Forum Discussion
Understanding a User Experience - Through User Interface Patterns
Pierrick Barreau Yes, absolutely there are very successful ways to conduct stakeholder interviews that will help to ascertain the User Centered Information you need.
A User Journey Map is a wonderful tool for helping to visualize this conversation with Stakeholders or expressing the interactions of User Personas.
In the case of O365, because Microsoft has woven the tools together already, the strategic UX idea would be to focus less on the technology and implementation more so on the Business Objectives and the User's Needs.
Here are some really quick example questions. Notice the questions are more abstract with the intent that we ask behavioral questions to unearth functionality, but also in doing so ask how the user feels.
- Currently how do you find documents?
- are you happy with this?
- how would you like to see it changed?
- If you have a problem, who do you contact?
- if you don't know a person's information, how do you get it?
- if you don't know a person's information, how do you get it?
- Currently If you're in a meeting, how do you take notes?
- are you happy with this?
- how would you like to see it changed?
Depending on how closely the Micro or Marco Personas overlap the more assumptions can be made that the User Journey Map created around those Personas will or will not fit across an organization.
Once these objectives and needs are clearly defined the technology can easily in most cases be inserted into the Journey where it serves a purpose.
Thanks for the perspective Damon Sanchez !
The User Journey Map seems indeed to be an interesting tool for user interviews in order to capture their existing experience with the collaborative tools and then brainstorm how we could improve that experience making it more compelling (emotion) or more efficient (rationnal).
Any interesting reading you'd recommend to get more sense of the methodology to draft a User Journey Map live with an end-user ?
The example questions are a good start in any case !
Thanks for the share.
The User Journey Map reminds me of Value Stream Mapping or Spaghetti Maps we did as part of process improvement studies (Six Sigma or Lean Sigma) in healthcare technology. We also held stakeholder interviews, presented use cases and created personas. These were key for driving adoption within healthcare. As you can imagine, personas (roles) use technology differently across healthcare and stakeholders have varying opinions about how technology impacts their workflow (even thoughtflow - as we learned to map it out). Thus, it was to our advantage to interview, time, document, study as many departments, use cases, stakeholders, roles and personas prior to making our recommendations on process improvement within technology.
Perhaps you will find this wiki article helpful. I would also encourage you to search on terms related to Six Sigma Thought Process Map or Spaghetti Diagram.
