Data driving design decisions

Fanny Pourcenoux is the Director of Global Design at Contentsquare. Fanny is leading Contentsquare’s redesign and rebranding efforts and she’s leaning heavily on data-informed design decisions. On this episode, Fanny talks about using data to make design and content decisions and how data can support UX research efforts.

Transcript

ALFONSO DE LA NUEZ:

Welcome to UXpeditious! A show that brings you quick, insightful interviews with design, product, and UX leaders.

DANA BISHOP:

In each interview we dive into how UX research impacts user insights; shaping the design and business strategy of some of our favorite tech tools and products. 

I’m Alfonso de la Nuez, Chief Visionary Officer and Co-Founder of UserZoom.

DANA:

And I’m Dana Bishop, VP of Strategic Research Partners at UserZoom.

ALFONSO:

And we are your hosts. Joining us on today’s episode is Fanny Pourcenoux, Director of Global Design at Contentsquare. Contentsquare is a digital experience and data analytics company that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites.

DANA:

Fanny has been with Contentsquare for over a decade and recently oversaw the company's rebrand, which used data driven design insights to inform decisions. We are going to hear more about that on today’s episode. 

ALFONSO:

Hey, Fanny. So nice to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. Can you please start by introducing yourself?

FANNY POURCENOUX: 

Sure. I manage the Contentsquare studio with 30 creative people all around the world, mainly between Paris, London, New York, but we are also expanding in Asia. And our studio is in charge of all the creative and UX production for our marketing, but also our internal teams and some customer needs. 

ALFONSO:

That's awesome. And we'll be talking about data driven design and data driven insights today and how it relates to UX. So let's start with the meaning of data driven insights and if you can share some examples of how you're using it to actually design your interface.

FANNY: 

At Contentsquare, we have a motto. It's: Without data this is just another opinion. This is definitely one of my favorite topics. I work with data at Contentsquare since I started. So I would say it was very natural for me to integrate it into different stages of our design processes. So our daily goal is to define how to create digital experiences, putting this data at the heart of all our decision.

I think everybody knows, as a designer, we are taught from our beginnings to put the end user at the center of our decision and to never be satisfied with our own opinion. And we have this keyword, the empathy, that must guide our work. It's not so easy in reality and so quick to apply because you need to define your context, your personas, you need to study them. But honestly, how to be sure to get it right, to have analyzed the right behaviors and to interpret them well.

I have this great chance to evolve in the company that analyze millions of data on a daily basis. And it's really this mass analysis that gives it strength. We are able to analyze UX trends in all verticals on all devices, in order to understand the most complex behavior for all our analysis. So to give you some examples, we are able to define what is the typical behavior of a prospect on a B2B website. What is the average number of product page that you will consult before confirming a purchase on a retail app? Or what is the average page scroll on a list page for a new visitor to a cosmetic website.

So many question that we can have, and yes, this is endless knowing that the segmentation that we can have with our tool can be even further by a country, by web order. We have tons of metric, UX ones, ROI ones that will guide our analysis.

DANA:

So can you talk about the importance of the data that you're collecting to inform the UX and UX research?

FANNY: 

So before using data on a larger scale, I base my work on UX loads, UI trends, practicing user testing through the process in order to validate my choices. And I was able to see a lot of biases and myths with the rapid evolution of digital experience and the complexity of user behavior. So it was also much easier to challenge a user test with a small panel. So with all these issues that we faced, it was necessary to find the solution to solve all these problems.

DANA:

It sounds like you're using both qualitative and quantitative data.

FANNY: 

It's really important to keep both, but of course, as a data analytics tool, we are used to put the data first, but we can't stop using also user testing for our analysis and for our design processes. 

This data insight definitely adds to optimize our processes also in order to analyze a large number of projects in parallel, because you have access to your data instantly and 20 hours a day. So decision-making is extremely fast. No external factor can really slow you down. This methodology also enhance the work of our designers by backing up their choices with data and additional weight is given to their work. So no more generic good practices. Welcome to the era of quantitative UX. In my team, they are naturally obsessed with data. They want to measure the performance of all their creations. They analyze their existing pages before creating new versions. They collect insight on the performance of designing production. They learn from our customer successes to perform even better.

DE LA NUEZ: 

Data analytics for many people can be or can feel overwhelming to understand, and to really attach a meaningful story to what the numbers are telling us. So can you please tell us about how data driven insights are driving UX and UI design.

FANNY: 

When we start a new creative project, we define the pages, the journeys that we want to analyze. So we define all the contexts like the device, the country, the project, et cetera, the audience of this project, its goals. So it could be, for example, your person who have completed their purchasing or not who clicked on this demo video, watched this page, et cetera, et cetera. And we will then observe their behavior between and within the pages using Contentsquare data. After this first step comes the most strategic phase. To be totally transparent, it's the hypothesis phase, because we are able to identify behaviors, analyze them. Now, how to be sure that we are interpreting correctly, what we saw? So we really challenge this hypothesis with other internal data from our benchmark or external data that could be provided by our customers, for example, and this step is really crucial because it ensures that your insight is right.

DANA:

I know that recently Contentsquare went through a big redesign and rebrand effort. How did you use your data driven design analytics and your methodology to make decisions and on your own product?

FANNY: 

So to be totally transparent, we are still in the process of redesigning our corporate website. We were, of course, able to fully analyze the user experience of our previous website, to learn from it, to not reproduce the same errors, pushing the right content at the right time of the journey. Thanks to our data, we were able to integrate best practices into our demo request, for example, that we learned also from our customers' journeys. We were able to challenge our navigation bar in order to better guide our visitors also with this data.

So for example, for the demo request, we found that a demo video was very engaging for our prospects. Indeed, we had an attractiveness rate. This is the percentage of visitors who clicked on an area after being exposed to it. This attractiveness rate was of 0.6% on the classic demo request call to action, while it was 5% on the demo video call to action. So this is just day and night. So we have chosen to make it as a key entry in our demo journey to push really the demo video as the key entry for all our prospects.

DANA:

And I understand you also have refreshed the logo and also your tagline.

FANNY:  

Yes. Most definitely.

DANA:

And what was behind those decisions, and did you use the same methodology to make those decisions?

FANNY: 

So, it's a bit different for messaging and pure brand identity. We did some surveys to collect internal opinion, but also prospect, client, partner's opinion about our first ideas when we started to change the positioning, the messaging and the logo of our brand. And it was really key for us to keep all these insights. It was a mix of qualitative and quantitative one more time. It was definitely key for us to be sure that we were on the good way. So it's really the methodology I recommend when someone is starting a rebranding to have this insight as the secret recipe of success.

DANA:

Nice. And also, digital accessibility was kept in mind, I understand.

FANNY: 

Yeah. It became a key pillar for us. At Contentsquare, we acquired an accessibility tool more than one year ago now, and it's definitely something we want to focus on because analyze UX experience is great and accessibility is part of the UX experience. So we definitely want to help our customers to improve their journey, thinking about all their users, because we know that today, so little quantity of websites are fully accessible. So this is a big challenge I think we need to tackle for this year.

ALFONSO:

It's been a real pleasure to have you with us today, Fanny, and really appreciate that you were able to join us from beautiful Paris.

FANNY: 

Thank you for the invitation. It was a pleasure.

ALFONSO:

That's Fanny Pourcenoux, Director of Global Design at Contentsquare.

DANA:

Thanks for listening to UXpeditious. We’ve had so much fun making season 1 of UXpeditious that we are already busy at work on season 2. We’ll be back this Fall with an exciting lineup of new UX leaders from across the industry. 

ALFONSO: 

UXpeditious is produced by UserZoom in partnership with Pod People. Special thanks to our production team: Christopher Ratcliff from UserZoom; and the team of Pod People: Rachael King, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Hannah Pedersen, Colleen Pellissier, and Michael Aquino.