Human Focus

An approach and understanding of human centered interaction.

Discover the Story

Companies I work with invest in user experience to discover open spaces previously unknown to them. We chart the open seas of our user base to explore what we do not know about them. It requires us to audit of what we currently know about ourselves and understand what we want to discover. Sometimes the answer is in plain sight, sometimes we have to iteratively dive deeper to learn more.

We are going to be building a experience/product/feature for our customers and we need to ask ourselves honestly:

  1. “Who are our users?”

  2. “What do they need?”

  3. “Why do they behave this way?’

  4. “How might we help them?”

Alternatively helping stakeholders and internal practices people will to answer

  1. “How much time will it take?”

  2. “Will it cost much?”

  3. “What value do we get?”

  4. “So what?”

One of the key tenants in growing awareness of discovery may take place during our weekly product calls to bring about any new testimonies or insights on how users are observed.

Map the Journey

If we’ve done our homework and collected a lot of neat information about our users, how do we thread all of it togethere? There must be a tool that can tell us the story and display metrics for the user from beginning to end of our experience.

Journey mapping is a very useful tool for us to keep the vision of how we incorporate into the full picture of our experience.

What do we want to Learn?

Helping organizations on their discovery process I am keen to ask “What do we want to learn?’” and we can break this down into two modes of thought:

Quantitative

“How MANY of our users do XYZ?”

  1. User Tracking API’s (Full Story, Userlytics etc..)

  2. Survey

  3. Customer Insights Department

  4. Marketing Team (User Funnels0

  5. Sales Team (Customer / UserConversions)

Qualitative

“How do our users FEEL about XYZ?”

  1. User Interviews

  2. Journal Studies

  3. Usability Tests

  4. Persona Mapping

  5. Design Workshops

Organized Brainstorming

Done right, brainstorming sessions do not need to take a long time or require a huge amount of resources. Keeping this in mind, the information gathered from brainstorming is highly valuable based on the time needed to gather. I model the scope of this work after GC Ventures 5 day Sprint model keeping to a strict deadline not to impede any progress on the design deliverable at the end. We want to make sure everyone has a seat at the table for this from our stakeholders to our customers.

Stakeholders

How might we…

  1. Expand our business with this product?

  2. Have it store ready by the holidays?

  3. Align this to our product roadmap?

  4. Plan for future versions?

Customers

How might we…

  1. Accomplish my task?

  2. Get help when I need it?

  3. Enjoy using this product?

  4. Want to buy other products that interest me?

Create Visual Hierarchy

Multiple products, multiple experiences how do we organize them? By creating affinity, we prioritizing features through baseline needs, performance, and delight for the user. We can group each area into a touch point of a product’s information architecture.

I create Affinity diagrams for to take their shape often exhibit a hierarchical structure of the product or experience we seek to create. Identifiying broader themes at the top-level and more specific sub-themes within each group. This hierarchy helps to organize and prioritize the information visually.

Expanded Flows

Any product under the ‘under the hood’ functionality is our base for setting up the experience for users. At this moment in time it is important to consider hard and soft business requirements that may play into affect as far as customer / user conversions. We want to understand and map out the user journey, ensuring that the system is intuitive, efficient, and meets the users' needs. By creating a user flow, we can identify potential bottlenecks, usability issues, or areas of confusion within our perceived experience.

  • Entry point

  • Actions and decisions

  • Branches and alternatives

  • Exit point(s)

They help myself, stakeholders, developers, and stakeholders visualize the experience, identify potential pain points, and make informed decisions to improve the overall usability and efficiency of the system.