Nancy Early - Usability Research 2 Case Studies

Dealer Brand Portals

Challenge – Start a new job and a new project as a Sr. User Architect in an Agriculture company with, not known at the time, an immature usability research practice.  Sole researcher on the new project.  Also had design duties split with one other designer and a 4-person development team to start. Business believed to know their users and felt for the most part what they said was what the user would want.

Process

  • 2 week project kick-off workshop
  • Business stakeholder participants
  • Research, Design, IT participants
  • Missing end user participants
  • Journey Mapping
  • Needs and Requirements gathering
  • Priority MVP voting
  • Timeline Creation
  • User Story Creation

Outcome

  • MVP Project Deliverables
  • Begin Wireframe Design
  • Begin User Research Plan

Participant in the project kick-off my second week with the company. Participants upward of 50 people. We divided into groups of  8-10 to journey map, determine different functionality needs,  and deliverables strategy. Created user stories. My role was more that of a business analyst than a user researcher at this point.  Business partners acted as proxy users to help determine requirements. Facilitation by outside vendor to organize and create preliminary deliverables timeline. From here wireframe design began. I began work on User Research project plan and Finance design deliverables.

Process

  • List of users provided by business
  • From list chose users to interview
  • Schedule remote 1 hr sessions
  • Conduct user interviews
  • Analyze user findings
  • Document findings and Recommendations​
  • Present findings to business and IT stakeholders
  • Work with Design and Dev teams to implement​

Outcome

  • Business and IT determine items to change or enhance
  • New User Story creation
  • Story prioritization
  • Story Implementation
  • Enhanced versions created

Sales Opportunity Report

Challenge –  Gather  feedback in US and globally for a new sales report using Tableau. The data available was limited mock data, US focused. Tableau design is dependent on having available data. Inability to have global data hampered design efforts, 

Process

  • Work with US and Global stakeholders to define user Personas likely to benefit from report
  • User names provided by stakeholders
  • Schedule sessions in multiple time zones
  • From interviews and findings created personas and made recommendations for improvements

Outcomes

  • Implementation of design changes po
  • Backlog items created for later implementation
  • Persona Creation
  • From interviews realized not all personas were potential users of report

After findings were presented and during Persona creation, I wasn’t happy with the persona template and reached out to others in the design platform to discuss changes. With the assistance of 2 other designers from a different group within the design platform, we came up with a new template to use. We felt that the image used needed to be more generic and less likely to create bias. We also felt it necessary to add a few background items and an area for notes to aide with project specifics.  An example of it is below.