Tag: enterprise ux

For your last project ask yourself: What did the stakeholders learn

For your last project ask yourself: What did the stakeholders learn

At the start of a new project we like to begin with a naive mind, a beginner’s mind. In it we try to avoid our assumptions and start with a blank slate. Our clients do not. They are expert in their respective domain and know a lot. It’s naturally that during the project we learn lot about them and their domain, their work and their daily struggles. We see how they work around the limitations of their tools and cope with software written more than 30 years ago.
But besides us learning something about the domain, the stakeholders learn something about their domain, too. Because to develop the domain, the use cases and the daily work, we have to know details and reasons. Why is this step before that? Is it optional? Are these all the formats which are allowed? How long is the text usually? Why is there an exception to the rule? How often does it happen?
Usually we ask questions which cover the most traveled path, the happy trail. But in order to understand we need to get to the edges as well. The dark edges. Sometimes the number of objects we deal with is so big, nobody has all the answers. Our work, even before we write the software, enables collaboration. People and different departments have to work together. We work with all of them. Our software helps them to reach their common goals. But before that we need to know. And in order to tell us that the stakeholders need to dig deeper in their respective domain. Sometimes we need to look at the history in their domain, their work history, the decisions other stakeholders made in the past. It’s like archeology without the shovels, well, most of the time :).
Luckily the people we work with enjoy getting to know more about their work. They are astonished what depth the details have. How much different types of things, where gaps are. It is not always easy to light up areas that were kept in the dark so long. That were done just the way they were done. No we come and ask sometimes uneasy questions. We need to know. We need to know exactly. We need to know deeply.
This curiosity is not for its own sake. Our clients can confirm that the new software is so much better than the old. Not technical, but most importantly more adapted to their daily work.

That’s what’s important.

Mapping the user’s workflow

One of the most important things to understand before starting any design or development is the user’s workflow(s).

One of the most important things to understand before starting any design or development is the user’s workflow(s). A user uses your app to reach a goal. His starting point is the start of the workflow. His goal its end. He takes steps in order to get from the start to his goal.
The order and the type of steps he takes helps us to understand how he reaches his goals at the moment. Visualizing these steps, often called mapping, is a great way to see the system from the user’s perspective: what does he do with the system, how and when does he do it.
This workflow helps us to keep the big picture in mind and organise planning and execution around the important part of the project: the user goals.

How does a workflow look?

Use the visualization or tool that suits you most. A workflow can be a sketch of boxes and arrows. Or an excel sheet. You can use a diagramming software or a presentation software. The important point is that you see the start, the goals and the steps and can annotate each step with important details.

How can we create the workflow

A workflow describes a series of actions. When the system supports the user to get from his start to his goal our application does its job. The user experience is how efficient and pleasant it is for the user to take each step.
One way to find out about the steps the user takes is to observe him doing so. At first: try to only watch and listen. Take notes. Be open. Record each step as if you were a beginner knowing nothing about the system or how the software works or should work. Especially watch out for the struggles.
Struggles can be seen in:

  • mistakes
  • back steps
  • pauses
  • changing applications
  • repeated steps

The struggles give us a hint where to put our energy. In the second run keep an eye open for unusual steps. Unusual steps are actions which seem complicated or unnecessary from a beginner’s mind. Start with the notion that every step is needed but find out the reasons why it is. In subsequent observations look for variations and ask what information lead the user to decide differently this time.
Armed with your recordings you can now sketch the first version of what you understood about how the user reaches his goal using the current systems.

What I’ve learned in UX in the first half of 2016

The first part of my journey to better software

Since the beginning of the year we as a team of developers started meeting 1-2 times a month talking about UX design. Urged with a motivation to create better software for our clients and serve them better I started the conversation inside our company. Years ago I read classics like Alan Cooper’s The Inmates and Don Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things. They left me with a craving to create something more fitting for users but I had no place where to start. At the turn of the year I focused on learning as much as I can about UX, product design and design in general. Here’s my list of insights I gained in these 6 months (in no particular order):

  • doing UX means changing the culture and mindset of the whole company from technology to people
  • nothing beats exposure to real users in their contexts (source)
  • contextual observation and interviews are key and the most profitable and motivating method to find out more about your users
  • analytics and data can tell you more about what user do, interviews why are they doing it
  • in the enterprise context where we are it is sometimes difficult if not impossible to gain access to users
  • some methods from UX feel a bit squishy and the value of doing them not apparent
  • traditional (UX) designers have a hard time talking about the value of UX for the business
  • the definition of UX is all including at best and inconsistent at worst, but it doesn’t really matter to me as I want to improve the software we write regardless of what it is called or which responsibility it is
  • in order to craft a better user experience our development process has to change drastically
  • the creative method (observe, reflect, make) is a way to order my concepts about UX
  • users behave differently in different situations, the better way to capture that is jobs to be done not persona
  • the UI layer is where experiments are made, therefore it should be changed more easily than other parts
  • assumptions are very dangerous, trying to validate or falsify them
  • you have to live with assumptions, know their risk
  • conversations are the way to spread knowledge, not documentation and not presentations
  • let users or stakeholders talk, do not complete thoughts for them, get comfortable with silence
  • the user has a whole different view of your UI than you
  • I have to learn to suspend judgement
  • ask why but not endlessly
  • the struggling moments of your users are the best points to start for a better solution
  • understand the problem, the context and the user’s motivations better
  • requirements are liars
  • use whiteboards more, they help me to think spatially
  • if you cannot argue for a design, the client overruns you with his taste
  • think in systems, systems of people and design systems
  • small usability improvements are easy and therefore we often tend to flock to them
  • conversations with people are hard therefore we tend to avoid asking the hard and important questions

In future posts I will write in more detail about each of the points.

Requirements should not drive development

I want to make the work of engineers better. Requirements and user stories are just too solution focused and miss important details to drive any software development effort which wants to help people doing a better job.

For more than a decade I develop software for engineers. The software they use is coined by vendor lock-ins, terrible interfaces and dowdy technology. In the last years I am struggling to find a better way to make tools that help them to get their jobs done. In a more pleasant and efficient way. My journey started with trying to make the internal quality of the software better through practices like clean code, TDD and the like. Maybe the software got more robust but the benefit on the user side of things was negligible.
So I turned to learning user experience design (UX). A vast land of new unknown concepts, theories and practices lays before me. So big that even practitioners in the field cannot agree what UX is.
The label isn’t important to me.

I want to make the work of engineers better.

To make the work better I have to learn more about the people and the work. The importance of domain knowledge is undisputed in the software development world. And collaboration is a pillar of modern software projects. But after reading and practicing several methods to uncover information about people and their work (read: user research) I found the traditional way of communicating inside a software project lacking.
Normally a software project starts with gathering requirements. Requirements describe what the software should do in an abstract way. For example: the software should calculate the balance of the user’s bank account. How did we found out that this is a requirement? We interviewed a stakeholder.
At first sight this might sound reasonable. Looking closer we find many problems with this approach.
First in the context of enterprise software where I work the user and the stakeholder are often different people. Even more alarming is that we talk about the wants of the solution. We have no indicator what problems does this requirement try to solve. Without knowing what we want to solve we are doomed. We are imaging an illusion.
Now even if the one who made all research and wrote the requirements knows the problems he wants the software to address the requirement is a very poor communicator. We need to spread the knowledge about the problems throughout the team. The agile approach to include roles (as a), actions (I want to) and outcomes (so that) in so called user stories is not much help.
In order to know what properties a solution must have we need to understand the user and his work. For this we need to see his context, the situation he is in. In different situations he might want to do different things. So we need to capture his motivation and of course his goals.

Jobs to be done – job stories

In the search for a better way to communicate what we find out during research I stumbled across the jobs to be done methodology. Coming originally from marketing several teams adapted this way of thinking to product development. I think Paul Adams mentioned and Alan Klement developed the idea of the job story and several others have had a great success implementing it.
What’s in a job story? A job story take the form: When (situation), I want to (motivation), so I can (expected outcome).
Now the first part captures one of the most important concepts of UX: the context.

The situation

Context is so much more than I naively imagined: it is not location and surroundings. Context or better the situation is what happened before in the environment, in the system and for the user. Developers might call it the state of these. For example: When I am about to buy a car, when I start a measurement, when I am leading the race, when my application crashed, …
The situation and what happened just before is crucial to get a sense of what the user is struggling with.

The motivation

The user wants to move from the current situation to his goal. Why? And what is important for him? What might hinder him to do so? The jobs to be done framework calls this forces. We have 4 forces:

  • push of the current situation: what is bad now
  • pull of the future: what is good then
  • habits: business as usual might hinder progress
  • anxiety: the fear of the new might bring hesitation

These forces help us to document needs of the user in the current situation. If we want to better support the user we need to care about him as a person, not just as a machine going from one state to the next. Forces help us to communicate needs. Again a property the current solutions of documenting requirements lack.

The outcome

What benefit does the user get from his actions? He has a goal. We need to know his goals in his current situation to help him get there. Beware: this is not just a feature of the system, it is an understanding the user gets, an accomplishment, a symbol of status. The benefit is the value the user gets.

Conclusion

Describing situations in which people struggle to get to the wanted outcomes and goals helps us relating to them. It helps us documenting findings and communicate them to other team members. When evaluating different solutions we can lean on the job stories to determine if they fit. Requirements and user stories are just too solution focused and miss important details to drive any software development effort which wants to help people doing a better job.