Let UX Design Principles Guide Your COVID Strategy
May 2020
Venture back with me if you will to December 2019. The unemployment rate in the US was 3.5%, and the S&P 500 ended its best year since 2013, gaining almost 29%. Fast forward to today, and unemployment nears 15% with over 20 million people losing their jobs in April and the stock market is down almost 20% since the end of 2019. COVID-19 has resulted in an unprecedented impact on people's lives and the places they work. Fear and anxiety due to extreme uncertainty is limiting creativity as organizations and the people that work for them seek to find ways to survive in this new environment.
As a leader of a small to medium-size business, what do you do in a situation like this? You compete with larger incumbents in today's modern marketplace using your agility, however even the most agile businesses are struggling to adjust to the massive change we have experienced in such a short time. You lay awake at night worried if your business will survive this and struggle to generate creative solutions when the anxiety becomes overbearing.
In times like these, it is helpful to return to the basics and apply new ways of looking at the problem. The field of User Experience (UX) design provides some excellent insight into how to approach this situation. UX design has become invaluable to technology companies in the development of new, innovative products in rapidly changing and highly uncertain markets. No matter what your product or service is, or what market you are serving, you are now dealing with a rapidly changing and uncertain market due to COVID-19.
UX design has traditionally been used in product development, focusing on delivering an exceptional end-to-end user experience with a product or service. However, let's now apply these principles toward your brand, not just your product. Let's reevaluate every interaction that your customer has with your company, which includes your employees. The goal of this exercise is to deliver an exceptional end-to-end experience for your customers and employees during this time of crisis, one that will endear both groups to your company and your brand.
To deliver an exceptional experience, UX design starts with and is centered around people. Who are your serving, and what are their needs and motivations?
Getting Back to Basics: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow, in his 1943 paper titled 'A Theory of Human Motivation', provides a great framework to gain deeper understanding of what motivates people, and is helpful for understanding what people are most concerned about during this crisis. As shown in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid below, basic needs including physiological and needs of safety are at the foundation, and only after these needs are met does a person move up the pyramid to focus on psychological needs such as belonging and esteem, then onto Self Actualization where creativity flourishes.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
People move up and down the pyramid based on their situation. If your basic needs are met, you move up the pyramid. In our modern society, this has often been the case. For the last several decades, companies and their marketers focused on meeting the psychological needs of customers while HR and organizational development focused on meeting the psychological needs of employees.
However, in a time of an impactful crisis that threatens supply chains and health, people will revert their focus back to basic needs, not only for food and protection from contracting the virus, but apparently toilet paper too. And, as massive impacts to businesses are driving unprecedented unemployment, employees are seeking safety in the form of job security while customers desperately seek financial security in their own businesses and lives.
These basic needs of your customers and employees are driving their current motivations and should directly influence your COVID business strategy.
Developing your COVID business strategy
Focus on two groups of people, your employees and your customers, identify their key needs during this time and come up with solutions to those needs.
Start with your employees as they are crucial to the operation of your business and act as the interface of your company to your customers. If you neglect this group, anything you do for the customer will be in vain as it fails in execution, or an experience with your employees negatively impacts your brand during this crisis. The more you do here to ease your employees’ fears and anxieties around their current concerns, the more creativity and dedication they will apply to the business which your company desperately needs right now.
Your employees’ primary safety need is health, especially those who are at high risk due to age or other health complications. For employees with a pregnant spouse, young children at home, or caring for their elderly parents, they will also be highly concerned about bringing the virus home from work. This is where you need to ensure all of your policies and procedures for the COVID work environment are in place to reassure your employees that your company is doing everything it can to minimize risk of contracting the virus. There are no guarantees, of course, but your leadership team should think through all scenarios where human contact is involved and put measures in place to prevent the spread. Some of the policies that companies are putting in place include distancing work spaces from each other, encouraging mask use and washing of hands, frequent and extensive cleaning of surfaces throughout the facility and work from home consideration for high risk employees or those with high risk family members.
Your employees’ secondary safety need is job security. We know there are definitely no guarantees here, however many companies are adopting pay cuts (starting at the top) and unpaid furloughs as an alternative to a layoff. Although definitely impactful, the ability to maintain benefit coverage along with the potential that they will be able to return at some point is much less disruptive on an employee's life than being laid off. Although it is not always possible if revenue literally drops to zero as in the case of many restaurants and other small businesses highly dependent on foot traffic, avoiding layoffs wherever possible will deepen employee trust in you and your organization and help them move back up the pyramid to think more creatively.
Internal communication has never been more important. In addition to putting COVID policies and procedures in place, it is imperative that you over communicate to your employees the steps that your company is taking to keep them healthy and employed. And as there are no guarantees on when this crisis will end and what the financial situation will be like in the future, advising employees of job security on smaller time horizons will help them stay focused in the near term.
Next, focus on the needs of your customers during this pandemic and develop creative solutions to meet these needs. Although they are motivated by the same basic needs as your employees (health and financial security), the solutions to these problems will depend on your type of business, whether it be product or service. It is important to closely review any and all physical interactions with your company. Your goal here is to allay any fears or concerns and to deepen trust with your brand.
If your company delivers a software product or service, your interaction with your customers are more than likely already contactless. B2B sales and training are effectively handled via web conference, and can be done in groups via webinars or one-on-one sessions with key customers. This situation allows you to apply more of your time planning strategy towards keeping your employees safe and getting more creative on how you can help your customers through the crisis, such as alternative payment plans to help them in a time of cash-flow crunch. An example of this would be providing options to reduce subscription pricing with longer time commitments to the service.
If your company delivers a physical product, your strategy should consider the movement of product through the entire supply chain. Evaluation should include what steps are being taken by your suppliers on incoming goods and materials to ensure your employees handling product remain safe and not passing along any potential of the virus through the shipping door. If you sell product directly to customers, make sure to effectively communicate the steps you have in place for their protection. If you sell through distribution, evaluate your distributors' and retailers' policies as your brand is affected by their actions also.
If your company sells product through a store front, or a service through direct customer interaction such as retail or a restaurant, state or regional regulations on COVID procedures are a minimum. Be aware that some of your customers will have deep concerns about contracting COVID, and some others will not, based on their particular situation, but you should always err on the side of those most concerned. Make sure that you not only implement the procedures, but that your employees are following them and oversight is in place. This is not going to be easy, as your customers must also follow procedures upon entering your establishment, and not everyone shares the same concerns. How you communicate will be key, and an inclusive message of we're all in this together will help.
Post-COVID Strategy
It's hard to even think about now, but at some point in the future, this pandemic will be behind us. When it is, you want your company to come out stronger and ready to scale quickly. As compared to previous recessions, there doesn't seem to be anything fundamentally broken with the economy, which means that once a vaccination is developed or some other event occurs to calm concerns on the spread, the massive pent-up demand will drive tremendous growth. A solid post-COVID strategy in place will allow you to hit the ground running.
When this crisis is behind us, the needs of your customers and employees begin migrating back up the pyramid towards psychological needs of belonging and esteem, and you should direct your focus on developing a business strategy to address these needs better than your competition. It starts now with your COVID strategy, as the foundation to psychological needs is trust in your brand. Being effective in this regard during the crisis endears customers and employees to your company. Take it to the next level in the post-COVID world by coming up with creative ways to help your customers and employees feel they are part of your tribe, a deeper connection with your brand due to the over-and-above service you deliver. Keeping your creative employees on board through this will be key to your success in developing and executing this strategy.
As a business leader, this pandemic is stretching you. Intestinal fortitude combined with a calm demeanor in front of employees, no matter what you are feeling inside, is going to lead your organization through this. Feel the emotions but don't let them drive your decisions, focus back on the basics, and develop solid people-centric strategies that will deliver success.
