Psychologically Speaking

Find out how customer interaction is helping mold SAS Marketing Automation and other SAS®9 offerings by Fred Volk, Ph.D.

Imagine you’re walking down a hallway at any FORTUNE 500 company. It could be a pharmaceutical firm, a financial services provider or one of the large retailers. You see someone working at a computer and another individual peering over her shoulder, asking occasional questions and taking copious notes.

That observer might be a behavioral researcher for SAS. And he is likely putting into practice one of the user-centered design techniques he and his colleagues employ to help understand human behavior as it relates to the use of SAS software.

Over the past four years, SAS has developed and acquired considerable talent in the areas of human factors, user-interface design and visual design to try to ensure that customers have a positive experience using SAS software.

Human factors psychology, simply, is the study of people and how they use systems, processes and environments to accomplish their goals. User-centered design refers to the application of the techniques and methods of a human factors professional that are critical for delivering easy-to-learn and easy-to-use products.

Key components of our user-centered design process are a tireless focus on our users, and the deliberate and timely application of the scientific method throughout the life cycle of our software. The results of our behavioral research provide the foundation on which SAS designs user interfaces – and that determines ease of use. This approach influences the entire system design, not just the visual aspects of the user interface.

The impact on SAS® Marketing Automation
User-centered design techniques have been employed on several of SAS’ more recent releases, including the portfolio of SAS®9 offerings, SAS Marketing Automation 4, 4.1, and 4.2.

Appropriately enough, SAS Marketing Automation is one of a group of applications that helps SAS customers focus on the needs of their customers. This software enables companies to maximize profitability and customer satisfaction over the lifetime of a customer relationship. Given the focus of the application portfolio, it seems only fitting that SAS took a user-centered approach to designing SAS Marketing Automation.

SAS Marketing Automation 4 was a great candidate for the process, because, although it was one of the most powerful campaign management solutions in the industry in terms of features and its solid customer base, earlier versions of the software could be difficult to learn and required users to spend too much time manipulating the application rather than using it to make better business decisions.

A multidisciplinary team of marketers, campaign management consultants, developers, account executives and human-factors engineers was established. Together, team members sought to ensure that the software release met the needs of all types of potential users and that the user interface provided a positive experience while getting the job done.

Discovery, design, development and delivery
Initially, in the "discovery phase" of the design process, the team focused on functionality and prioritizing customer needs. Frequent customer consultations guided several iterations of the software’s design.

During this phase, the human factors team employed both direct and indirect user research methods. Team members conducted a series of interviews with campaign management consultants who discussed their experiences with more than 25 different implementations of campaign management software and processes. For each experience they were asked to describe the customer goals, user roles and tasks, as well as the strategic intent of the customer executive sponsor. This indirect research helped in the characterization of user roles and strategic direction of the SAS Marketing Automation applications suite.

In addition, a series of customer site visits permitted the human factors engineers and marketing experts to interact directly with users of the software. Researchers sat with the users at their desks and watched them over the course of the workday. To ensure that they understood the reasons for users’ actions, researchers would ask clarifying questions or collect artifacts such as an example of a report or a process document. Although this work was time-consuming, it provided some of the most useful information in terms of helping the researchers understand – in detail – how users think about their tasks, how users share work, and how they perform complex, lengthy tasks. Interviews also were conducted with secondary users and executive sponsors. Although these users might not necessarily interact directly with SAS Marketing Automation applications, the success of an implementation is often determined by how well it meets the goals of these key stakeholders.

The design and development phases for SAS Marketing Automation included basic research on new approaches to building complex queries, cognitive walk-throughs, usability tests, and design reviews with user groups and SAS field representatives. First, initial designs were proposed based on the interviews, observations and artifacts collected during the discovery phase. Cognitive walk-throughs (one-on-one sessions with users) were then conducted for the most critical elements of the user interface design. Each set of these walk-throughs resulted in changes that were integrated into the subsequent set of design proposals – which were tested in a subsequent set of cognitive walk-throughs. Next, a design review was conducted with key internal stakeholders, internal domain experts, marketing teams and development partners.

Finally, prior to delivery, we conducted a usability test with the target users of SAS Marketing Automation to validate the design and ensure the design goals were met. This testing established a usability baseline for the current release and prioritized input for future releases. The application of the user-centered design process resulted in a version of the product that was much easier to learn and use.

One more time!
What’s next, now that SAS has implemented a successful user-centered design approach to designing software? The plan is to repeat the process so that each new release of the software is better than the one before it. We will continue to practice rigorous user-centered design techniques, which is possible only with the cooperation of dedicated customers and development partners. That cooperation, in turn, allows us to focus on making world-class software that is easy to learn and easy to use.