Chapter 8. Box 4: User Outcomes and Benefits
Figure 8-1. Box 4 of the Lean UX Canvas: User Outcomes and Benefits
Despite the proliferation of Agile techniques like user stories, the user and their goals often become lost in the lengthy debates over features, designs, and technical implementations. Empathy is at the heart of great products and services. Designers often have been responsible for advocating for the user from an empathetic point of view. As we now know, this is not uniquely a designer’s responsibility. To achieve broader shared understanding of users and a deeper sense of empathy for what they are trying to achieve, we ask our teams to declare their assumptions about what users are trying to do, in the form of user outcomes and benefits.
Before starting Box 4, you may be asking yourself, what’s the difference between business outcomes, customer outcomes, and user outcomes? Good question. Let’s take a look at an example in which you work for a company that makes corporate expense tracking software.
The business outcome the company is trying to achieve is to acquire more customers, retain the ones they already have, and increase monthly software subscription revenue.
The customers of this company—other companies who buy the expense tracking software for their employees—are trying to improve the efficiency of their accounting teams, reduce payment of expenses that are not reimbursable, and drive down overall operational costs.
The users of the software are the employees at these customer companies. Their desired goal is to get their expenses reimbursed as quickly as possible and reduce the time it takes them to input those expenses correctly.
All of these are still behavior-based outcomes, but each has its own point of view. In other words, they refer to the different goals being pursued by the different groups of people.
In addition to behavior change, there are emotional goals at both the customer and user levels. The buyers of this software want to feel like they are helping the company be more successful and profitable. They want to look good to their bosses and want to be able to point to their specific contributions to the success of the company. This would motivate them to seek out a brand of expense tracking software that allows them to do this easily.
The users of the software want to get reimbursed quickly and feel confident their expenses will be fully reimbursed without a myriad of red tape and corporate hassle. This would motivate these users to be more diligent and deliberate in the use of this software rather than having it be yet another corporate IT tool that goes unused or worked around.
It’s worth noting that all of these outcomes are important and should be called out specifically as business, customer, or user outcomes. However, not all of these are quantifiable. Meeting users’ emotional goals is hard—particularly if the team tends to focus on metrics, because you measure these emotional factors in different ways. That said, just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to this type of goal. These emotional goals are critical: they’re the ones that help teams understand what kind of experience they’re trying to deliver and ultimately, if you get it right, will lead to better performance on the quantifiable metrics.
Facilitating the Exercise
Once your proto-personas have been created, you can use the material in the bottom portion of the proto-persona as the basis for this discussion. Working individually, in small groups, or as a whole team, work your way through each proto-persona. Use the following questions as your prompts:
- What is the user trying to accomplish?
- Example answer: I want to buy a new phone.
- How does the user want to feel during and after this process?
- Example answer: I want to feel like I got the phone that I need at a good price and that I’m keeping up with my peers (i.e., I want to feel cool).
- How does our product or service get the user closer to a life goal or dream?
- Example answer: I want to feel tech-savvy and respected for it.
- Why would your user seek out your product?
- Example answer: I want to fit in with my friends at school.
- What behavior change can we observe that tells they’ve achieved their goal?
- Example answer: They bring their new phone to school every day.
Note that not every user outcome exists at all levels. But thinking about outcomes in these terms can help you to find important dimensions of your solution to work on, from the functional, task-oriented outcomes to the more emotional experience-oriented outcomes.
This section of the canvas is where the team digs into the emotional side of the conversation. We’re not talking about features, pixels, or code here. We want to understand what would drive our personas to look for our product and, when they find it, what they might do. When the time comes to begin testing, marketing, or advertising the product, the work we do in this section becomes a gold mine for content, calls-to-action, and helpful instructional text.
What to Watch Out For
Sometimes teams get so feature-focused that this exercise becomes a bit of a recursive exercise. We’ve seen teams write down features in this section because they assume that’s what motivates their customers. Writing down a user benefit as “calendar integration” misses the point of this exercise. The goal here is to understand the user’s latent needs. “Never be late to another meeting” is far more important and compelling for the user than the specifics of the feature that will help them do that. Apple is always very good at differentiating the iPhone this way against Samsung and other competitors. While the competition is touting features like “12-megapixel camera,” Apple advertises, “Show grandma the baby from across the country.”