Out of the hot seat and into the onsen, as they say. You can lead a designer to a thermal spring, but you can’t make him bathe — or can you…?
Responsibilities:
» Customer research planning
» Research synthesis
» Client workshop facilitation
» Concept design
» Interface design
» User testing (qual & quant)
» Optimisation
» Style guide & playbook creation
» Digital partner
» Project manager
» Lead UX/UI designer
» UI designer
» Software engineer
» 4x Business analysts
The bureau had a network of traditional Japanese inns (ryokan) and thermal baths (onsen) with a dated and poorly performing online booking service. Since this service was mainly used by gaijin (foreigners) like me, they made the sensible decision to enlist a crew of gaijin (and locals) to overhaul the product.
The ryokan network had a strong sense of loyalty to JTB, but Airbnb was an increasingly tempting alternative for the operators. The pressure was on to deliver a sharp improvement in user experience and product performance.
With visitors booking ryokan from all over the world, but particularity the US and Asia Pacific, I knew that we would need a deep connection to customer context and motivations. A distributed research program across the US, China, Taiwan and Korea gave us a robust foundation to build on.
We ran site analytics, funnel analysis and usability reviews to understand where the points of friction were in the existing site. We began to map out future pathways linking content and functionality to three main customer archetypes.
Prioritising features was done in close collaboration with the client. We started a tight weekly cadence of testing with users and sharing insights with stakeholders.
As the new site took shape, we leaned heavily on quantitative user testing methods (task completion, SUS and Attrak-Diff) to show performance of the new product in direct comparison to the old one.
I rounded it out with a design playbook that the client could use to guide the continuing evolution of the product.
While Japan is an awesome place to live and work, this was by some distance the most demanding design environment I’d ever encountered.
None of the clients spoke English and we ran meetings with the help of simultaneous translators (like they have at the UN). This made communication fairly painless, but only up to a point. It was impossible for me to ask the clients how their weekend was, as you would normally do to build some rapport.
This gulf began to manifest itself in a lack of trust in my design process. The key clients began asking for empirical or theory-based justifications for every design element I was demonstrating. It’s not culturally acceptable to openly offer criticism in Japan (or so I’ve been told), but I knew them well enough to understand that they were unhappy with the work.
It seemed fairly obvious what the underlying problem was, but I was at a loss about what to do.
I decided that we needed some kind of circuit-breaker. We had completed customer research, but had little information about what ryokan operators thought their guests valued most.
So we did a field trip to Hakone, south of Tokyo, a renowned ryokan destination. With the help of the clients, we interviewed several operators, and learned about the strong allure of Kaiseki (traditional, highly refined meals served in ryokan).
There was some time to kill before the train back to Tokyo, so one of the clients suggested we visit the most famous onsen together.
I had never been to a public bath like this before. I knew the accepted procedure fairly well, and had toyed with the idea of trying it out some time, but was not psychologically prepared to get naked with clients and colleagues I saw every day.
The indecision was acute and excruciating. At last I landed on the side of “When in Rome…” and realised this was an opportunity that would most likely never present itself again.
I believe I avoided all the cultural faux pas, but getting ready to bathe was still incredibly awkward. Nevertheless, once safely submerged in the scalding water, the awkwardness melted away, and so did some of the barrier between me and the clients. Steam curled upwards into the branches of arching trees where songbirds were warbling. No language required to share an experience like that.
It was not happily ever after following this serendipitous event. The clients still wanted to know if significant design decisions were derived from design theory or just my “instinct”. They pored over the data from quantitative testing, looking for holes. But we had some kind of enhanced familiarity and understanding after that fateful day at the onsen.
I ran parallel programs of qual and quant user testing. The qualitative part followed a weekly routine of 1 hour testing sessions with 6-8 participants. The quantitative testing assessed task completion and usability with an online panel of 50-100 users.
The testing schedule was somewhat punishing but went a long way to relieving client uncertainties about the design direction. They related very strongly to the quantitative data as this was what they were most used to dealing with. So in the end, the qualitative testing was mostly for my benefit, while the quantitative testing was mostly for the client's.
Unfortunately, the new site design was never launched. As we wrapped up the design phase, there was a turn over of senior stakeholders at the client. The implementation phase was put on hold as the client reviewed its overall strategy.
Main lesson for me was: never underestimate the difficulty level in working in a different cultural context. Communication barriers and misaligned expectations about methods are only two of the more obvious potential minefields.
Just because a country's technology sector is world-leading in some areas (eg. robotics, gaming) doesn't mean that the same holds for all areas. The standards in Japan for e-commerce and agile are surprisingly under-developed by comparison. It takes some time to re-calibrate your approach in relation to these standards.
Perhaps the most universal lesson to emerge from this project was the importance of trusting relationships in keeping the gears turning and the wheels firmly in place.
