User Experience Research

Challenge Overview

The UX design and research team were called upon to unite with product engineering teams and set the design foundation for the first release of a new task-based developer application within Vantage, the company’s unified product platform that lets customers access all their data wherever it resides.

As most of the product teams had never experienced human-centered design methods before, our UX team determined to host a 3-day “User Experience Training Bootcamp“ to model this new way of working, kick off the developer application, and begin to gather initial user data, insights and ideas from the team to establish the basic design principles.

Team, Roles, and Scope

Before this event, I trained the UX Bootcamp “table coaches,” who were selected from designers, FE developers, and a small external agency. Participants were various stakeholders responsible for creation and delivery of the product.

DAY 1: We conducted listening sessions with participants as part of a change management technique. A simplified research project intake brief was co-created so we had everyone’s buy-in on the goal and deliverable.

DAY 2: I facilitated a full-day, user-centered training workshop, demonstrating user-centered research methods, allowing teams to practice and then try the methods with real users. I educated them on the human-centered mindset and table coaches guided teams through the end-to-end design thinking experience to a solution for their user’s problem.

DAY 3: We brought in our chief executive officers and presented our solutions and roadmapped each team’s milestones and deliverables for the creation of the developer platform to reach our specified launch date.

User-Centered Discovery Research

After my brief tutorial which includes me and 2 designers acting out the interview process, each team table interviewed a targeted user role to experience and empathize with the users. Using “wall worksheets” I designed, teams created a persona, created a user journey map and storyboard, uncovered obstacles, and defined the user’s key problem to solve.

Each group was coached on how to reframe their user’s key problem as a “how might we” point of view statement. Then they were given a variety of brainstorming techniques to generate ideas such as individual, silent idea-storming and SCAMPER methods.

Techniques used:
Interviewing
Observation
Persona definition
User journey / empathy mapping
Data pattern analysis
Analysis / Synthesis
Problem definition and POV
Actionable insight writing
Group brainstorming techniques

Ideation and Concept Validation

After ideation, each team plotted their idea on a 2x2 matrix (easy/hard, low value/high value) and voted to select their top idea. To develop their concept more fully, I lectured on story arcs and value propositions and conducted a press release writing exercise. Ideas were presented to the users, senior executives, and customer account executives for validation and comments. Rough prototypes were developed in a subsequent workshop and these insights and idea-starters were the foundation for use case driven design sprints later.

Techniques used:
Persona definition
Design Principles
Value proposition writing
Storytelling

And later…
Wire frames
Rough prototyping

POST-WORKSHOP: Prototype Creation & Testing

The core research and design team leveraged the design principles to create a first iteration of a prototype. A series of bi-weekly design and research sprints took place over six months. I oversaw the usability testing methods, writing of the learning guides, scripts, testing sessions, and the analysis and synthesis process. After each sprint cycle, I presented the full research report to UX/UI design, engineering, the strategic offering team, and product managers.

Techniques used:
Contextual inquiry / Interviewing
Direct Observation
A/B testing
First click test
Tree testing
Data analysis
Synthesis
Actionable insight writing

Our Final Product

The Vantage Developer Platform was launched to the public at our global partners' convention six months after our initial research began. This was the first release under the Vantage product umbrella to be influenced by a full, end-to-end user experience research and design process. The success of this launch was largely due to the users’ voice guiding development decisions and uniting the internal teams through a common vision. It received high praise and rave reviews from our customers and industry experts.