The UX Flywheel is a user-centered alternative marketing the marketing funnel that puts the user at the center of all marketing activities. It prescribes specific UX methods to help marketing teams understand what customers want (deep down inside), how to earn their trust, and why they make specific choices.
Unlike the traditional marketing funnel, the UX Flywheel is something designers, researchers, writers, and marketers can all get behind.
You'll leave this session with:
Brent Summers:
Hello, good morning. I hope everyone is enjoying the product lead summit so far. I really enjoyed the first one that I attended in 2019, and I'm stoked to be a part of this event this year. As you can see on my screen, my name is Brent Summers, and you can get in touch with me via email or social media using those handles at the bottom. Before I dive into my presentation, I wanted to share just a little bit about myself to help establish some context. I've been working at the intersection of marketing and technology since 2004 when NASCAR hired me in their ticket sales department. While there I successfully advocated for and built an internal portal that helped 100 ticket agents sell more efficiently. That side project kickstarted the seven year career which opened doors for me that, as a college dropout from Daytona Beach, I never would have thought possible.
Brent Summers:
I had some really great managers who supported my professional growth and helped me cut my teeth as a business analyst and project manager, while contributing to countless projects, including more than a dozen website redesigns, the introduction of print at home ticketing, deployment of an enterprise grade CRM, and even a building a few wireless networks. Since then I've moved to California and started working the agency side with a decidedly more creative and user centered focus. My clients have included successful SaaS companies, such as Segment, pivotal, New Relic, Elastic Search, Sumo logic and MarcomCentral. And one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in my career is that momentum makes things work better. Hopefully this talk will give you some lessons that will help you become more effective in your job and increase your momentum. Oh, and I also have the world's cutest dog. His name is Midas, and he's a 75 pound golden doodle. You can find them on Instagram @Midasthedoodle.
Brent Summers:
So I work for a company called Blink, we're a user experience, research, and design company, and that means that we work with other companies to make meaningful digital products, brands, and experiences. Blink was founded in 2000 and today we're about 150 people spread across five locations. These are just a few of the clients that I've worked with, or Blink has worked with since I joined the company two years ago. There's two primary ways that we help customers, the first is improving existing experiences with things that are going to ship in the near term, like in the next one to six months, and we've done that for Nike with the run app, with Oculus with the Go and Quest headsets, and even for Starbucks. We also help clients with future strategic initiatives. Those are things that are going to ship 12 to 36 months out. They involve extensive user research, comprehensive prototyping and dedicated teams, and sometimes multiple sub projects. That's what we've done for USAA, NASA, and Amazon.
Brent Summers:
Anyways, I could go on and on, but you're here to learn about the UX Flywheel. The UX Flywheel is something we've developed at Blink to explain how UX can benefit marketers. I'm going to tell you about it in three segments. First, I'll share this new model and how it's different than the traditional marketing funnel. Next I'll explain the components of the model, including the difference between user research and traditional market research. Finally, I'll share a relevant case study that will tie it all together. Sound good?
Brent Summers:
Oh, real quick, I wanted to tell you about the inspiration for this talk. Several months ago, Dave Gerhardt, a leading marketer in B2B SaaS, somebody you may have heard of, he put this out on LinkedIn and it caused me to pause. He said, "Not to try and mess up your brain, but how do you effectively market in a world where 99% of people don't want to be marketed to, 99% of people only read headlines or tweets, and 99% of people are skeptical of sales? Plus, all that fake news stuff." Now, Dave has a pretty big LinkedIn following and a really strong personal brand. You know the type, people like him and they trust him and they respond to him, and I wanted to get into that conversation.
Brent Summers:
So I'm watching the comments come in about how do you effectively market in these kinds of conditions, and I'm seeing things like 1,000,001 different software tools from Insta page, to Google ads. People talked about using videos or webinars as a way of engaging customers. People talked about Live chat and messaging tools like Intercom and drift. Customer data and personalization and the age of AI and data privacy. People talked about their success with direct mail, apparently that still works for some businesses, and people even talked about influencer marketing as a way of gaining customers trust. And as I'm looking at all those responses, I just kept thinking to myself, "Wow, that is a lot of tactics." And those tactics are certainly respectful, but they don't really mean a whole lot without strategy behind them.
Brent Summers:
So I want to start off by talking about strategy and how to define strategy. The dictionary defines strategy as, "A plan of action or policy to design a major or overall aim." So if we break that down, strategy is a plan of action, it's made up of tactics. And that's why people so often confuse strategy and tactics because they are inextricably linked. Those tactics are selected to solve a particular problem, designed to achieve, and what is design but problem solving? So a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. So it's not about short term, it's about a big, hairy, audacious goal. That's what strategy helps you do, achieve a major or overall aim.
Brent Summers:
So here's a really clear picture of an audacious goal and a winning strategy. If you don't recognize the image, that's Muhammad Ali on the left, and he's fighting George Foreman on the right at the Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman was favored to win this fight four to one, because he was so much more powerful than Ali. Big George, as they called him, had already successfully defended his title twice before facing Muhammad Ali. So Muhammad Ali knew that he wasn't going to be able to beat Foreman on power alone, he would have to outsmart him with a strategic plan. So Ali started by looking at evidence. He watched hours and hours of boxing footage and learned that Foreman had this very specific style. He would paw at his opponents and draw them open so that he could land punches.
Brent Summers:
Well, Ali and everyone else knew that Foreman was this really powerful boxer. In fact, he was so powerful that his longest fight before this was just five rounds, and he usually won in less than four. So it was clear from that footage that Ali was going to need to try to extend the length of the match, and find ways to tire George out, because he was just so powerful. So he examined that data and developed this three-part strategy. The first thing Ali did was dodge and counter, and he had made an entire career out of this. You probably already know the adage, fly like a butterfly sting, like a bee. So Foreman would do one thing and Ali would dodge, and then that would leave Foreman open and Ali would counter attack with a jab, or whatever else.
Brent Summers:
The next thing he did was psych him out. Every time that Ali was taking on damage, he would grab him by the headlock and use that to break up the momentum. But when he was holding onto him, he wasn't just passively breaking up the momentum, he was actually psyching him out. He was yelling in his ear, "Is that all you've got, George? Give me some." And so this helped Ali keep the pace of the match nice and high. Ali had trained for a long and intense match. In fact, during his training, he let other boxers hit him unguarded just to build up toughness and stamina.
Brent Summers:
So that's the first two components of the strategy, but the third is probably the most famous part of the match, the rope-a-dope. Here's the thing, boxing is hard. It requires stamina and power, and when George Foreman hits you, it hurts. That energy knocks you back, and so to counterbalance this, you usually grip with your toes or squeeze your midsection. It's really, really hard work. But in Ali's approach, he leaned on these ropes, so that actually used the laws of physics to his advantage, the energy would transfer through him and into the boxing ring. And it looked really bad on television, but it helped Ali last for more and more rounds. That's strategy.
Brent Summers:
So why do you care about a 40 year old boxing match? Well, because the last time that you executed a strategic plan, it probably didn't work out perfectly, so you've got to look at the major or overall aim and know when you can stay the course, but also make sure that you've got opportunities to learn and iterate and tune your strategy. Again, staying focused on that major aim, the end goal.
Brent Summers:
So in marketing, the end goal is to drive revenue, and in a product led company, the product needs to do a lot of that heavy lifting for you. And that's where the UX Flywheel comes in. Obviously the objectives are different, but marketers can learn something from Mohammad Ali. Each interaction with your customer is an opportunity to learn. The UX Flywheel is a basic strategy model with three components, just like Ali's. And also like boxing rounds, it allows for iterations, multiple chances to learn about your customer and win them over. You see, some purchases are like cars or homes, and you only make those a few times in your life. But in many more cases, loyalty becomes this really important part of the relationship between a customer and a brand and a product led company, or a SaaS company, where recurring revenue compounds over time, this sort of iterative long tail approach is really an improvement over the traditional marketing funnel.
Brent Summers:
I like to say that SaaS companies reminded me a lot of restaurants. Getting people to try your product once isn't that hard, you just need to get their attention and have something that they like on the menu. But getting them to come back time and again means you have to have a quality that can trust and a differentiated offering. The pictures you can see here of my favorite restaurant here in San Diego, it's called the Turf Club, and it doesn't look like much from the outside, but my husband and I go there pretty much every Tuesday, and it's become a favorite of other people from Blink as well. We call them blinkers, and when they visit San Diego from one of our other five studios, we oftentimes go there for a steak. But I digress.
Brent Summers:
If you've been around marketing long enough, then you probably recognize this framework, the AIDA framework, awareness, interest, desire, action. It's the old school marketing funnel, and it's been reinterpreted several times over the years. A few years ago HubSpot pioneered a new approach they called inbound marketing, where you focused on providing value to your customers, probably through content, in order to attract them and ultimately convert them.
Brent Summers:
So I'm also not the first to come up with a flywheel. The UX Flywheel is an approach to marketing that's inspired by this classic piece of technology. Here's what Wikipedia says about flywheels. "Flywheels are often used to provide continuous power output and systems where the energy source is not continuous." So in this pottery wheel, you can imagine the person pumping the pedal, yet the wheel is maintaining a consistent pace. It's because the flywheel is actually storing and throttling that energy. And I think that's really important for marketing teams because no matter what your role is or how big your team is, the energy you can output is probably not continuous and steady. So a flywheel helps you to regulate that. And your customer's readiness to buy certainly isn't always on either, and that's why leading companies, like HubSpot have actually evolved their approach from the inbound funnel, and are themselves using a flywheel as a metaphor to continue to define their strategy and dominate their categories.
Brent Summers:
So again, the UX Flywheel, it starts with understanding your customers deeply. That understanding is an essential element of marketing, I don't have to tell you that. Especially if you work for a product led company, you probably understand your customers pretty well, and why that understanding is important for growth. But if you'll indulge me for a minute, I want to make sure you and anyone else who's listening understands the difference between traditional market research and user research. Both are important, but they're very different. Traditional market research focuses on statistical understanding of your customers. It's sort of removed from the individual and focused more on a user segment, while user research helps you understand your individual customers really well. Through one-on-one interviews we learn about their motivations, their self identity, their attitudes, and their context of use.
Brent Summers:
Here's a really vivid example. If you think of two customers, both of them are born in 1948, and they're male and they're white. They were raised in Great Britain, they're married, successful, and wealthy. Furthermore, both of them have at least two children, they like dogs, and they love the Alps. That's the kind of data that a market research persona might tell you. You've got a picture of who these two men are? So do I. One of them is Prince Charles, and the other is Ozzy Osborne. So you can see those two contrasting individuals look very similar from a market research perspective, but are so much different in terms of their attitudes, their cultural norms, and the choices that they make, and their motivations. So statistical customer descriptions are of course important, but a true understanding of someone's habits, social context, and motivations is really critical to creating a great user experience, and without a great user experience, it's very difficult to achieve product led growth. So the UX Flywheel will help you both on the product side, and on the marketing side.
Brent Summers:
The first ingredient in the UX Flywheel is desire. Desire is really difficult to manufacture. I'm married now, but I remember how frustrated I was with a guy that I was trying to date. We can call him Eric. He was tall, handsome, and a doctor. My mom would have been so proud had that worked out, but despite my efforts to like him, I just didn't. There just wasn't any desire. You see, desire is more than just a want, it's a deeply innate intrinsic thing within each of us, and UX methods like user interviews and contextual inquiry can help you understand what people really want deep down inside. That understanding helps you design products and describe products that results in a better and stronger market position.
Brent Summers:
The second ingredient is trust. Trust is earned through consistency of behavior matching expectations. Influencer marketing, one of the tactics that was mentioned in that LinkedIn thread, is driven largely because content creators consistently make promises and deliver on those promises. Every day they show up and they post that thing to Instagram, or publish a video on YouTube. And those audiences learn to trust people because they deliver on their promise.
Brent Summers:
WEX methods, like usability testing and concept evaluation, help you understand how people expect a product to work, or why they prefer one thing over another, and that can result in a clearer and more effective messaging. But all of that takes time, and you've usually got about seven touch points in a B2B transaction before a customer's really going to pay attention to you, and their attention is fleeting, and you've got to close the loop once you have their attention. And so understanding what they want, how to get them to quickly trust you, and ultimately drive action, that's the secret. And that's the final action step or component of the UX Flywheel.
Brent Summers:
Like my buddy Dave pointed out in that LinkedIn post, 99% of people only read headlines. And what's the point of doing all that work of discovering what they want and getting them to trust you if you can't then translate that into revenue. Am I right? Well, action is sometimes more complex. A lot of times you are driving action with a call to action, a button or a value proposition. And then other times you're supporting that action through things like help documentation.
Brent Summers:
So again, back to the kinds of methods that you can use, quantitative UX methods, like data science and the analytics, can help you understand what actions people are taking while qualitative methods, like the others that I've mentioned, help you understand why they take those actions. Language is also an extremely important part of the user experience. At Blink, we use Cialdini's six principles of persuasion in the content strategies that we create for our clients. If you don't know those principles, they are liking, authority, commitment and consistency, reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity.
Brent Summers:
Our design work spans interaction, visual and motion design, and all of that works together to support the components of the flywheel. Desire, trust, and action. And each time you spin the wheel, you learn more about your customer, what they want deep down inside, how to get them to trust you, and what motivates you to buy. Those learnings that come the fuel for your growth, and the faster you spin the wheel, the stronger and more powerful your team becomes.
Brent Summers:
All right, let me break that down for you with a case study. Sumo Logic is one of our clients at Blink. More than 2000 enterprises around the world, rely on Sumo Logic to collaborate, develop, operate, and secure their cloud applications. We've got a great client base. Some of their clients include Pokemon Go, Pitney Bowes, Acquia, and Airbnb. This is late 2018, Sumo Logic came to us with the goal of creating a new website that would extend its rebrand initiatives that they had done with another agency. And like most SaaS websites, this one needed to educate, persuade, and motivate people, and ultimately get them to buy software. Sumo Logic also wanted to create a billion dollar brand, because they were preparing for another round of funding and an eventual IPO. This was a multi-month project, and we help them with lots of stuff.
Brent Summers:
I'm oversimplifying, but the first thing we did was start off with foundational research to understand the competitive landscape business objectives, and of course their audience, especially what users want or desire from Sumo Logic. That turned out to be reduced downtime, more secure applications, and more accessible insights about business performance. Our second round of research was primarily focused on information architecture and high-level content concepts. We used two separate high fidelity prototypes to determine what worked best about these two different concepts. That round of testing was all about trust. The final round of research was primarily focused on demonstrating that users could have a successful web visit, which meant completing several key user flows that, according to historical data, indicated were common paths to conversion. This helped everyone understand and believe, including executives that the new site would improve results and was indeed ready to be built.
Brent Summers:
So again, a multi month large-scale website redesign project, we did three rounds of user research with lots of design and content strategy woven in. Here you can see us discussing our personas. We had identified three different mental models, the slow jogger, the all-out sprinter, and the mindful runner. The individuals all had significant buying power, but approached the software buying process a little bit differently. Although many were technical, they were not all using the platform in the same way. Their use cases differed, and they also sometimes delegated the sign-up and trial responsibilities to someone else on their team after doing their own preliminary vetting.
Brent Summers:
During our discovery process, we conducted more than a dozen stakeholder interviews. We articulated goals, identified areas where the team was misaligned, and also where the current website needed to be improved. And although the design would be the most obvious change, it was clear that the value proposition and content strategy also needed some improvement. This is a picture of us doing a value proposition exercise, a Madlib kind of template from the folks at Strategizer. Our research indicated that Sumo Logic differentiators included three things. It was a multi-tasker that reduced the amount of times teams spend switching between systems, it improved depth of compliance with regulatory bodies, and it provided an abundance of native applications and integrations that proved to be, again, a time-saver. This data that we collected on post-it notes was just one input into this group exercise.
Brent Summers:
We also did an analysis of the content that was on the current website, and we learned that Sumo Logic's content was landing at around ninth grade reading level. And although that's pretty good, actually eighth grade is a better marker, and while it's a very technical product, you can see that companies like Splunk, New Relic, and Elastic Search that also had technical products were able to simplify their sentence structure and overall just have content that was easier for people to understand. So that was a big goal for us was to bring that reading level down.
Brent Summers:
In our first round of usability testing, we created two separate concepts that explored different content strategies and value propositions. Inside of this round of studies, we observed that participants would consistently try to interpret explicit meaning from all visual elements. So that meant that icons should be literal and not abstract. That diagrams must tell a sensible and easy to infer story. We also found that some participants conflated machine data and machine learning, and they said that machine data didn't adequately describe the predictive nature of the platform, which if you understand it all, is kind of nonsensical. So we learned that we needed to use the word machine data sparingly, and instead focused on log data. Participants also told us that distinguishing the value proposition by use cases for operations, security, and business intelligence helped provide a clear path to explore content. So those were just three of the learnings from this first concept test that we did.
Brent Summers:
We ended up creating a cohesive design system that scaled to support a massive website with about 10 different page templates for things like product pages, case studies, press releases, blog posts, and such. The design system also contained two dozen flexible components that could be assembled in a variety of ways for things like the partners area, information security, and release notes. If you're a marketing geek, you might be familiar with Cialdini's six principles of persuasion that I mentioned earlier. We used that framework to ensure an effective content strategy was applied throughout the experience. Most obvious are the free trial, which is a form of reciprocity, case studies, which offer social proof, and authority in the form of certifications.
Brent Summers:
But consistency matters a lot too, and that's why we used repeatable patterns that are centrally managed and have these value proposition lockups that are carefully crafted. Here you can see an example of those lockups and the motion design that supports it. There we go. So emotion catches people's attention and it slows them down and encourages engagement. In this case we used motion to call attention to these primary use cases. I'm not able to share the specific traffic conversion stats, but I can point out to you that Sumo's last round of funding, which they received in the months following the launch of this new site, had a valuation in excess of a billion dollars. So we definitely achieved that goal.
Brent Summers:
All right, so that's the three elements of the UX Flywheel, desire, trust, and action, and a case study with a product led company. I hope that this framework helps you and your team become more effective. Again, my name is Brent Summers, I work for Blink, and I'd love to hear your feedback about the session, and I'm happy to elaborate on the Flywheel, or talk to you about Blink's services. Just get in touch, thanks.
