“UX design doesn’t just have to be pretty” – mobile.de product manager in interview

Every now and then, we ask clients and other UX experts about their UX processes, lessons learned, and best practices.

Today Martin Schröter-Riese tells us how UX is integrated into the product development process at mobile.de, what role RapidUsertests play in this and his 5 golden UX rules.

Who are you and what do you do?

I am Martin, Product Manager at Mobile.de

What does your workday look like?

First thing in the morning, I look at the data: How has the conversion rate changed, what do the numbers of current experiments look like. Are we achieving the targeted KPIs?

After that, it’s the Daily Team Standup with my development team, where we talk about the progress of the current sprint and what we’re working on today.

This is usually followed by various meetings, the most important of which is the squad meeting, in which we discuss strategic and/or operational topics in a multi-functional round, which we have recorded in our OKRs. This includes representatives from all areas (Business Development, Product, UX, Analytics, etc.) – We work in squads within our Financing Business Unit.

The most fun meetings are the ones where I work with the Product and UX colleagues on new concepts for experiments that we want to implement in the next sprints.

How does UX fit into your product development processes?

UX is an important part of our process.

At the beginning there is the analysis, which we do in 2 ways: Quantitative and qualitative.

For the quantitative part, we look into the data – where do users abandon, which steps in the user journey are most central, where is the biggest impact?
Luckily, we have a really cool business intelligence tool and a huge amount of data that we’re getting very interesting insights from. For example, we see in our data that most users use our site on Sundays, which is when they get their rest.

However, these quantitative data only show the “what” and not the “why”.

Therefore, in addition to data analysis, we regularly gather qualitative feedback from our users. In addition to a (light weight) feedback tool (CSAT) on our site, we use user research and user testing to hear from real users in our target audience and see where there are problems.

A third perspective we take is the expert review, also in conjunction with a best practice analysis from the competition or even products completely outside the industry.

From the collected input from these different methods, we prepare a hypothesis backlog that we prioritize in the form of A/B tests and then test in agile development sprints.

In the conception phase we first scribble the ideas, these are then implemented in a UI design (sometimes also in a clickdummy) and either tested with users or they go into development. After the experiment (2-3 weeks), it starts all over again.

How do you use RapidUsertests?

We regularly use Rapidusertests to

• generate new hypotheses for our experiments, or
• verify concepts before putting them into an experiment, because we want to understand if the ideas will be understood by the users.

We then look at the results in self-service, everyone grabs 5 videos and we talk together about the results, prioritize them and think about how we can test them in the form of experiments. We also share the findings with the squad or the entire business unit.

What are your lessons learned when it comes to developing user-friendly products?

• Get user feedback instead of listening to your gut feeling (your own or the boss’s :)).
• Experimentation in the form of A/B testing – User testing alone is not enough because we humans make decisions subconsciously. Therefore, there is much that users cannot reflect, let alone explicitly express, in the tests.
• Think mobile first instead of desktop first when designing. Although I actually know it, I keep forgetting it myself and have to remind myself.
• Reflect your own opinion again and again and try to avoid the confirmation bias, i.e. look soberly at the results and decide accordingly, even if they do not always correspond to your own wishes (I made this mistake far too often myself :)).

Which products represent a good UX for you?

Products that solve a real problem for the user.

In addition to good user experience, they need to motivate users to actually use the product. By now, every online shop construction kit has a (more or less) good usability – the trick is to motivate users to want to buy there.

Websites that use psychology and behavior patterns to engage users while providing a good user experience get it. A concrete example for me is Booking.com.

Do you have a golden UX rule?

More like 5 🙂

• The first question should always be: What (user) problem are we solving with the product?
• Task appropriateness beats consistency
• UX design doesn’t just have to be beautiful. Less is not always more – When the right content is placed in the right place, the opposite can be true.
• Don’t just listen to what users say, but what they do. And even then always test with experiments, because the real user behavior can be different.
• And the most important one: motivation beats usability – The best usability is useless if users don’t understand the added value or aren’t motivated enough to engage with it further. Apple, for example, could probably place its add to cart button in the masthead instead of on the product detail page, and users would still buy.

How do you keep up to date with UX? Do you have any recommendations for books, podcasts, magazines, newsletters, etc.?

• Book: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Medium.com
• YouTube channel from the Nielsen Norman Group

Thanks a lot for the interview, Martin!