Transcript of Interview With JonDelina Buckley

Interview With JonDelina Buckley

This interview features JonDelina Buckley, vice president of customer experience strategy at Synchrony. You can watch it on JonDelina’s profile page.

Transcript

– Hello everyone. I’m Joe Welinske, conference director for ConveyUX, and our 12th annual event is coming up the last three days of February, and we’ll be in person in Seattle and also online. One of the fun things I get to do is talk to all of our speakers before the event, and today I am chatting with JD Buckley. Hello, JD. How are you today?

– Hey, good to see you, Joe.

– Well, I, I’m talking from my home office in Bellingham, Washington, which is just north of Blinks office in Seattle. Where are you talking to us from?

– I’m in Pasadena, southern California on this wonderful 72 degrees day, so right before the holidays, so feeling good.

– All right, excellent. I’m jealous about the weather, but I’m happy to be having this conversation with you and I’ve, I’ve known you for quite a while now and keep up with your, with your exploits, but for everyone else, why don’t you talk a little bit about your background and type of work you’re involved in?

– Yeah, so I have been in UX interaction design, UX research, and now service design and customer experience strategy for about 20 plus years. I’ll leave it at that. I’ve worked at companies like Yahoo and Kaiser Permanente and DirecTV and Kelly Blue Book, so I’ve worked at startups like Ideal Lab Incubators, done a lot of work with research and UX strategy, really passionate about also teaching young researchers and designers as a professor, adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design.

– Well, you mentioned customer experience and that’s part of, it’s one of the main themes of Convey ux. It’s also something that is related to your talk, which is entitled Bridging the CX and UX Divide with the superpowers of the Super Q. So tell us a little bit about that topic and what we can expect to learn from it.

– Yeah, so the Super Q metrics stands for the standard User Experience Percentile Ranking questionnaire. You can blame Jeff Sorrow if most of you’re familiar, if you’re a UX person with Jeff Sorrow. He is the co-founder of Measuring You a consultancy that looks at statistical, a measuring of the user experience. He created the standard user experience percentile ranking questionnaire, the super queue to kind of look at four components of user’s experience or customer’s experience, loyalty, trust and credibility, appearance and usability. And why I liked it and why I leaned toward it when he was first kind of working on it almost back in 2010, was it was really looking at those standard UX metrics like usability and appearance, but also the little more attitudinal aspects of appearance of loyalty and credibility and trust. And I sort of using it at some desirability studies when I was at Kelley Blue Book and have used it back and forth across different types of studies over the years while I’ve been recently looking at it, was has this nice bridge. I really think of customer experience strategy has a bridge between the strategy in terms of brand strategy, customer experience, strategy, and then the more traditional user experience aspects of usability and appearance, efficiency, effectiveness at the page level, and it’s a nice metric that bridges those two things and brings them together and allows organizations and teams to think holistically about the customer’s experience or the consumer’s experience with One Metric. It’s an eight question questionnaire. It has a score that you can compare to other, other competitors against that category. Definitely go to measuring you.com and take a look. Jeff Soro is again, well known for a lot of his metrics and his work with statistics and the super queue is a tool that I’m beginning to use and to bring in the company I bring into the company I’m at to be able to look at those different disparate aspects, CX and UX strategy and execution making, and look at our customers and consumers holistic experience.

– Well, I I, I know that you explicitly have customer experience as part of your job title. As a VP of customer experience strategy for cx. How do you see that area specifically evolving or being relevant to user experience professionals as we move forward?

– Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think what CX is in customer experiences in the unique position to do has, it has evolved. I think originally customer experience was really just about the service touch points. If you have a, and most of our software today has a service experience, so if you are getting a, a applying for a credit card or buying SaaS, software, anything, there is a service aspect where you’re reaching out to get help or support or customer support. Historically, customer experience was really only thought of as looking at the touch points and that service experience. Increasingly, customer experience is being seen as a bridge. As we think about the vision and the strategy that executives have to what are the, how are we gonna translate that strategy into execution? Who is the audience segment that we are actually trying to target? What are the, how do we prioritize that audience segment? What are the trade-offs between the business and the consumer? How do we make those logical, rational trade-offs in a way that benefits both? I think CX is in a unique position to be that bridge between the strategy and the execution, so I think it’s grown in its capabilities from its original mission of only focusing on touchpoints that impact the service.

– Well, it’s gonna be a great, having your experience in that specific area at the event, I know you’re involved in a lot of different things in your work life. Is there anything that you’re particularly excited about or passionate about that you might wanna share with us?

– Yeah, I, as I, I also mentioned that I am an adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design here in southern California. This past summer, I had the unique opportunity to introduce the first service design course for interaction design students, and super passionate about the new ways of thinking, encouraging young design students to be strategic as well, has built their craft in terms of making, in terms of their digital expertise, really thinking about holistically about end-to-end experiences. I think Brian Chesky at Airbnb has made us all reconsider the power of service design, the power of thinking across journeys as opposed to just at digital interfaces and interactions, and really passionate about encouraging young students to start thinking strategically as early as possible in their career to transition from thinking just about the interface and thinking about the whole human

– Well, we have a lot of student people that are just getting started in user experience, both students and, and people that are actively working. We also have a lot of senior UX professionals, so it’s, you know, good. Do hear about the work that you’re doing to foster more education. I, I believe you mentioned to me that you’re also have some thoughts around ai and that’s one of the, the other themes that we have at the conference. It’s just not specific to your talk, but do you have any thoughts about that that you might wanna share with us?

– Yeah, I am, you know, it’s, it’s a crazy time. We’re all in, right, with generative ai. Last year, you know, earlier beginning of this year, late last year, we were all, you know, considering the interesting things that Chat GPT could do, but I think the opportunities to really interweave generative AI into design thinking, I think we are all in a place right now where we’re really reconsidering what it means to be a designer or a researcher or any profession, really, because there is this very powerful opportunity to collaborate with this incredibly intelligent entity that allows us to make our work potentially easier. There are a lot of discussions, a lot of caveats, the ethics of ai, whether it’s potentially hallucinating and providing the appropriate and correct information bias. These are all things that are important parts of the conversation. When we think about any creative endeavor from painting, drawing, animation, writing, we’re all going to be impacted by how we can facilitate a partnership with generative ai and the best way to approach that. I think it’s, it’s a unwritten story right now. I think we’re all trying to figure out what that means for us and for in our professions, but really, really encouraging students and colleagues to jump in and to not, you know, hide from it. I think there’s, everyone’s saying, you know, people, generative AI won’t replace our jobs, but people who are comfortable in using it to be better and faster will, and I, I firmly believe in kind of jumping in, getting your hands dirty, figuring out what works, what doesn’t work, what real questions and concerns you have from kind of being in the messiness of its watching it evolve.

– Well, thanks sir, for sharing your, your thoughts on that, and it’ll be great to also have that as part of our discussion at the conference with our colleagues during the in-person and online activities. What the, the last thing I wanted to ask about is related to our conference bookstore. I, I, I like to find out if there are any new books that you might have been exploring that you would wanna recommend to us.

– Yeah, Cheryl Ka Baba has a great book. I saw a, a talk with at recently where she was talking about her book Systems Thinking for Designers earlier this year. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but very excited as I think about, again, the, the evolution where we’re all in, where we need to think bigger, not just in digital experiences or touch points, not just in services, but in systems, ecosystems, omnichannel systems. So I really enjoyed a few pages as I watched a webinar she was speaking at, thinking about all of the opportunities of systems design. So haven’t read the book yet, but super excited about that. There are more opportunities to educate ourselves on thinking holistically globally and more than just, more than just digital experiences.

– Well, jd it, it’s been great to have this brief conversation with you and definitely looking forward to having you as part of the event, and we’ll see you in Seattle in just a couple of months.

– Thanks so much, Joe. Appreciate it.

– All right. Thank you. Bye-Bye.