Why CEOs Need To Care About UX – Before It’s Too Late

Transcript

Nate:
All right. Welcome, everyone. I’m very excited today to have an honored guest on the podcast. My name is Nate with Userlytics. And today we have the CEO and founder of Userlytics, Alejandro.

Alejandro. Welcome.

Alejandro:
Thank you, Nate. It’s an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Nate:
Absolutely. I’m really excited to talk to you. Today we’re going to be kind of digging into a little bit of the behind the scenes of Userlytics, where it’s come from, why it started, and hopefully looking forward to the future as well.

Lots of disruptive technologies, in our current day and age, you know, so how is Userlytics handling that? And, how do you plan to include all of that?

Before we just jump in, just a quick intro of myself. My name’s Nate. I’ve been with Userlytics for four years now. Joined during the Covid pandemic. And kind of saw the business world shift to more of a remote style, and in UX research as well, I saw the industry really shift to a remote style of work. So it’s been really interesting for me to see the growth of not only the industry, but Userlytics as well. 

Alejandro, maybe you could just give us a quick background of yourself, and then we’ll kind of jump into some of the questions I have for you.

Alejandro:
Sure. Well, I’ve been involved in the user experience and usability space for about 14, 15 years.
Previous to that, I was working in the telecommunications industry. Also the market research industry. Also the nuclear power testing industry.

So being in a variety of industries and in different countries around the world, US, Japan, France, Spain, so, yeah, I have a little bit of mileage on the clock.

Nate:
Yeah. Very interesting. Sounds like you’ve had your hands, in a few different, a few different parts. I’m wondering if UX research and usability testing was, like, a seamless transition, or is that something you kind of just discovered and thought? You know, I want to kind of get into this space.

Alejandro:
It’s a great question. I have been involved as either a founder or co-founder in a number of different startups. Market research. Fixed telecom carrier. Wireless telecom carrier. Marketing platforms.

Of course, usability testing and user experience research, which is Userlytics. Grocery delivery service, all kinds of different business ventures along the years.

Some of them were very successful. Some of them were, you know, learning experiences.
But, one of the things that I saw was that the ventures that did very well tended to have a very easy usability, a very simple way for people to achieve their goal. Not necessarily, you know, the most beautiful aesthetic, not necessarily the most, innovative design.

But, you know, going back to the early days of Google, for example, we just had a white space and just a little box, you know, and you just typed in there to search.

That kind of very simple and easy to use aesthetic I found correlated very well with success.
And that’s what got me thinking.

Okay, maybe, this user experience thing, this looks really interesting, this usability testing.
So that was one of the drivers, to arrive at where we are.

Nate:
Yeah. Very, very interesting. I agree, I think a lot of people who are not familiar with the UX space, kind of just take usability for granted, right?

We think of, like, the iPhone and kind of that experience. But you don’t always think of, like, hey, the website that I’m on. Someone designed this, to have a certain experience. And so I think a UX can be a little bit hidden.

Now, in terms of, you know, the industry itself, you know, I joined a little bit later in kind of 2020 and then kind of saw the expansion of remote testing. But usability and UX research, as I would say, has really had a big boom starting around 2015.

But as we know, Userlytics started, I believe, back in 2009, did you kind of foresee this kind of gap in the market and think, is that kind of where the idea of Userlytics came to kind of fill a gap of, being able to research and find insights related to UX?

Alejandro:

Very interesting, because, in fact, usability and user experience, user experience research and user experience design, these things have existed for decades, going back into really around the middle or, you know, the latter part of the 20th century. 

However, large corporations always had a few people who understood the importance of usability and user experience research. It was never viewed as important as, for example, sales and marketing or customer service or, you know, product development. 

It was kind of a very niche area that if you asked any CEO until the last 10 or 11 years, you know, who’s in charge of your usability, who’s in charge of your user experience design, who’s in charge of user experience research? They would be like, user what? What are you talking about? 

And, so in 2009, the idea of Userlytics was actually not my idea. It was an employee of another venture that suggested it to me. It was quite clear to me that, wait a second, A – everybody’s going remote, and B – businesses are going digital.

Now, if you go to a restaurant and you don’t like the service, you don’t like the aesthetic, you don’t like the food, you’re already there! It’s, you know, you might walk out, but chances are you’re going to stay there unless it’s an absolutely horrific experience.

However, if you’re visiting a website, if you just slightly dislike it, you’re out of there in two milliseconds. So the cost of a bad user experience has become immensely more important with the move of all businesses to a digital interaction. And this is something that was clear to us back in 2009 when we started. The issue was, who do we talk to to convince a large corporate that they should invest in us?

And it took us a number of years. And, I can’t say that it was thanks to us, I think it was thanks to a collective recognition by CEOs, especially in English speaking countries, that would, you know, they’d open the newspaper in the morning or the digital equivalent, and they’d see something like, you know, Slack worth billions of dollars in XYZ…

And, so they’d say, hey, well, who are these Slack people? Oh, it’s, you know, it’s some kind of an enterprise messaging app. Billions of dollars for that? Yeah, but it’s got a great user experience. And they’re like, what are we doing about user experience?

All of a sudden they realized at the top level of the corporation how important it was, and they started investing time and money and people into a better UX.

Now we’re kind of privileged and we can see that happening in the Anglo-Saxon speaking world. Canada, US and Australia with a lag in the rest of the world because we sell to enterprise clients in 40 countries around the world. And you know, we can tell within which countries the light bulb has gone off in the sense that the CEOs of the C-suite have realized, hey, this is really important.

Zoom entered its market 13 years after everybody else, but now owns its market. Not because they spent more money in sales and marketing, not because they were cheaper, but because they just had a slightly better user experience. It’s the only reason.

So, anyway, that’s an extensive answer to your question. I hope I didn’t bore you with that.

Nate:
No, not at all. And you know, I actually wanted to touch on something you said.

So you mentioned, you know, a lot of CEOs, executives. You know, they’re aware that they need to have a good user experience. But when you ask them, hey, you know, who’s doing your usability, who’s doing your research? They may just kind of blank, right? Because maybe they assume that, like, their designers creating the website are really doing everything, but there’s not a focus on research specific.

So I’m wondering, you know, in your experience as a business owner and speaking to other business owners, is there like a light bulb moment that switches them to not only like I need to invest in usability, you know, maybe from like a design perspective, but really having a company or organization focus on doing research, you know, with real people, real users.

Alejandro:
Yeah, it’s a great question, because in order to have an organization adopt best practices in terms of usability and user experience, you need a complete mindset change at all levels of the organization.

And that’s not so easy. Even if the CEO says it shall be so. You know, it’s not necessarily going to be so. It takes a while for that to happen.

A great analogy would be: Imagine… The toothbrush is invented today, and until today you never brushed your teeth. When things got really painful, you went to a dentist and they would do something, give you drugs, pull out a tooth, do something, right?

That’s kind of the world for most organizations in relation to UX, because brushing your teeth is like doing constant usability testing and user experience research iteratively every week, every day, if it’s possible.

Just continually trying to get feedback from real users about what’s going on. That’s like brushing your teeth. And if you do that, then you won’t have to go to the dentist as often, you know.

And so getting people to do that when they’ve been trained from being little kids is easier because they’ve been trained. But organizations, you know, the designers, the developers, the marketers, the customer service personnel, the product people, all these people getting them to get into the mindset of, you have to do research continually, doesn’t have to be 500 people, doesn’t have to be a massive project. It can be five people, but do it all the time.

And that’s just like brushing your teeth. And if you do that, your teeth won’t hurt as often. Basically.

Nate:
Hopefully everyone’s brushing their teeth out there. I think this is a really good point. Especially as we move into, and we’ve kind of been in an economic market that is uncertain. Right? It’s there, always a threat of recession and things like that.

And a lot of times, UX research is not, you know, seen as maybe as important as something like sales and marketing, you know, top line items. So I’m wondering if you can speak to that, right? For executives out there, directors who are like, I don’t have a budget to do research. Especially in uncertain times, in downturning markets.

You know, from your perspective Alejandro, why would you say it’s important to continue doing the research, even at maybe a lower cost or a lower level, smaller amount?

Alejandro:
Yeah. Well, to answer that question precisely, you would need to come up with a slightly different answer depending upon the industry. It is because different industries, usability and user experience will have different impacts. But let me just give you one example.

Any industry like the SaaS business that has recurring customers, you know, if you’re selling houses, maybe you’re only selling to the same customer once in your lifetime. So, you know, if the user experience is not great, well, you know, no big deal. You’ll find another customer somewhere else, right? Most businesses are not in that situation.

Most businesses, they do rely on returning customers. So then I would ask the CEO, okay, you’re faced with budget constraints. You can cut sales and marketing. You can cut customer service. You can cut product, you can cut different areas. Okay.

Let’s analyze what percentage of your customers churn every month or every year. And how big of that is that in dollars sense?

Now let’s analyze if you could adjust that churn rate slightly downwards or your retention rate slightly upwards, what would that translate into in terms of millions of dollars of revenue for you, and of profitability?

And then it’s crystal clear how important user experience is, because that is going to be the thing that not only gets people to come into your store in the first place, but especially keeps them there and talk well about you and refer other customers and so on and so forth. If I had to cut anywhere, the last place I would cut would be in user experience research. Period.

Nate:
Yeah. I mean, I totally agree, and I’m glad you explain it that way, because I think, you know, for us, we’re in the UX space all day, every day. You know, that’s kind of our job is what we do, right? But maybe if you’re not in that space directly, you’re just not thinking as much about it. And so I think that’s kind of a really good delineation.

What I want to do now is kind of switch gears a little bit, you know, kind of talk about the future.
You know, we have a lot of, again, disruptive technologies in the space. AI being one specifically and, you know, there’s a lot of maybe potential worry that AI is going to, you know, take over research, design, you know, lots of different potential jobs out there will get outsourced or changed by AI.

So wondering if you could talk a little bit about kind of where you see AI currently within the UX space and maybe even potentially where you see it going in the future.

Alejandro:
I mean, but before jumping into, you know, AI and its relationship with UX and user experience, I would like to just touch on the point that you mentioned about the fear that we may have, that, you know, this AI is going to replace people.

I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t predict the future. But I will say that in terms of Userlytics, I have been trying to get every single department and division in the company to look at AI, to experiment with AI, and to implement AI in different workflows and processes, to see what works and what doesn’t.

Because the way I see it, it’s not going to enable us to cut costs so much as it’s going to allow us to do a lot more of what we’re already doing. So we may well be able to cut prices for our customers, but because we’ll just be able to do so much more, we’ll become so much more productive.

So at least in relation to Userlytics I’m not fearful in that sense. You know, obviously I have several concerns about some, Arnold Schwarzenegger type, chatbot taking over the world as a Terminator, but that’s a different story.

So, with that, in terms of its impact on Userlytics, I see two types of impacts. One is kind of short term and tactical. So it enables us to do a lot of things better or easier or especially our clients.

For example, we generate tons of hours of video. These are video sessions. These are recordings of people interacting with websites with prototypes, mobile apps, etc., and these video recordings are chock full of insights, super valuable insights.

But somebody’s got to watch these videos and, you know, get those insights. It’s not like seeing a bar graph of a thousand respondents of a survey. You immediately see, okay, what’s going on.
Here, somebody’s actually got to listen to the videos, watch what they’re doing, the participants. 

So here AI, and we’ve already started, we launched something called AI UX in April of last year.
That basically what it does is it analyzes what has happened during the participant session, extracts insights and synthesizes what is happening.

And so that’s, if you will, a tactical innovation or tactical value added, and there’s other areas where AI will clearly have a tactical benefit for us, such as assisting in test script generation and similar matters.

But I would like to take a step back and think a few moves ahead down the road. If you think about the user interface, as it’s been designed for decades, digitally consists of predefined flows. If I click here, I can go here and I can do this and I could do that if I click here, etc. etc..
Now obviously there are thousands of different flows that can happen. And our job is to help our clients make sure the user experience is good if not fantastic in all those flows and interactions. 

But what happens when you introduce chatbots and AI into the equation? All of a sudden the experience, the amount of different flows of different interactions, it’s multiplied a thousand fold.

And that can be good or bad because depending, you know, we have a UI and we add a chatbot. Have we done it in the right way? Is it helping improve the user experience? Is it helping the user, the client, the prospect achieve their goals? Or is it just useless noise, distraction, visually or audio or however?

So in that sense, the need for testing, for user research, for usability testing, of the integration of chatbots into new UI’s that are going to be hybrid old UI systems with AI that’s going to multiply a million fold. So I’m sorry to say you’re going to have a lot more work.

Nate:
No doubt. I mean, I think one of the really important things that you mentioned there was that it.
It’s going to increase productivity. So it’s going to allow humans to get more work done, maybe focus less on some of the lower items and focus more on some of the more important things.

I think, like a good metaphor would be, you know, the call in robots. So like, you call a major corporation and it says, hey, you know, click one to go to this area, click two to go to this area.

So that prevents every single caller from having to talk to a real person and maybe find the information. But sometimes at the end of the day, you know, you just need to talk to a real person to ask a question, some human ingenuity. So there’s a point where it increases productivity, but sometimes you really just need to have a human interaction.

And I don’t know if you would agree, but I think UX research will steer towards a similar direction. A lot of the lower level items will get automated. But at the end of the day, you still really need a person to talk to a person to kind of get the human ingenuity.

Would you agree?

Alejandro:
Yeah. And in fact, one of the businesses that I started, back in the day, was an audio tech company. You know, that designed and implemented those, you know, press this for that and press and say that for this.

And unfortunately, what we have seen is that the industry, especially customer service and all that have adopted these in a very un-user friendly way, and it can be hell on earth sometimes to be talking to this extremely badly designed interface.

So I am hopeful and confident that AI will radically improve that experience. But as you say.
The best application of AI is when it empowers human beings to become better and more productive and more efficient, not when it replaces them.

So, getting that right is, you know, part art, part science, but, that should be the goal.

Nate:
Alejandro, you mentioned something that I think might be good to kind of touch on from an AI perspective. You know, you mentioned that UX research and usability testing adoption was really first adopted in the Anglo-Saxon market.

English major speaking countries. Do you see something similar happen for AI, or do you think that AI gets more widely adopted, especially from a UX perspective, globally first? Or, you know, maybe in the more English speaking main markets first?

Alejandro:
I think it’s not going to happen that way with AI. I think clearly everybody recognizes how important AI is. It’s the most important paradigm shift in technology that I’ve seen in my lifetime and that I suspect humanity has seen in its lifetime. So, I think everybody recognizes that everybody’s jumping on this bus, and there’s not going to be the same kind of delay that we saw in the adoption of UX. So, a lot of interesting things lie ahead in that sense.

Nate:

I think a good kind of segway into the latter half of this interview. That’s kind of where we’re going in the future. You’ve probably been through a few more business cycles than me. So you’ve kind of seen some of these trends in cycles. 

And so I’m wondering, from Userlytics’ perspective, where is kind of your goal and vision for the next 5 to 10 years? Not even maybe so specifically on AI, but just for the company in general. 

Alejandro:
Sure. So, in our field, there are a variety of providers that just specialize in one distinct area.
User experience design or research. So there might be platforms that are focused on being repositories, or there might be platforms that are focused on card sorting and tree testing, i.e., information architecture design. Or they might be focused on just getting respondents, you know, having a quality panel of participants. So, there are a variety of small to medium organizations that focus on one specific area and try to do that area very well.

And then there’s a few organizations that try to be holistic, one-stop shops where you can pretty much use the platform for almost any type of UX research method. So thus enabling what we call in the industry mixed method research.

And that’s where Userlytics is, we definitely have the biggest international footprint in the world. We’ve done projects in 79 countries. And yeah. So, I would hope that we would continue to be leaders in terms of international, being able to do, you know, multiple simultaneous countries with multiple UX research methodologies all mixed up in one big massive project, or conversely, just doing a do-it-yourself simple, easy test in Malaysia or, you know, in Luxembourg or wherever.

And so we’d like to continue to be that kind of company. And one thing that we’re very focused on is improving our own usability. So, it’s all fine for us to help our clients improve the usability and user experience of their products. But we very much try to apply those same methods to our own product. And, you know, there’s always more that we want to do in that sense.

So we’re not where we would like to be. And the goalposts continually move, and that’s the nature of business. But that’s where we’d like to be—to be the most user-friendly, the best customer service, and the most international, holistic, one-stop shop user experience platform and panel.

Nate:

Wonderful. I mean, I think from the perspective of UX research, it’s helpful that your platform is the one that can actually do it. So that leads us to a good position to do some UX research.

In terms of UX research as a whole. Right. The field, the industry, again, gaining more adoption. I would say even here in the US, which is where I’m located, and kind of the market that I work with, even companies that are like, hey, we have a researcher, they do it. To kind of get a little more evangelism. You can see more adoption across the organization. 

So as we see more adoption, what’s kind of your outlook 5 to 10 years on the industry as a whole? Does UX get outsourced to AI? Where, you know, essentially everything is going to be automated? Does it get more global? Does it get more interconnected on a global scale? Just kind of overall thoughts on where we go from here.

Alejandro:
I definitely don’t think it gets automated. I do think that AI will empower researchers to get a lot more done, and designers to get a lot more done in the field of user experience research.

Now, I do think that there’s going to be a massive challenge for all of us in what I mentioned before, which is as we start inserting AI into the UI, the user interface, how we do that in a way that is positive for the user and we just don’t throw it at, oh, we need AI, so we’re just going to throw it and it’s going to stick on the wall and voila, check! We’ve got AI.

You know, if we can avoid that outcome and actually do it in a thoughtful and considered way where AI is adding value rather than detracting value. And it’s quite easy to add AI to have it detract value because we add it in a way that is just adding noise. It’s confusing, it’s hallucinating, and it’s giving wrong answers.

And by the way, that’s one of the reasons why we’re always going to have to have a human being in the pilot’s seat, making sure that, you know, the flaps go in the right position and we land the plane. So, yeah, that’s my take on that.

Nate:

And I guess last question for you. I want—I appreciate you sticking with us, and I throw a lot of questions at you, and you really give us some good insights.

For the listener who is, you know, listening to this interview and thought, you know what? Maybe it is time for my team, my company, organization, to focus a little bit more on UX research.

What would be your suggestion of, like, a good place to start, assuming that they haven’t done a lot of research in the past? What would be kind of a good first step for them?

Alejandro:
Well, that’s a great question, because I think the first step should be, okay, I have this organization. I want to improve the user experience. In what area will I get the biggest bang for the buck?

Because, you know, Rome wasn’t built in a day. So, let’s figure out where is the place where user happiness and user usability and user satisfaction and, you know, all those things are most important from a dollar and cents point of view.

Once I determine, okay, this place where users come in and they ask for this, or they’re looking for that, or they interact with that, this is the area where we should start with. Okay, now what is the ideal flow journey of a user in that interaction point?

And this is something that, you know, you may need to talk to your product people, to your marketing people, to your ops people, to, you know, a variety of actors. But once you have that established, then you should look for a company that can assist you, depending upon, you know, what internal resources you have yourself.

If you have researchers, maybe, you need a company that will provide the software platform like the Userlytics one and maybe the participants, or maybe you have the participants. So it depends upon what you have within your organization.

But maybe you don’t have the researcher. So, you know, maybe you need an organization that can supply all three of those things—the software, the panel, the researchers. So it kind of depends upon what you have. But before you even get there, you have to determine where are you going to start.

It’s going to be a big and continual and never-ending task. But start with the area where you have—you get the biggest bang for your buck, essentially.

Nate:
Yeah, I love that. I think the important thing here is the first step, right? Getting started on the journey before, hey, here’s where I need to be five years, ten years from now. Really interesting insights, Alejandro. You’ve given us a lot to think about.

For anyone listening, that’s, you know, maybe interested in learning a little bit more on how to get started on a UX journey, how to continue on a better path to be more productive on your UX research goals, feel free to reach out to us here at Userlytics.

We’ll put some more information below on where you can reach out, where you can learn a little bit more. And hopefully we can assist you on that. But also, Alejandro, I really appreciate your time. I know your time is really valuable, but you’ve given us a lot of really important, good things to think about. And appreciate you jumping on with us today.

Alejandro:
Thank you, Nate. It’s been a pleasure.

Nate:
Thanks, everyone.