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Working with Marketing

Mike Atyeo, Simon Robinson, Charanjit Sidhu

BT Laboratories, Martlesham Heath,
Ipswich, Suffolk, IP5 7RE, UK
E-mail: m_atyeo@hfnet.bt.co.uk

ABSTRACT

This paper describes our experiences in BT working with Marketing on a number of recently released and forthcoming telecommunications products. We believe that usability professionals will find it increasingly important to work with marketing professionals, and we provide practical advice for those who do so.

KEYWORDS:

Human Factors, Marketing, focus groups, telecommunications

INTRODUCTION

As long ago as 1976 the relationship between human factors and marketing was characterised as 'neglected' [1]. As recently as 1995, the relationship was described as 'distant and often chilly' [2]. At BT, we have been integrating our work with marketing activities for some time [3, 5]. We believe that this not only provides a more cost-effective solution for our company, but overcomes many of the traditional problems with the role of usability professionals - for example, the frequently-voiced complaint that usability professionals are not involved early enough in the development process.

We also believe that usability professionals will find it increasingly important to understand and work with marketing. Winograd recently pointed out that software markets are becoming more consumer-like [4]. Consumer products also have an increasing software content, and many depend on integration with information and communications services. More importantly, information, entertainment and computing technologies and markets are converging rapidly, and usability professionals will find themselves working on consumer products and services more frequently. These radical market shifts also mean that traditional marketing research techniques are no longer sufficient for producing innovative products.

EARLY CONTRIBUTION

On recent product developments, we have been able to contribute very early in the development cycle, either jointly or in parallel with marketing research. Most of the experiences reported here come from our work on Call Minder, the remainder are from products not yet launched. Call Minder is a residential voice messaging system. Launched in May 1995, it already has more than 100,000 customers, with over 1,000 new customers taking up the service every week.

CONCEPT EVALUATION

Part of our 'concept evaluation' process is a rapid impact analysis, designed to provide a 'first cut' analysis of costs, timescales, and issues. On a recent development, we were able to highlight a significant number of end user issues from a high level concept outline. These issues were incorporated into six usage scenarios, whose primary purpose was to communicate the concept - including target market - to BT developers, and to external design agencies and manufacturers.

For Call Minder, marketing carried out initial concept testing with focus groups. They examined customers' attitudes towards answering machines and existing network-based services, as well as their attitudes towards the proposed service, their price expectations, etc. The resulting information suggested necessary levels of customer acceptance needed for market success, and even highlighted some customer priorities, but provided little guidance for product specification or for design rationale.

We therefore prototyped a version of the proposed service, using an in-house dialogue design tool, and ran a series of focus groups with representatives of the target market. Unlike the earlier focus groups, we included task-based product interaction as well as discussion. This provided qualitative behavioural data in addition to subjective response, and sparked specific discussions in the groups. The results highlighted usability issues which would have had significant impact on the acceptability of the product. As a result, major parts of the user dialogue were re-designed.

INVOLVING CLIENTS IN PROCESS

We have found that our clients [1] obtain a clearer understanding of our techniques and skills if we involve them in our process. In the developments outlined here, we gained buy-in from team members during multidisciplinary scenario and storyboard generation. Key project board members were also invited to observe our focus groups. When they were unable to do this, we provided videos of edited highlights of our customer observations. Certain types of customer behaviour can only be fully communicated in this way. For example, customers' hesitancy when faced with a speech system shows more in real-time behaviour than in their considered responses to survey questions.

PRESENTING FIELD TRIAL FINDINGS

For Call Minder, a field trial was carried out with the modified prototype service. Marketing and human factors carried out parallel research, coordinated to prevent duplication. We presented our results at the same project meetings. These presentations highlighted the contributions of both disciplines. Marketing were able to present general findings covering a broad range of market issues (price sensitivity, package options etc). Our work provided explanations for some of the findings, and elicited customers' own views on how the service could be improved. In addition, we showed how verbal responses could sometimes have a tenuous relationship to actual customer behaviour.

On a subsequent product, we presented the marketing and usability data as an integrated whole, rather than in separate presentations.

SETTING USABILITY TARGETS

Even at Call Minder concept generation stage, we were able to start to put in place approximate usability targets for critical parts of the proposed service - eg message access time, system response times - drawn from previous product work. These were used to direct and prioritise work as well as providing benchmarks against which we evaluated the prototypes. We refined the targets after the field trials, and were able to use Call Minder benchmarks on subsequent developments.

In the production of usability targets, marketing became aware that they had to develop a stronger understanding of the relationship between specific subjective and objective usability targets and likely market size, usage, and churn.

USING COMMUNICATIONS STATISTICS

A recent development was built on an exchange platform which captures network transaction data for the production of traffic statistics. For a field trial, this meant that we were able to obtain detailed information from a large number of calls to the service within a few days. This helped us to see some problems early on, for example a high rate of 'hang-up', which might otherwise have required lengthy customer observation.

The platform also allowed us to selectively change parts of the prototype service during the field trial itself, and observe the results.

STRENGTHENING MARKETING RESEARCH

Marketing research, no less than usability engineering, can be conservative in relying on tried and tested techniques. More marketing people are beginning to realise that their traditional research techniques are weak in the face of rapidly moving technology and markets, where potential customers are unable to envisage future services. BT marketing have recognised the need to move from 'asking' to 'observing', and the necessity to provide as realistic an environment of use as possible for the observation. They are more frequently taking prototype services out into the marketplace for concept testing. Following on from our Call Minder work, marketing are considering adopting the dialogue prototyping tool as a marketing research aid.

UNEXPECTED BENEFITS

Working closely with voice service engineers as well as marketing people, we were in a unique position to see, understand, and communicate the interdisciplinary issues. In effect, we were often able to act as translators between the two very different sets of people, and ensure that our own recommendations were sound from both a business and technical perspective.

CONCLUSIONS

Our recent work with marketing has illustrated how: The main value of this learning has been that we can refine ideas while still at the concept stage. This saves the disproportionate amount of effort, time and cost which could have been necessary to re-work the products later in the development process.

We believe that usability professionals will increasingly need to integrate usability engineering with marketing activities, as they find themselves working more and more often with marketing. However, the payback is that usability engineering can establish a secure role at the earliest stages of product development, in generating and evaluating innovative product concepts.

FOOTNOTES:

    Internal customers of our work, rather than product end-users.

REFERENCES

  1. Cannon, T. and Hasty, R. The Neglected Alliance: Human Factors and Market Research, in Proc. 6th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association. Santa Monica, USA 1976, pp. 113-117.
  2. Nardi, B. Some Reflections on Scenarios, in Scenario-Based Design, Carroll, J. (Ed), Wiley 1995.
  3. Atyeo, M. and Green, R. User-Friendly Weapons for the Competitive Fight, British Telecommunications Engineering Journal Vol. 13.3, 1994 pp. 201-205.
  4. Winograd, T. From Programming Environments to Environments for Designing, Communications of the ACM Vol. 38 No 6 June 1995
  5. Atyeo, M. and Robinson, S. Delivering Competitive Edge, in Proc. Interact '95 (Lillehammer, Norway) pp. 384-385.