Author: tamella

Tammy Fritz has over 30 years experience in design. She is an independent contractor and Principal and Founder of Pink Frog Interactive, Inc. Tammy founded Pink Frog in 2005 where she specializes in human-centered design including human computer interface design, design research, customer experience design and service design. Tammy has a passion for combining human factors, design thinking and research, innovation and technology to help solve complex problems. Tammy has a Masters of Design degree in Communication Planning and Information Design from Carnegie Mellon University. She did her thesis work and worked with the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University studying internationalization in design, way-finding in virtual environments and how to evoke, assess and predict affect in design. Tammy also has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a certificate in Specialized Technology from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Her work has won design awards from Intel and AIGA and has been submitted for patents. Tammy follows a user-centered design process and uses principles and techniques derived from cognitive science, psychology and anthropology to partner with her clients and design and test services, product interfaces and interactions in order to make them efficient, useful, usable and desirable. At Pink Frog, Tammy has interviewed hundreds of our clients customers across the globe in multiple languages to find out what constitutes an exceptional customer experience, define the customer journey and provide actionable insight for a company roadmap. Tammy has shadowed nurse practitioners in the field and interviewed users in Jacksonville Mississippi to help redesign applications to order medical supplies. She has redesigned medical insurance websites and designed medical benefit communications to employees. Some of Tammy’s clients have included TE Connectivity (Tyco), Iron Mountain Crozier, Danaher Cytiva, First Insight, Developmental Dimensions International (DDI), and Genco (now FedEx). Tammy has also done design work as a subcontractor for Highmark, McKesson, North Shore Long Island Jewish Center Cancer Institute, Rite Aid, CDC/NIOSH, Martris LLC, and Capital Blue. Prior to founding Pink Frog, Tammy worked at IT companies design software including NDCHealth and Freemarkets where she worked in multidisciplinary teams within large IT departments to brings the needs of the customer to the process. She has led large-scale ui design efforts in co-branding, branding, workflow, information architecture, and internationalization and worked on sites that were over 4000 prototype pages from the ground up. She has worked on mergers helping companies consolidate functionality of web applications into one seamless user experience and multiple internal applications into one consistent user experiences. She has worked on large scale pharmaceutical applications and has led ethnographic research projects. She has worked through all phases of the human-centered design process. Tammy volunteers as a foster parent for the Humane Society, secretary for Pennsylvania Association Gifted Education, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and Epi-Life.

Why UX Design? 10 ROI Statistics.

1. Raise Your Share Price
The share prices of companies that invest in design performed up to three times better than the FTSE 100 Index over nearly two years in the run-up to December 2004, according to new data released by the UK’s Design Council.

View the report.

2. Save Money
According to a report from Forrester Research, the poor usability of applications may be costing organizations as much as $6 million annually in hidden costs and lost productivity.

“Savings from earlier vs. later changes: Changes cost less when made earlier in the development life cycle. Twenty changes in a project, at 32 hours per change and [a minimal] hourly rate of $35, would cost $22,400. Reducing this to 8 hours per change would reduce the cost to $5,600. Savings = $16,800.” (Human Factors International, 2001)

“A financial services company had to scrap an application it had developed, when, shortly before implementation, developers doing a User Acceptance test found a fatal flaw in their assumptions about how data would be entered. By this time, it was too late to change the underlying structure, and the application never implemented.” (Dray, 1995)

Detect Problems Early And Save Big
“[Usability engineering techniques] are quite effective at detecting usability problems early in the development cycle, when they are easiest and least costly to fix. By correcting usability problems in the design phase, American Airlines reduced the cost of those fixes by 60-90%.” (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

“One [well-known] study found that 80 percent of software life-cycle costs occur during the maintenance phase. Most maintenance costs are associated with “unmet or unforeseen” user requirements and other usability problems.” (Pressman, 1992)

“Incorporating ease of use into your products actually saves money. Reports have shown it is far more economical to consider user needs in the early stages of design, than it is to solve them later. For example, in Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, author Robert Pressman shows that for every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.” (IBM, 2001)

3. Free Your Resources From Fixing Defects
“Martin and McClure found that $20-30 billion was spent worldwide on maintenance. Studying backlogs of maintenance work shows that an “invisible” backlog is 167% the size of the declared backlog. Anonymous case study data show that internal development organizations are spending the majority of their resources on maintenance activities and thus cannot initiate development of strategic new systems.” (Martin & McClure, 1983)

4. Cost-Benefit Ratio of $1:$100
“The rule of thumb in many usability-aware organizations is that the cost-benefit ratio for usability is $1:$10-$100. Once a system is in development, correcting a problem costs 10 times as much as fixing the same problem in design. If the system has been released, it costs 100 times as much relative to fixing in design.” (Gilb, 1988)

“Sun Microsystems has shown how spending about $20,000 could yield a savings of $152 million dollars. Each and every dollar invested could return $7,500 in savings.” (Rhodes, 2000)Reduce Training Costs

“At one company, end-user training for a usability-engineered internal system was one hour compared to a full week of training for a similar system that had no usability work. Usability engineering allowed another company to eliminate training and save $140,000. As a result of usability improvements at AT&T, the company saved $2,500,000 in training expenses.” (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

5. Improve Efficiency up to 50% by Fixing Minor Flaws
“The average UI has some 40 flaws. Correcting the easiest 20 of these yields an average improvement in usability of 50%. The big win, however, occurs when usability is factored in from the beginning. This can yield efficiency improvements of over 700%.” (Landauer, 1995)

6. Raise User Satisfaction by 40%
“When systems match user needs, satisfaction often improves dramatically. In a 1992 Gartner Group study, usability methods raised user satisfaction ratings for a system by 40%.” (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

7. Reduce Liability, Employee Absenteeism and Turnover
“Humantech, Inc., studied ergonomic office environments and productivity for 4000 managerial, technical, and clerical workers in a broad cross-section of North American industries. Surveys showed that video display terminal workers had twice as many complaints of neck and shoulder discomfort, eye strain was reported three times as often, and there were higher rates of absenteeism less job satisfaction, and increased (30%) turnover.” (Schneider, 1985)

8. Reduce Support Calls
“A certain printer manufacturer released a printer driver that many users had difficulty installing. Over 50,000 users called support for assistance, at a cost to the company of nearly $500,000 a month. To correct the situation, the manufacturer sent out letters of apology and patch diskettes (at a cost of $3 each) to users; they ended up spending $900,000 on the problem. No user testing of the driver was conducted before its release. The problem could have been identified and corrected at a fraction of the cost if the product had been subjected to even the simplest of usability testing.” wrote the researcher.” (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

“At Microsoft several years ago, Word for Windows’s print merge feature was generating a lot of lengthy (average = 45 minutes) support calls. As a result of usability testing and other techniques, the UI for the feature was adjusted. In the next release, support calls ‘dropped dramatically’; Microsoft recognized ‘significant cost savings.” (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

9. Improve Productivity
“With its origins in human factors, usability engineering has had considerable success improving productivity in IT organizations. For instance, a major computer company spent $20,700 on usability work to improve the sign-on procedure in a system used by several thousand people. The resulting productivity improvement saved the company $41,700 the first day the system was used. On a system used by over 100,000 people, for a usability outlay of $68,000, the same company recognized a benefit of $6,800,000 within the first year of the system’s implementation. This is a cost-benefit ratio of $1:$100.” (Bias & Mayhew, 1994)

“In another company, business representatives did a cost-benefit analysis for a new system and estimated that a well-designed GUI front end had an Internal Rate of Return of 32%. This was realized through a 35% reduction in training, a 30% reduction in supervisory time, and improved productivity, among other things.” (Dray & Karat, 1994)

“Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity (see Tom Landauers’ excellent book The Trouble with Computers). By my estimates, bad intranet Web design will cost $50-100 billion per year in lost employee productivity in 2001 ($50B is the conservative estimate; $100B is the median estimate; you don’t want to hear the worst-case estimate!). Bad design on the open Internet will cost a few billion more, though much of this loss may not show up in gross national products, since it will happen during users’ time away from the office.” (Nielsen, August 28, 1997)

10. Increased trust of your customers.
Sites that are poorly designed are not credible or trustworthy to customers. A well-designed and user-friendly website significantly enhances customer trust. Research indicates that first impressions are 94% influenced by design, and up to 75% of users trust a visually appealing website.

Improve customer experience and tame complexity across your organization.

At Pink Frog, we help you comply with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, or IDEA Act.

This law mandates government agencies assess new or redesigned digital services — websites, forms and applications — and prioritize usability improvements based on impact.

We partner with you to design, assess and improve the customer experience. We study how people learn, navigate spaces, make decisions, memorize, perceive, behave, and at what point in their customer journey they make decisions, how they make decisions, how critical the touchpoint is in their decision making, and what their expectations are of your services. Innovation, trust and brand loyalty comes from knowing your customers.

We help you collect qualitative and quantitative data relating to the experience and satisfaction of your customers, identify areas of concern that need improvement and improve the delivery of your services both online and offline.

Pink Frog Interactive is a boutique design consultancy that provides customer experience design for public services. We specialize in making complex processes, interactions and information clear.

Our mission is to create a better world by conducting human-centered design, making the complex clear, and solving complex problems with design thinking. Understanding peoples’ unique challenges, emotions, culture, and goals allows for empathy. Empathy creates compassion which is necessary for shifts in mindset. Shifts in mindset change the world.

We’d be happy to discuss with you how our services can help.

If your organization does not yet have a staff dedicated to improving customer experience design, you can choose to become our partner or simply use our services for certain projects.

Choose an improved customer experience, choose to dominate complexities with Pink Frog Interactive.

Pink Frog Interactive listed as one of 13 Best Pennsylvania UX Design Startups – UX Design Innovation

Pink Frog listed as one of 13 best PA UX startups.

Pink Frog Interactive was showcased in the top picks for the best Pennsylvania based UX Design companies. “The startups and companies are taking a variety of approaches to innovating the UX Design industry, but are all exceptional companies well worth a follow.

We tried to pick companies across the size spectrum from cutting edge startups to established brands.

We selected these startups and companies for exceptional performance in one of these categories:

Innovation
- Innovative ideas
- Innovative route to market
- Innovative product
Growth
- Exceptional growth
- Exceptional growth strategy
Management
Societal impact”

Pink Frog Interactive makes the list! 41 Most Innovative Product Research Startups & Companies.

Why you are kicking people off your social media page who don’t agree with you.

People seek only the information that validates their existing beliefs which tends to make them believe it more whether right or wrong.

As a designer, I study people – the way they think, act, perceive, learn, memorize, etc. Part of these human factors are cognitive biases. Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that favors information that confirms previously existing beliefs or biases.

People seek only the information that validates their existing beliefs which tends to make them believe it more whether right or wrong.
Here are some ideas to avoid confirmation bias.

Understand your tendency to exclude other opinions and facts and seek information that only validates your existing beliefs. Think For yourself. Do your own research. Question what you hear and see. Don’t just follow the crowd belief.Validate information with what you personally hear and observe. Sincerely listen to an opposing view without feeling your ego is being attacked and defending your stance. Seek information outside your normal comfort zone. Check all facts before jumping to conclusions. Challenge assumptions. Don’t read this and assume it doesn’t apply to you.

What are the least effective ways to eliminate confirmation bias?

Kick everyone off your social media page that doesn’t support your view. Name call and attack people with different points of view.Demean or stop talking to others that don’t agree with you. Surround yourself only with information and people that confirm your beliefs. Profile people into wide groups with sweeping generalizations – if you believe this then you also do x, y and z.

What ways can the government help with confirmation bias in government services?

Verifiable Data

Transparency

Accountability

Empathy – Understanding people’s unique challenges, emotions, culture, and goals allow for empathy. Empathy creates compassion which is necessary for shifts in mindset. Shifts in mindset change the world.

In the end, we will remember most the actions, character and behaviors of our family, friends and neighbors and the character traits they exhibited during this unprecedented time.

Our vision is a country where people have equal access to public services because they are designed in a way that is thoughtful, intuitive, easy to navigate, transparent, accountable and user-centered.

The Top UX “Sins” Made by Beginner Designers.

Taking every bit of customer feedback and implementing it.
Design by committee.
Listening to only what users say and not observing what they actually do.
Not starting with a problem statement or reframing the problem.
Going with the first decent idea.
Not understanding human factors – the way people think, make decisions, behave, perceive, cognitive biases, etc.
Not using a hierarchy of information.
Not asking the right questions.
Not talking to the right users.
Not talking to any users.
Leading users in design research with your own agenda.
Being biased.

How to Communicate With Your Customers During Times of Crisis

Emotions are important in design because they are a powerful motivator and can influence perception, cognition, attention, decision-making, learning, memory and behavior. If we can learn how to evoke, predict or assess a specific emotion in design, we can better present information in a way that aids in understanding and retaining information and communicate more effectively.

Extreme states of emotions such as anxiety, fear and anger can complicate learning because they interfere with sensory perception. Sensory systems allow us to make sense of ourselves and our surroundings and if distorted can cause the emotional organization of our experience to be compromised. As a result, learning can be detrimentally affected. Under stress users can develop tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. For example, they wouldn’t hear an alarm going on while trying to complete a task.

When a person is highly aroused, as in a very shocking or surprising situation, they are more likely to form a memory of the event and possibly a distorted memory. Arousal (excited/calm) has been found to be a better predictor of memory retention than valence (pleasure/displeasure). However, strongly negative things tend to automatically be highly arousing, leading many to think that better memory is correlated with negativity. If we are depressed, anxious or tired, we are more likely to have difficulty remembering. When we are upset or distracted, we cannot concentrate as well which impairs our memory. Too much stress results in poor performance.

To help communicate with your customers during periods of stress, fear, or anxiety several design principles are critical.

Use bite-size chunks of information

Users can only consciously process small amounts of information at a time. Grouping and chunking information aids in memory retention.

Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Be consistent.

Error prevention

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.

Recognition rather than recall

Make objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.

Anticipation

Anticipate the user’s wants and needs. Bring to the user all the information and tools needed for each step of the process.

Inconsistency
It is just important to be visually inconsistent when things must act differently as it when things act the same.

Good design is design thinking made invisible. Now more than ever, it’s important to understand and empathize with your customers, make doing business with you easy and intuitive, and provide clear communication.

Partner with a frog, cast a love spell on your customers, leap over your competition and live happily ever after.

Why we chose the name Pink Frog Interactive.

Pink

Pink is the color of happiness. Pink Frog brings joy to our clients and their customers. Joy is evoked in design with micro-interactions and an understanding of your users. Repeated strikes of an emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase. Happiness turns into joy after repeated positive interactions. Users remember the peak and endpoint of any experience. We focus on understanding your users’ emotions and finding out what constitutes exceptional customer experience. Happy users are more trusting and loyal.

Frog

Frogs are symbols of joy, luck, money, prosperity, abundance, wealth, and friendship in many cultures. Used as an amulet and talisman, they are strongly linked with transformation and magic and are believed to bring good luck. They are the magic in fairy tales and the secret ingredient in magic spells. The three-legged money frog, wealth frog, and lucky frog are three of the five Chinese gods that offer protection against misfortune and enrich a business or household in wealth. According to ancient Feng Shui beliefs, placing a frog near you dispels evil and attracts wealth.

Frogs are the happily ever after in fairy tales. If you kiss a frog, it turns into a prince. Frogs are the only animal that can only move forward and not backward. They can see in all directions without moving their head. A frog is often the elixir in magic potion.

Interactive

Interactive because we improve interactions at each touchpoint in your customers’ journey. We help you leap over your competition. We interact with you, your customers and your stakeholders to help you:

Tame complexity of your products or services.
Deliver innovative products and services that your customers love.
Decrease customer support calls.
Communicate complex information.
Help your customers intuitively navigate your product and services.
Help you understand how your customers learn and make decisions.
Help you understand how your customers define what constitutes an exceptional customer service.
Raise customer satisfaction scores.
Raise net promoter scores.
Gain more trust and loyalty from your customers.
Raise stock prices – companies that invest in design outperform 2 to 1. The key differentiator in companies is a positive customer experience. Customers choice products and services that are easy and joyful to use.

Behold! The power of design.

How Pink Frog Interactive saved one customer $$$ millions of dollars by fixing one link.

Pink Frog Interactive was hired to map out customer touchpoints (on and offline) for larger and smaller customer accounts around the globe as part of an exceptional customer experience project for a 14 billion-dollar company. While interviewing the customers about their touchpoints with our client and their decision-making points, we found that all three user groups around the globe did not believe that they could order as many samples as they needed to prototype the product. The engineers believed they could only get one sample and would often call managers and distributors to try to get more. The managers and distributors, using the same poorly designed interface, also believed they could only order one sample. In addition, finding mating and tooling for the sample part was difficult due to poor search futures, interface content, and nomenclature.

Ordering samples was a key decision making touchpoint for engineers. In fact, it was the most critical. Once engineers ordered samples to spec into their product the chance of changing them at a later time was almost nonexistent. While the engineers preferred our client’s products over the competitors and were even willing to pay more for them, they often believed they were forced to go with a competitor because they could easily get as many samples as they needed quickly and easily.

In contrast, their competitors did samples very well. They knew ordering samples and having easy access to mating and tooling parts for the samples where all key decision making points. The competitors had overnight samples on the front of their website and made mating and tooling parts just as easy to access. Once the part was in the prototype, the sale was made.

Let us help you empathize with your customers, understand your customer’s touchpoints, customer journey and decision-making points.

Emotions and Service Design

Emotions are important in design because they are a powerful motivator and can influence perception, cognition, attention, decision-making, learning, memory, social interaction, health and well-being, experience, behavior, and aid in managing information overload. Designers who learn how to assess, evoke and predict the emotional status and response of a user, can better present information in a way that aids in understanding and retaining information and communicate more effectively. They can create a better customer experience.

A partial list of design elements that can evoke an emotional response through sensory stimuli include: color, pattern and repetition, space, proportion, typography, sound, animation, motion, signs, symbols and images. In addition, designers can evoke emotions through interface design principles including, but not limited to, clear navigation, feedback, error prevention and recovery, scale and contrast, craftsmanship, structure and organization, and consistency.

Being able to assess your users’ emotional state is important. User’s who are stressed have problems memorizing and often experience tunnel vision. Repeated strikes of emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase. An angry customer can become furious with a couple of bad experiences. Customer experience is the number one differentiator. Companies that can provide a great experience will have loyal customers and gain trust.

Repeated strikes of emotion cause it’s perceived intensity to increase.

Other methods of evoking an emotional response include meeting expectations, allowing for play, and storytelling. In order to assess and predict the emotional response of users to a product interface or service, designers need to do research and testing to understand the environment and emotional needs of the user. They need to understand the stakeholders, ecosystem, customer journey touchpoints, and solicit domain expertise.

For example, customers using services for homelessness, foster care, school 504 disability services, veteran healthcare, etc. could have feelings of tunnel vision and stress due to their immediate situation or past experiences. Being able to navigate the services and information will depend on how well it is designed with an understanding of their emotions.

There are a variety of methods for measuring emotional response including, but not limited to, participatory design, questionnaires, experience diaries and body response measurements. Design research is needed because the way a stimulus is sensed is sometimes modified by needs, personality, experience, beliefs and attitude. In addition, a designer should be aware of how a user’s cultural background can influence their emotional response to design elements.

Learn more at https://pinkfroginteractive.com or email us at emotions@pinkfroginteractive.com