Refreshing Our Corporate Memory

Last week, Brian Still, Director of the Usability Research Lab at Texas Tech University was on site again to train a third wave of folks in the principles and practice of usability.

As Sara and I discussed some of our current projects and usability challenges with Brian, he reminded us that one of the values of training another group of employees is that it refreshes our corporate memory.

He reminded us that while eleven employees  had gone through the training in the last year, two of those have since pursued new job opportunities beyond the organization and two have moved into slightly different job roles since taking the training.

Training new people refreshes again the organization’s collective understanding of what it means to develop a product side by side with the user of the product. Having additional folks trained also ensures that those engaged with the work of developing products and services are empowered with the knowledge and skills to do the work efficiently and effectively.

Having taken the same class last February, Sara and I continue to be surprised at what is again reinforced for us in the midst of each training. Whether it’s questions of clarification that come up or different nuggets of knowledge that the new teams latch onto, widening the circle of employees with this knowledge and skill base broadens and deepens our total corporate memory and practice.

I hope in the coming weeks and months you will have the opportunity to not just hear what folks in the most recent class took away, but to work alongside of them as they put into practice their new found knowledge and skills. Until that time, take the opportunity to ask those who took part what they learned, or better yet, ask them to show you. 

There is a lot we can learn from this new class of user experience professionals, and I for one, can’t wait.

Understanding Users Leads to Innovation

Guest post by Sara Lawrence, Product Development Brand Manager,
Saint Mary's Press

Back in December, John asked me to lead new–to–the–world innovations at Saint Mary’s Press. At the time, I was pretty comfortable in my role as marketing associate, dabbling in a number of different areas. But the more I discerned the idea, the more I was feeling called to move into this new role.  So, not quite knowing what it all meant, I said yes! I officially moved into this new role in March and have been forging a path ever since.

So, what better way to dive in than to hold an Innovation Kick-Off retreat! I knew the most important piece to innovating was going to be the voice of the customer. How could we possibly come up with innovative ideas and not put our customers at the center of it. So, for the purposes of the retreat, we focused on parish customers.

I dove into the huge well of site visit data we had on parish customers and found some major trends. From there, I created a problem statement that encompassed the struggles our customers are facing and the goals they are trying to achieve. This statement was the most important piece of the retreat – this statement would be thing we would go back to throughout our two days together to gut check our ideas.

The 9 of us (8 SMP employees + an innovator from NC) converged on the Science Museum in St. Paul for our two day brainstorm session. We were armed with tools essential for brainstorming: crayons, toys, pipe cleaners and other thingamajigs to keep our hands busy and our minds creative! I don’t think any of us could have anticipated the amount of ideas that would come flowing out! There weren’t many rules those two days, but the number one rule was “NO SHOOTING DOWN IDEAS.” It may have been the best rule ever invented, our ideas flowed easily, we built on each other’s ideas and made huge lists of possibilities. 

Half way through our time together, it came time to evaluate our ideas. We kept our problem statement and our customer tasks at hand and slowly narrowed the list down to 8 things we wanted to prototype later that day. We split into groups of two and each took an idea – we had 30 minutes to create our idea out of random craft materials and had to present it to the larger group. Later that afternoon we did the same thing with the other 4 ideas.

This photo sums up the craziness of our two days together.

All in all the two days was a huge success, we have some great ideas that we’ll be able to quickly prototype and test, and move forward with if successful. I feel like we were able to really get the most out of our two days together because everything we did was steeped in customer research and data.

If you want to see our first product idea, head to the commons with your smart phone, if you don’t have a smart phone, borrow one from a friend! All you need is a QR code reader – on the windows near Mindy/Carol there are QR codes – check them out and let me know what you think!

Also – if you ever have any innovative ideas, feel free to send them my way. I’m keeping a list and we’ll continue to review it and add to it! I’m sure I’ll be calling on a number of you in the next few months to help with different innovation brainstorms, prototypes, tests, etc.! This is a really exciting time for Saint Mary’s Press – our customers are at the heart of innovation!

Thank you to those that joined me on the retreat and helped come up with some amazing ideas and thank you to all those who’ve gone on site visits.  The data we're collecting is worth more than we can imagine – the little gems of information from each visit lines up with other visits and innovation is formed!

What We Can Learn From Paper Prototyping

A guest post by Megan Williams, Web Marketing Specialist at Saint Mary's Press.

Recently Jason Shawley (Digital Manager at Saint Mary's Press) and I facilitated two separate user experience testing sessions with one of SMP's newest products in development, the Bible App for the iPad. Within the scope of the testing we managed to glean several nuggets of wisdom from a novice perspective that will, we hope, serve to aid the next wave of iteration and future facilitators.

Something that struck us about our experience with UX (user experience) testing, foremost, was how well paper prototyping works.  Although we tested a high-tech product using a low fidelity technique (paper), resulting feedback was just as effective. We also learned how delightfully insightful users are when it comes to carrying out tasks.

Many users pepper the experience with body language and/or starts-and-stops indicating taste or distaste for certain functions. Utterances such as” yuck”,” hmm’ and “ugh” were superb indicators that an intended task had strayed too far from what the prototype made possible. Likewise, expressions of delight when encountering an unexpected feature or ease of use helped us to identify when we were on the right track.

Jason, as facilitator, delighted in how easy it was for a person doing the testing to pretend they were using an actual iPad despite the paper prototype given to them.  Although paper may seem like a waste of time when dealing with high-tech products, the reality is it’s a perfect place to start due to the low-cost and turnaround.  Results from low fidelity testing in the beginning can have a big impact on the final high-tech product.  With this knowledge we will continue to embrace and make use of paper prototyping within the future. 

As "recorder of notes" during the usability testing sessions, my curiosity was piqued by what seemed like a universal desire of users to do the test “right.” This recognition as facilitators invites us to begin a testing session by creating an environment that encourages users to approach the tasks with a “beginner’s mind” while fostering exploration and championing curiosity.

Something surprising we learned from the experience is that testing around a half dozen users really can give you sufficient and concrete feedback. Anything above and beyond five or six test subjects and the results begin to level out. Another point of recognition is how innate it is to want the user to succeed. It was difficult to not intervene in the process and allow a user to find their own way when it was clear they were struggling to complete a task and waiting for a prompt to help move them forward.

One thing we discovered  that we would like to understand more of coming out of the experience is how to better lead a user through a test while adapting to the ripples of the unknown questions and obstacles that might emerge while conducting a paper prototype test, questions and obstacles that signal expectations that seem innate to human behavior.

The pinnacle of doing anything well in life is finding the Zen within it. By learning how to better facilitate a testing session, and ensuring a user’s comprehension of the tasks asked of them, we can be confident that the results and future iterations will develop a user-friendly product the consumer will trust and devote their loyalty to for the long haul. Finding the Zen in user experience testing, or allowing the Zen in UX to find us, most certainly will ensure this success.

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To understand more about what paper prototyping is, visit http://www.paperprototyping.com/what.html