Bobby Meixner: Design-Led Innovation: A Vision for How the Empowered Enterprise Crafts Exceptional Experiences

So what does it take to proactively craft the exceptional customer experiences that your customers demand? Jamie touched on it. So this could be a little quiz, but, of course, it is customer feedback. Right?

And what do you need in order to get the right level of customer feedback? You need really three things. You need access to the right people. You need AI to allow you to get that feedback and process that feedback quickly.

And of course, feedback is no good if you can't actually use it, if it's not where you work and how you work. So I'm going to walk you through a prototype of how this may work in the future because we wouldn't be user testing if we didn't walk you through a prototype of something before we actually built it to get your feedback. Right?

Okay. So let's do it. Let's do it. Let's take a look. So of course, this is a prototype, so the safe harbor statement applies.

And let me now introduce you to Threadline and Jane, a senior designer.

So Threadline is a premium fictional brand of high end home furnishings and bedding.

Their customers, they are really picky. They expect nothing short of exceptional when it comes to customer experience.

So for Jane, what does that mean? Well, that means that every design that she delivers, it needs to inspire, it needs to inform, it needs to delight, and it absolutely has to convert.

So what is Jane working on? Well, Jane is working on evolving the product detail page. Right? She needs to stay ahead of rising customer expectations.

There's fierce competition in this space. She needs to know what her customers think and what's going on. So she's working on the product detail page and you know what, it's not that easy though because delivering great design guess what, you all know this, that's only half the challenge. What else do you need to do?

You likely need to bring a whole group of cross functional stakeholders along for the ride. They need to be bought in. Right? We know these people.

The product team, they want performance. The marketing team, it better be polished.

And leadership, they really, really they just want results. That's what they care about. So she's navigating this sea of opinions, preferences, and priorities, all while really trying to just stay focused on what the customer actually needs. So what is she doing? Well Jane's a designer, so she's actually over here working in Figma. And she has produced what looks like three pretty polished prototypes of the product detail page. Each one is elegant, each one is on brand, but we know that only one is going to deliver the seamless high quality experience that Threadline's most discerning customers actually demand.

But you know what? There's more to it than that. She has that big meeting. She has that big stakeholder meeting tomorrow, and she needs to walk into that meeting to get buy in on these designs.

And she needs to do that with more than just just design rationale. Right? She actually needs feedback from real people. Now luckily, Threadline and Jane, what do they use?

Of course, they use user testing, and user testing is integrated right into Figma so she can get feedback directly where she works. She doesn't have to switch tools. She doesn't have to slow down. All she needs to do is come over here and click on get feedback, and she's greeted with a very friendly, conversational, AI driven prompt that simply asks her what does she want to learn?

And this works really, really well for Jane because remember, Jane is a designer. Right? She's she's not a researcher. And the beauty of it is is she doesn't have to be.

As long as she knows what she's trying to figure out and what her goals are, all she really needs to do is leverage what is right in front of her. So we're gonna go ahead and type in what concept helps customers feel the most confident when buying. Down below, she has a set of goals that she can select from. These are AI driven based upon other tests that have been successfully run-in the past, and she goes ahead and clicks on generate.

So in the background now, user testing's AI has gone through based upon her goals and has automatically created a test plan that targets the call to action, the image gallery, the product information. It's preselected the audience, so we're targeting thread line customers.

And we want to keep this discreet, we want to keep this confidential, we don't want anything getting leaked out, so we're going to enable password protection.

So she clicks on launch, the test is launched.

Now if you use user testing, you know that eighty percent of our tests produce results really within just a couple hours. So at this point, what does Jane do? Maybe she switches to another project. She might take a break.

Perhaps she goes to lunch. When she comes back, she's greeted with a notification letting her know that the results are ready. So she clicks on the results, and here directly in Figma, she sees the AI insight summary right at the top, letting her know very clearly that concept c is the winner. It's the one that inspired the most confidence in purchasing.

Why? Well, of course, that's what we help you understand. In this case, it was due to the robust product reviews and the very clear product details. Now if we scroll down, you can see that we have embedded QX scores.

Concept c is clearly the winner across a variety of different experience metrics. And if we take a look even further, here she gets a set of actionable recommendations to make this design even better. So the recommendation is to iterate on concept c and make a few subtle changes. Perhaps we're going to adjust the page to make the shipping and the returns information a little more prominent.

People want to know what they're getting into and then make some subtle tweaks to the the product image gallery.

If she wants more context though, she has the ability to come over and take a look at the details for each concept. So here we can see we have some AI driven themes that are surfaced. There are some key quotes, key video moments. She can even drill in and click into specific path flows to get a much more detailed analysis of the path people took through this particular experience.

But at this point, what is Jane doing? She's breathing a sigh of relief because she knows that she has the insights that she needs to walk into that design review meeting with true confidence. So we're gonna help her get there. She comes over and clicks on get report or generate report in Figma slides, and some of this information gets thrown into a deck for her.

Jane's all happy. She's walking into that meeting. Fast forward, she's in the meeting, and she's reviewing some of the QX score information on the screen. There are actually key quotes included here as well that have been automatically generated from the AI driven transcript so people can actually read what real people are saying.

But, again, we are user testing. Right? And what are we known for? Think out loud video based feedback. There's nothing like seeing and hearing people describe their experiences in their own words. So Jane goes ahead and clicks play on an embedded highlight reel. And at this point, the room kind of goes quiet, right, as people are seeing, hearing, listening to real customers describe what resonates and what doesn't.

But there's always that one person. There's always that naysayer in the room, right, who raises their hand and says, how do we know these people know what they're talking about? How do we know these people are legit?

Well, Jane, she's used to this. She is prepared, and she quickly pops over to her next slide. And she's like, you know what? We know these are the right people because these people come from the user testing network, and the user testing network is known for quality, is known for reliability, it's known for speed, and because of the new LinkedIn verification feature, we can be confident that the feedback we're getting accurately reflects the preferences of Threadline customers.

Sounds good to me. Everyone's happy. The design moves forward, and the designers along with Jane move over into FigJam to start iterating and making some of these changes. They're collaborating, so here we're working in FigJam.

We've embedded specific highlight reels here. So as they're going through and iterating on the design, they can rewatch key moments that helped shape some of this feedback.

There are some sticky notes calling out the changes that we're making to the shipping and the gallery.

This is really where we go, where we help designers go from really insights to action. Right? So they're no longer guessing what customers might want. They're confidently going through and co innovating with them.

So they've made their changes. Jane's back over here. She's got her final concept.

She might go through and run one more rapid test just to be sure. She wants to be confident because she's gotta meet with the stakeholders again. She's hopping on a Zoom with marketing, and they are reviewing things. So she has her final prototype.

It looks like the shipping information is updated here. We've made some changes to the gallery. Based upon those changes, we now have an even higher QX score validating the changes that the team just made. So this particular design, it inspires more confidence.

It optimizes conversion.

Marketing is smiling. Everybody is nodding in agreement.

For once, they all have consensus, and it's all backed by real customers. So the product detail page launches on time, it launches on brand, and of course, it's all supported by real customer feedback and information.

So what have we done for Jane, right? We've really done we've helped her do three main things. We helped her go through and validate every decision that she made throughout the process, not with assumptions, but with feedback from from real people.

We helped her co innovate with her customers, right, elevating the process of design from what sometimes can be a solo experience into an experience that's more shared among her team and among her customer base. And we gave her the confidence and speed to move quickly to the best version of her product detail page. And the best part is we did this all before anything was ever coded or anything went in front of an actual customer before it was launched.

So if this is something you're interested in, if you want to learn more, during one of the breaks, you can head over to the consulting corner outside. We'll have this demo available. You can ask questions. You can find Baran.

You can find Michelle, our chief product officer. They are around today. I'm sure they would love to hear your feedback. So with that, thank you very much.