their way is the only way to do things. So, yes, sometimes C-level personalities impact the success of usability testing. But I think it’s a simple matter of recognizing that any effort is a team effort. Having User Centric a part of that process can change a company’s perspective on their users. We do our best to partner with our clients to help them achieve better insight and use other methodologies to give them smarter views into necessary product or service changes. I’d prefer to assume a company has a particular attitude towards their users because they’re naive to the user experience they offer, and help change that attitude by actually showing them their users. The thing about user research, the qualitative aspect, is that usability testing will uncover big problems early on in the data collection. When we provide participants with an unbiased context, a reasonable task and we observe how well they perform that task, we invite the clients to watch the actual session. We’re not inviting them to watch someone fail. Sometimes, we’ll wait until the client observing can finally see that the participants aren’t stupid and it’s a bad design. Often the research is able to shift not only an understanding of the user’s interaction with a product of or service, but influence an entire company’s company-wide perspective.

Q. How is recent news impacting your business?

A. The initial recession, two to three years ago, hurt everyone. User Centric managed to do OK, because I think our clients didn’t shy away and instead used the downturn as an opportunity to grab market share. Last year, however, our profits grew by 25-percent, and we’re growing even more in the first quarter of 2011. That tells us much more about the economy than User Centric. I’d like to think we’re different than everyone else, but the field we’re in is a barometer for where companies are willing to invest. What’s great about User Centric is that during a recession we can go inside, hunker down and improve returning client’s operational efficiencies. Our services and expertise is then used in operations, and we evaluate areas that aren’t revenue drivers, such as call centers, but are operations that can lower overall business costs. A company in a recession can look at usability testing as expense dollars vs. top line revenue because User Centric is versatile.

Q. How is the industry evolving?

A. We’re booming. The great thing about User Centric is our product and service diversity. We can work on a mobile device, on a consumer device like a camera or TV, or hand-held units inside a car for navigation or entertainment systems. We work on health care products for patients, as well as observe hospitals and pharmacies to determine operational efficiency. We do call centers, web applications, and point-of-sale programs for restaurants. When I think of what we can do, I think that our own diversity is what keeps this company evolving.

Q. What about corporate awareness for user experience research?

A. Even 10 years ago, strategists were starting to bullet point “make sure the product is usable.” After a while of seeing those things, people started to ask “How do I measure usefulness?” But I don’t spend my time institutionalizing the user experience. I focus on delivering, rather than evangelizing, because honestly it’s about results. User Centric is only as good as what we deliver.

Q. What do your clients expect from you that you deliver?

A. A company who has never worked with us before wants us to answer their user experience question. That’s what we do. We set up an approach to answer their question. We will set it up so it doesn’t have bias but an applicable context; we ensure the data is as clean as possible. We do this to truly understand what the data say to deliver the insight and answer their question. That’s what new clients expect from us. They are looking for that insight.

Returning clients ask User Centric for something different. The best thing a returning client told me was, “Just so you know, we pay you to tell us when we’re stupid.” Because sometimes clients overlook their own research question and it’s our job to say “Hold on, you need to be asking this first.” User Centric puts on a few different hats when we work with a company—let’s say 100 times—which is pretty cool since we’re project based. The most interesting thing is when we work with a client long enough we start to really know their customer touch points. This is understandable because the people who are researching how to develop and how to design the interface of the device are focused on the device itself—they don’t know all of the components that go into the customer experience and the customer’s expectations prior to purchasing that device. Because of the nature of our work and our exposure to the industry, sometimes we know more about a device’s reputation and what’s packaged with a device than the designers that actually work on the device. Sometimes, we even know more about how that device is purchased through the website and the store and what expectations and fulfillment materials come with that experience. This gets us into an area I think is very important for the usability field, and that is service delivery. It’s all of the touch points: the person a user calls for help, the person or information the user read that sold them the device and gave them expectations; all of those places are part of the experience. Customer touch points aren’t just a product interface. So if we can have a better understanding and have a more consistent delivery of a service or product, then that product has a better chance of being successful and has a longer lifespan. It’s about the entire user experience, from the moment of introduction. That’s what a lot of our existing clients are asking us to do now.

Q. The User Centric website says its consultants have literally “seen it all.” Which learned experiences do you draw on most?

A.  I began my career in experimental psychology, and I monitored electrodes and their various memory and cognitive components. One time as a student at UCSF, I was testing the cognitive processing of AIDs and Alzheimer’s patients. An AIDs patient said to me, “I really hope this is going to find a cure.” This was in the early 90s’, when AIDs was at a huge epidemic level in terms of fear. The technology and drugs just weren’t there. I shook his hand and thought to myself, wow this guy might not be here in 10 years. I knew that the work I was doing was really interesting, but it was basic research and wasn’t going to find a cure. Fast forwarding to what I do at User Centric. A year ago, I was researching a product and really making sure that the design was for home use for the patient. At the end if the testing session, the patient hugged me and said, “You don’t get it yet, do you? This is going to change the way my child looks at me in the morning. Instead of mixing chemicals on the kitchen table, and watch her mother shoot up, I can take this in the bathroom and be done in less than two minutes. It makes my life a lot less stressful. It makes my child see me less dependent.”

My whole career, I have been driven to fix a problem, whether it’s affecting 80 million people or 100,000 people. What we do—usability testing—matters. How can we transform experiences into a patient, customer and ultimately user experience? Sometimes it’s incremental. Sometimes it’s evolutionary. Even the ones that are just incremental, we find the silver lining, and recognize that we make a difference.

[End Interview]

Original interview with the Illinois Technology Association, 08/21/09: http://www.illinoistech.org/technologynews.aspx/2091:

In 10 words or less, what problem does User Centric solve for your clients?
Gavin Lew: How to create an exceptional customer experience.

What motivated you to start User Centric? What’s the origin of the name?
GL: After working at several consultancies and seeing how they practice, we wanted to build a better consulting firm without the games and sales tactics. In short, we wanted to be the company we would’ve hired. 

We chose the name because it’s what we do. We make products and services center around the user. Businesses have many things to worry about – time lines, budget, fulfillment, etc. – and our focus is the customer experience. It’s a fitting title.

How does User Centric differentiate from its competitors?
GL: To quote one of our clients: “We hire User Centric because you care about the project as much as we do.”  We don’t have sales staff. We feel the people who do the work are the ones who should prescribe approaches and methodologies and be responsible for the output. Our goal is to affect change. If we don’t provide value, our clients won’t come back.

What type of clients provide User Centric’s primary source of income?
GL: Our business uniquely benefits companies of all sizes. From Verizon Wireless to the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago, our clients span many industries and market sizes. 

Our client base is so diverse because the products consumers or internal employees touch are so diverse. Whether it’s a Web site, a telephone, an accessory for the phone, the product you buy off the shelf or business enterprise software, those are all the things a user touches. As an example, we currently have a client with whom we are in eight different business units.  We’re not doing management consulting. We’re actually touching interfaces, services and products. Our services range from small Web site usability evaluations to large global testing. We customize our services to meet each client’s goals and objectives.

How has your business sector evolved over the last 5 years?
GL: Our business sector has widened over the last 5 years. As more companies recognize the importance of user experience research and its impact on sales and customer retention, the need for our services grows. Technologies evolve at such a rapid pace that differentiation is imperative to product success. One way to stand out is to show attentiveness to customer needs and expectations from the instruction booklet to the call center IVR to the interface of the product itself. All of these facets of the customer’s experience impact the brand.

When a potential client comes to you, what are their primary goals for using your service? How do you often surprise them?
GL: The primary goal is to affect a positive change in the customer experience whether the customer is a businessperson, a consumer or an internal agent with the company. That’s our job. We often surprise them by revealing insights and ways to drive more usage just by having a methodology. We are not rocket scientists, but the outcomes of what we do change how people interact with products. They often don’t know their customers as one might expect. Our methodology places the customer in front of them in situations where they interact with the product. The client is sometimes too close to the product, but their customers have expectations and needs that we reveal.

Please describe the science of eye tracking. How did it become practical for business research? What do your clients most find interesting about it?
GL: Eye tracking is the process of capturing the location and movement of the point of gaze of the eyes. Through the use of special monitors with infrared technology that are designed specifically for capturing eye movements, we gather insight into the cognitive processes involved in user interaction with computer interfaces, physical products and printed material.

Eye tracking has been around for decades, but with the vast amount of data it collects (50 data points per second per eye), it was incredibly time consuming to analyze the data. It kept graduate students busy for weeks. Better analysis tools and software have made analysis easier. This allows research to be applicable to business on a business time line.

At User Centric, we analyze the data quantitatively and break it down into business drivers and goals. Companies are now taking this data and making business decisions that drive new products to market. When you look at two pictures, it could be hard to tell whether something is different. However, if you can look at it with quantitative data and I can tell you one is statistically significant and it’s going to affect 80 million people, you are much more confident as a business.

What trends do you see heading into the last quarter of 2009 that are relevant to the industry and your company?
GL: The HITECH Act by President Barack Obama that is infusing $30 billion into health care seems to be incredibly relevant to many businesses as we move toward an electronic health record system. The usability of these systems is often overlooked. We really need to focus on getting these systems not just to work but to work for doctors.

The globalization of products is also a significant force in the industry. We are all economically intertwined and interdependent on a financial basis. How companies survive will depend on their understanding of how to launch their products in not just one location but many. They will need to take advantage of larger markets and be able to move their products across borders.

Another trend is the convergence on mobile devices. The Web, social media, programming your DVR, banking and all of these technologies are moving to handheld devices. Who wins will be determined by simplicity (due to the size of the devices), costs (because of the economy) and the reach (in applications, communities and contacts). All of those things have to work together.