After the whirlwind that was last week, this week was much calmer. We had a one week sprint and everyone just tried to achieve the goals.
Here are the highlights.
Journey mapping
Last week, we had several sessions with users to understand how intuitive the tool was. However, interactions with the tool are just a part of the journey to create step by steps so we decided to do a journey map. The goal was to understand at what points in the journey users interact with the tool so we can identify opportunities for improving the work flow.
We had a journey mapping session. We started out with users that were embedded within the team. In the way that journey maps do. we were able to identify several interactions with the tool and clear opportunities for improvement. Anna, our user researcher is now having sessions with other groups of users to see how their journeys and experiences vary.
I find journey maps are such an amazing tool for the team to gain shared understanding regardless of the stage the product is in. This journey map has highlighted new problem areas, validated some of the issues we already identified and improved our understanding of the user needs, motivations and overall landscape. There’s now a series of actions and next steps as a result.
Step by steps review workflow
After defining what a review workflow should look like in the step by steps tool. Kate, our designer created the workflow, we had a small crit and improved it — creating a workflow for a review process can be daunting especially as you don’t want to put so many checks in the process that you hinder instead of help the user so some level of trust also has to be reflected in the process. We shared it with users within the team and then wrote the user stories for them.
I also spent some time working with the team to analyse the pros and cons of the options to let reviewers know when a step by step is ready for review. There were a range of options from very simple to very complex so it was an elimination process to identify the simplest way to meets the most important needs. After identifying the options that were most feasible in the time that we had, I had a chat with the delivery managers of reviewing team to get buy-in. We ended up choosing what we think is the most appropriate option. We’ll test this in a few weeks and see if it’s actually effective. This is in addition to implementing a proper review workflow within the tool.
I finally booked my tickets for the product people national meetup in September so I’m looking forward to that. I also have most of next week off and it’s sunny so yay!
What I read/What I’m reading
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport — I finished reading this book. It’s full of insightful and practical tips. The last bits talked about quitting social media or at least making sure the network tools you use is a conscious decision because if they dont have a significant positive impact on your life, they are just taking away from the time you should spend doing other high impact activities. Which is interesting because I deleted all the social media apps on my phone some weeks ago to go on a month long social media fast and now deep work has given me a framework to make the right decision about which ones I want to continue using.