UCD is getting users and stakeholders together

User-centred design processes (UCD) focus on a number of actions designed to elicit requirements and validate them in order to provide traceability from the original concepts through to implementation. The ISO standard that I love to use — ISO 13407:1999 Human-centred design processes for interactive systems — provides clear instructions on what to do. I prefer this standard to the revised standard (ISO 9241-210:2010 “Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems) ultimately because 13407 is a simpler conceptually (and therefore easier to remember).

What either of the ISO standards don’t tell you is how to actually embed it into your work practices. What I’ve tended to do as a result, is interpret the ISO standard in terms of change management and get those from the business side of the project together with the people who will actually use the project’s products, in order to lead them through the change process that will, as it proceeds, gather their thoughts and ideas and help to frame them in such a way so as to:

• Contribute requirements to the final solution
• Help them understand the solution requied to make the project a success

I’ve discussed some of this approach in my last blog post, but I thought I would answer Erietta‘s question regarding how to get these people together.

The essence of this approach looks at combining the stages of the change management framework, ADKAR (awareness-desire-knowledge-ability-reinforcement), with the ISO standard.

The main reason I like ADKAR is that it is based on psych — the Transtheoretical Model of Behavioural Change by James O. Prochaska. Ultimately, it reinforces that there are several stages that people need to go through at both a cognitive and behavioural perspective in order to change. When aligned with UCD, ADKAR provides a rationale for raising the awareness of the project’s business owner and his stakeholders of the needs of end-users and, through a series of collaborative exercises typically employed during collaborative design workshops, prepare workshop participants for the solution that I understand will need to be put into place by giving them both the desire to fix the issue and the knowledge and ability to know how to do it. When this way of working has both the business owners/stakeholders and end-users in the same workshop the change that occurs is all the stronger because they get to hear the issues not just from me, but also from those who will use the end solution.

Recruiting End-Users

When I was working with CHOICE on their last website redesign (I’m very proud of the UX that I did for this website), we used Facebook to recruit people to our workshops. The people who joined the group in the first place were those who used the CHOICE website and would ultimately benefit from the end product of the redesign so they were interested in participating. If you go down this road it’s good to give them a gift to thank them for their participation.

We explicitly involved people internal to CHOICE with the workshops and what end-users said in the workshops provided a very powerful message regarding specific contexts of use, their requirements and the solutions they felt would meet their needs — both in relation to the information architecture and the user-experience.

Workshop Design

There are a number of things I now do both before and during workshops which I should one day present at a conference or something, but I might as well share them with you here.

1. Prepare data-driven Personas

You need to do your homework to know who the end-users are most likely to be. This will help you define the criteria for recruitment of external participants. You can get lots of data about user behaviour from sources like Forrester, Nielsen and (since I live in Australia) the Australian Bureau of Statistics. I make sure each Persona fits on an A3 page so it looks good when printed and I take those to the workshop.

Note: If you’re attending webdu2011 you’ll see much more of this in detail as applied to agile projects.

2. Pre-workshop Communication

Quite a few people are used to coming to workshops where everyone provides a laundry list of requirements. I find that the loudest people get heard and important things get missed.

I don’t run workshops this way and I let potential participants know that they’ll be doing a numder of structured exercises designed provide input into both requirements the solution.

I do a social network analysis (SNA) so that I know who are the power brokers and who are the people who are best connected within the project’s organisation in order to extend the workshop invitation to them. Even if they don’t come, at least I’ve given the opportunity to participate, be heard, and contribute.

Typically, all these people, including the ones the project’s business sponsor wants to invite (a good thing to do for the sake of politics), get an email invite. Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to also use a project blog to communicate what’s about to go on. Later, I also use the blog to relate a few bits of knowledge about research we’re doing, requirements and design outputs, and finally the outcomes of the workshop, final requirements and any final designs (or designs/prototypes as we undertake each Sprint if we’re working Agile).

3. The workshop

Tip: bring chocolate to put on each table of the workshop … it helps to increase people’s energy levels and makes them feel happy!

I like to use 4-5 groups in my workshops each with approximately 3-5 participants. This means I can have about 25 people in the room at once. The more participants per group the more time each group needs to resolve their differences and complete each task. The more groups per workshop the longer it takes for each group to present their completed activity to the other groups.

When people arrive at the workshop they normally sit with their friends. Because I want different opinions and ideas at each table and for people to have to work through their different opinions in order to collaborate effectively on activities, I just randomly allocate people to a group. It’s pretty easy, I just go around the room and give each person a number … 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 1 … 2 … etc. Once they get to their table I ask them to write their name on a sticky label so everyone (specifically me) can know their name.

Activity 1: Personas

Give one of the A3 Personas to each table and get them to write a list of the Persona’s wants, needs, issues & pain points. Note that wants and needs are very different. The way to think about them for the purposes of the workshop are that wants are about the Persona’s motivations, e.g:

“I want a car. I want a DB9“.

Needs are typically about an authority figure, professional, academic, etc, telling them the solution, e.g:

“You don’t want a DB9. You need a Ferrari“.

Essentially, people often know what they want (even if it’s unconscious) — it’s the thing that drives them and motivates them to look for content on the internet in the first place. If you’re going to lead them to your website you not only need to know what they want, but also provide them with the opportunity to find out what they might need once they get there.

I’ve recently addded a new secion into the Personas — trust of information sources. The research done by Edelman looks at how much trust people place in governments, NGOs, the media, etc. The research normally finds that people trust those who they identify as like themselves. I attempt to write some of this idea into the Personas’ narative, suggesting who they might look to for help, but most experts will suggest that experts are the msot highly trusted, followed by family, friends, etc. Those who are switched on, though, understand that one of the best ways to relate information and ensure that it’s most easily remembered by people, is to use a storytelling format that depicts a person in a situation that the reader can easily identify with. Edelman’s research is also a reminder that if you put a human face to content, a link to their bio, and enable end-users to interact with authors via discussion threads and/or comment sesions, the interaction is more likely to lead to identification with the author and build trust as a result. Overt symbols on a page of content, like rating, help to provide a filtering mechanism for readers that suggests how much others trust the source of information. Part of what I do as I walk between tables and talk to them about what they’re doing is to raise the awareness of these issues.

This activity extracts the context of the Persona’s issues and covers the ‘awareness’ part of ADKAR and begins to build requirements to help mitigate agsinst the Persona’s pain points resulting in a ‘desire’ (from ADKAR) to help them. I then start to provide ‘knowledge’ as I interact with each group, challenging their thinking, in order to help them more easily complete their tasks.

Activity 2: Card sorting

If you’re not familiar with this technique, the Wikipedia article on card sorting provides a good overview. Here’s what I do as an open card sort:

• Give each table a list of cards.
• Ask each table to take out the cards that they think will provide their Persona with information to meet their wants and needs. I use a sample of 200 cards and leave it up to each table to take out the ones they think are appropriate, get them to sort them into piles.
• Get them to label each pile.

From psych we know that the cards people take out of the pile and start to sort first will be placed on the left-hand side of the table (since Western culture is left-to-right writers). This typically represents the most important/valuable content and when you’re designing navigation should go on the top left-hand side of a page.

This activity attempts to get participants to identity with the Persona to the point where they can make an educated guess about what information (content) might meet their needs/wants. This covers the ‘desire’ and ‘knowledge’ parts of ADKAR.

At this point I get each table to present what they’ve done to the room — talk about their Persona, their wants and needs, and what information they believe will help them.

Activity 3: Channel preference

So how do each persona prefer to get their information? I’ve found leveraging Forrester stats in infographics on the Persona’s A3 useful for this activity. This part is also something quite new I’ve added to my workshop.

I get each table to use the Persona, their needs, wants and topics from the card sort to determine how best to deliver information and/or services to them. This is important because today with social media, wikis, twitter and blogs, there are more things to consider than just building a website [1]. I’ve used my web 2.0 channel cards quite a bit since creating them a year or so ago. I’ve now got versions that include a number of physical as well as virtual channels, including fridge magnets and face-to-face (I really need to update the download to include these new cards one of these days!).

Activity 4: Storyboards & scenarios

Now that each table has worked out the best delivery mechanism (channel preference) for content I get them to draw a scenario that depicts the Persona’s pain points and looks to describe their behaviour in seeking to meet their wants through delivering the information to them by the channel they’ve identified.

When I’m running a workshop with both stakeholders and users this is when the users start to tell stories to stakeholders about specific experiences. It’s great for expanding the ‘awareness’ of stakeholders because they are often so far removed from the people they serve that, alone, they rarely know specifics about context or scenarios. They are often so fixated on delivering their experience, and that their expertise is so superior, needed and valued, that they forget the wikipedia experience — that for most users “close enough is good enough”.

Once each table has finished their scenario, I get them to present it to the rest of the room

Activity 5: Collaborative design

I usually finish with getting each table to use their creative flair and create a web page, app or even set of fridge magnets (depending on the channel for delivery they identified) that appears in their scenario. Specifically, the labels they’ve used in card sorting must appear in the navigation of their design.

Most people just make a website home page. For the first time in my last workshop, people made an iPad app.

Once they’re done, each table presents their final work to the rest of the room. All the tasks before this one create the ‘ability’ to complete this task as well as similar tasks when they return back to their own organisations.

4. Champions

ADKAR promotes the use of champions in assisting change. In engaging people in the way I’ve described I create change agents who can then go back to their own organisations and relate what they’ve done, how they’ve participated and contributed their knowledge, and how it was used. They typically feel good about the experience because of all the sharing that has occured and the opportunity to interact with others in order to create a solution designed to meet the needs of others. They’ll also take back this new found ‘ability’ and apply this in their own organisations.

Overall, the experience tends to make them look to this style of workshop when it comes time to build their own websites.

5. Closing the loop

Getting closure is important for my UCD workshops. I relate that the task ahead for me is to take all of the disperate designs (which is obvious given everyone has produced different things) and create a single user-experience and information architecture. The job for my client is then to communicate when this is complete and provide people the opportunity to comment on wireframes and prototypes that are produced. This type of user acceptance testing (UAT) ‘reinforces’ that their effort has led to something tangible, that their contribution has been effective, and prepares them for the final delivery of the product. Typically, once they see it released, it’s sort of an anti-climax. This reaction is *exactly* what I’m hoping for because it suggests I’ve prepared them for that change and made them own it.

6. Additional workshops?

I’ve started to add one more workshop into the mix to further validate my concepts. I do use scenario-based testing and online (closed) card sorting through Optimal Sort as part of UAT. In my last workshop, though, I created formal storyboard elements and invited the partipants from the first workshop to create a user-experience for their original Persona based on:

• The storyboard elements
• Print outs of the wireframes
• Blank template cards of browsers, iphones and ipad/tablets

This workshop activity provides the original participants the opportunity to return and put into practice all that they learned during the first workshop and provide further feedback into the logic created to support end-users’  needs in context with the solution (wireframes) created.

Last thoughts on UCD

For me, UCD is much more than just getting users to create a solution to serve their needs. My experience tells me that they rarely think outside what they know. Leading them through a number of structured activities, though, helps me to provide them insight into the issues facing people today in meeting their needs through discovery of information and services, and helps my client and their stakeholders consider the people that their project is designed to serve. Throw actual end-users into the mix and you get some insight, but more over, provide everyone with the ability to contribute to the solution and educate them on how they might go about doing that.

Give it a try.

M

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1. In fact, a friend was talking to me the other day about a bunch of experts who felt people could benefit from their knowledge, so they decided that building a website was the thing to do. Often, unfortunately, its the wrong choice, particularly given that Google likes it when websites continue to have new content — it makes Google return to index it and means the website is more likely to be found when someone does a search.

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