The Takeover (at work)
I really feel like 80.5% of the world’s problems could be solved just by using effective communication.
This morning I met with the Director and Deputy Director of my client’s division and it was just so obvious how a lot of “politics” is more people not listening and trying to force their own agenda over what’s best for the entire group.
She was of course understanding of this, but I feel like on a functional level (down at the peon level), a lot of our client/customer relationships are hazardous due to a serious gap in communication. Yes you can document everything to high heaven, but people in general need to speak the same languages and understand each other AS PEOPLE before any real work can be done.
UX is a really effective tool in facilitating this in many cases.
These past several months I’ve been doing a 3 fold approach in getting feedback from the stakeholders :
Persona Interviews – Talking to individuals about their everyday roles, what they do as their jobs, what tools they use, and what capabilities they wish they had to perform their jobs more efficiently. I even got into how they use computers outside of work. (The perception on the development side is that the users are computer newbs which is not usually the case…but I needed evidence to refute this).
Contextual Inquiry – Watching said individuals doing their jobs to get real feedback on exactly what happens and any roadblocks they come up against. (What someone says they do vs. what they actually do are usually very different).
Experience mapping – Getting all the individuals together in one room so they can hear each other’s experiences and to promote empathy among them as they hear that everyone has the same issues. (This really helps as they can hear for themselves that issues aren’t any one group’s fault, it’s an agency/industry thing).
The end result of the combined information and recommendations goes back to the stakeholder group (the people with the money who pay for the applications) so they can understand the motivations and frustrations of the people they manage and make changes to increase efficiency in their organizations.
The process before was to base a very expensive agency wide application on the feedback from 3 people who would not actually use the application in the end….and then redesign it a year later again based on 3 people.
Takes a lot of effort to move a ship, but I’m trying. This is the first project they’ve allowed me to work with in this manner. If they actually take my recommendations (informed by real life users) it’ll be a big win.
My next effort will be in changing the way we actually present the applications.
This is an even bigger effort, but I really want to introduce the idea of personable application development here, best example being the Jack Principles and their interactive conversation interface.
The You Don’t Know Jack games were my introduction into UX before I knew really what UX was (I was 10 when I started playing them.) I recognized that my experience playing this game was just so phenomenal even then…it was super engaging and I felt like I was really inside the game…that the game was really listening and interacting with me as a person.
Still to this day, it’s the best UX experience I’ve ever had.
I check in with their website periodically as it’s my dream company to work for, though I feel like they wouldn’t pay me like my current company does, and it looks like they’re picking up their marketing. Lots of new videos and materials out there for people to see.
They have a short white paper on their Jack Principles, which explains the strategy behind how they made the Jack games, and it makes so much sense. It would certainly be a change to the way we do applications at my client, but wow if I can get at least one application to use these, or even a collection of them to use elements from these principles, I feel like it would snowball into a really cool way to approach enterprise applications.
I’m doing a brown bag in February for our development branch to introduce the ideas and how we can apply them to our applications. If I can get a working model of how to apply this to data heavy enterprise applications, I’m taking it on the road!
Within my company anyway.
