2. @robotperson
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5. @robotperson
Stakeholders
“Be kind.
Everyone you meet is fighting a bangle
you know nothing about.”
Ben Sauer, UX Brighton 2014, quoting someone else, complete with my
autocorrect error
36. @robotperson
The process
Stakeholder
interviews
Audience
survey
Card sort
Stakeholder
workshop
Sketching
and concept
testing
Wireframing
and
task-based
usability
Visual design
collaboration
37. @robotperson
The process
Stakeholders involved wherever possible
- Shake out the inconsistencies, achieve a
shared vision of the website
- Collaborate on design: make it their idea
- If its their ideal they’re invested, they own it
- No surprises, no big reveal
- Lean
- One path to…
39. @robotperson
Smooth simple projects for
happy, happy stakeholders
ROB PEARSON
Director, Amido
@robotperson
rob@robotperson.com
Notas del editor
So my talk is a very simple description of my typical UX team of 1 process
I’m really interested in different practitioners’ processes
It’s a lean approach because my clients almost always are working to a budget
Lets start by defining terms. People mean different things by “Stakeholder”
SH to me means individuals within the client organisation that have a say or that should have a say in the project
Eg. Marketing, Technology, Leader with a vision
This is an approach for peacemakers. Not necessarily for super disruptive UX people who are looking to make really memorable websites
It’s a pragmatic approach for people in real world projects trying to get the best for the users and their client organisation
It’s an approach that allows us to understand what motivates our stakeholders, and develop a relationship with them, which means we’ll be we’re more able to influence them positively when we’re advocating for our users
Here’s a tweet from Peter Merholz quoted by Andy Dennis as UX Brighton yesterday
We’re supposed to be an empathic discipline. Why shouldn’t we extend our empathy to Stakeholders?
This process helps to do this
Here’s another quote that Ben Sauer said yesterday
So let’s show our stakeholders the kind of empathy that we’re so good at showing our users and work with them
I like the idea that we’re all fighting Suzannah Hoffs
So I’m going to outline a 7 step process
The first step is to interview our stakeholders
And I like to do this first because you can go in with a largely pro-forma list of questions (i.e. not much prep required) and it’s definitely the quickest way to start getting up to speed
We’re idiots to begin with
I like to do them 1-1
People feel free to talk
You can give people your undivided attention. Their pain often pours out. It can be therapeutic
It’s a chance to form a rapport with individuals. Super important! If your stakeholders like you then the chances of you dealing with problems smoothly are much better
You absolutely must remember their name!
Also evaluation: metrics /. Goals / appraised?
Opportunities / pitfalls
Future developments
Best practice
Successful project
Who else should we be talking to?
I record the audio and make notes
Compile all the points into a big SWOT mindmap
I use a free mindmapping tool called Freemind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Then I compile a SWOT report.
The purpose of this is to highlight all the contradictions and gain a common understanding of the problem
People will contradict each other – that’s okay
People will talk about problems that are outside of the scope of this project – that’s okay too
Here I asked about the overly wide focus
So if the stakeholder interviews were getting the organisation’s view, this step is about getting the user’s view
I ask a few questions to allow me to segment against audience type – survey for Macmillan – Donor, fundraiser, campaigner,
Ask these at the end BTW – priming
Criticism: we’re asking an already engaged audience – subscribers, FB followers, Twitter followers and existing committee members
We’re doing the best we can with the resources available
One critical question – take various forms, but what we’re trying to do is identify a content hierarchy for the site
We clear questions with the client, so we’ve collaborated on this
The primary output is a goals hierarchy for the site: we can aggregate the survey results and get an overall view of how important the different goals are to users.
We can also segment the data by the different user types to get goals hierarchies for different user specific landing pages
Step 3 is a card sort
One of the question you ask in the survey is if people would be interested in taking part in further research
Content inventory to compile a list of cards
I use optimal sort online tool. It’s great
If you select your cards to test out specific hypotheses you have formed during the content inventory then the analysis becomes a lot easier: you’re basically looking to see if your hypotheses have been resolved
Example shown was a sort for the University of Warwick library
Here’s an example output: a dendrogram
Example labels for nodes supplied by participants are given
Turn it on its side and draw demarcations to get the new proposed site map – see next slide
Example shown was a sort for the University of Warwick library
Example shown was a sort for the University of Warwick library
So we’ve got organisational data from the interviews
We have user data from the survey
And we have a decent idea of optimal content structure
Now we have to present all of this back to the stakeholders
Gain a shared vision of the purpose of the project
So if the three activities we’ve done so far feels familiar, here’s why
It’s the classic three pillars of information architecture from the Polar Bear book – IA for the WWW by Morville and Rosenfeld
Context is the business environment – covered by the stakeholder work
Users is obvious – the survey
Content is the card sort
We’ve covered all the main inputs and now it’s time to present it all back to the stakeholder group in a workshop
Agenda:
SWOT findings: shake out all of the inconsistencies, present contradictions, gain a shared view of the goals of the project
Card sort results: agree on a new-top level sitemap
Survey results
Personas sketching
Home page sketching
Here: SWOT. Expect lots of discussion
Risks to the project are important to highlight
We run through all the survey data
I run through the overall aggregated data, ending in the content hierarchy
Next I ask stakeholders to sketch out archetypal users for all the different constituencies
Round the table may be 10 stakeholders: I try to assign a particular user type to a pair of stakeholders responsible for those goal, i.e. a course attendee user type to the training team members present.
I give each pair a printed-out set of graphs that relate to that user type: demographics, goals hierarchy etc.
It’s important to present this as evidence for discussion: it’s not proscriptive, we want stakeholders to combine this evidence with their own expertise and experience to come up with personas
Here’s an example result from an actual stakeholder workshop.
I have a massive stack of stock images printed out, and whilst the pairs are working I’ll spread these out on the table and ask stakeholders to choose an image.
It’s incredibly important for them to do this, and to choose a name and biographical details. Once a stakeholder has named a persona they ‘own’ it: collectively the organisation owns the personas, rather than me as the UX guy. These are personas that we create collaboratively, and they’re better than you or I could have produced independently.
When they’re done we go around the table, with pairs presenting back their user type. I invite other participants to add anything to the description or call out anything that doesn’t ring true. It’s rare for anything to get added or removed, but again it’s important to allow the opportunity for participants to feed back. Simply giving them the opportunity makes them very unlikely to question this work downstream: they’ve had their say.
The personas are a way for us to collaboratively synthesise all of the information we’ve covered so far: SWOT, survey, goals hierarchy.
After the workshop I’ll basically copy their work into the template for a super fast set of personas.
Useful for:
Getting the design team in the right space
Stakeholders evangelising internally: I ask them to print them out A3 and stick them up on the wall
Agreed standard against which to recruiting usability test participants
Articulate goals and motivations
Last exercise is a sketching activity, the purpose of which is to establish a design direction
This is Brad Frost idea: check here, step 4: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/establishing-design-direction/
The goal is to do 4 sketches of the new home page in 3 mins. Stakeholders usually freak a bit at this point!
The idea is for them to articulate all of the findings so far in a sketch.
I ask participants to present back their ideas and explicitly state that everyone should listen and steal ideas that they like.
We then repeat the exercise: 4 designs in 3 minutes.
Hopefully the results show some improvement and consistency.
I do 4 sketches in 3 minutes – 6 feels a bit much, and usually stakeholders are hard pushed to do more than 2
The idea is to provide a platform on which to begin the deisgn phase such that we can tie the eventual wireframes back to this collaborative process.
This lessens the risk of criticism when it comes to presenting the UX designs because features and functions can generally be tied back to something we did collaboratively
After the workshop I pin these up and draw out commonalities. It forms the foundation of the design phase.
Example refined sketch for a retirement finances organisation
So we validate the concept: I took this into a pub and for the price of a few pints I got some amazingly valuable feedback.
Great to have your client with you at this point – selecting participants, seeing the feedback is impossible to argue with
I’ve done guerrilla testing at conferences, in Starbucks, at the pub… think creatively: where can you find your target audience?
You get used to the rejection pretty quickly. About 1 in 6 usually says yes.
Wireframing … we know about this. I create clickable prototypes in Axure
Usability testing follows: usually one day with 6 users in 50m sessions.
Again, get your stakeholders to witness
And get them to do the recruitment if you can, or build in recruitment via a 3rd party market research agency to the costs (£120 / participants typically) because this is a massive pain otherwise.
I capture my usability notes on a printed-out grab of each page, using a different colour for each participant.
It’s much easier to compile a report this way as opposed to going through loads of text notes.
I usually do it without assistance, btw.
The resulting sheet is like a heat map of issues.
This is some testing I did for Medecins sans Frontieres
Of course, the visual design is where we ditch absolutely everything we’ve done so far and decide to make something “memorable” …Not.
This slide is a sarcastic reference to Andy Clarke’s talk at UX Brighton (the previous day) where he called for memorable web design like the classic TV ads of our youth (eg. The PG Tips chimp adverts). I did not agree with this.