Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes

Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes Betsy Comstock Mary Beth Raven Sheri Branco Michelle Cooper Deb Maurer Betsy Comstock  User Studies Lead, IBM Lotus Notes IBM Lotus Software Group:

For a huge, 20-year-old, collaboration platform
E-mail
Calendar
Contacts
Thousands of other custom applications
Suppose you suddenly needed a new, world-class UI …

We’re talking about IBM Lotus Notes Suppose you suddenly needed a new, world-class UI … In mid 2005, IBM decided to completely revamp and modernize the User Experience Notes version 7, looked like this:

IBM Lotus Notes User Experience Team
About 8 people full-time on the Notes 8 client team
3+ User Studies Professionals
4+ User Experience Designers
1+ Visual Designer
Many colleagues in the larger Lotus UX community

One of the goals of the redesign was to maintain the loyalty of our large user base
46,000+ medium and large companies worldwide
10,000+ business partners
~150 million very opinionated users
What to do?

We had great access to this community of users Design Partners & Beta Programs Customers / Partners / Users who follow Lotus blogs & forums Other Customers with whom we have good relationships Vocal internal & external users Volunteer usability participants Users recruited to meet specific use criteria Annual Lotus conferences, briefings

What should we do with all these people?

We decided to deliberately open our design, to partner with these users

By the time Notes 8 shipped, we had incorporated input from…

over 2,000 users

13 User Research Methods in the Design of Notes 8
One-Way Customer Input
Surveys
Self-guided usability tests
Customer feedback during product use
Reaction time experiment on icon design
Structured Dialog
Usability testing
Color and texture identification
Personas
Spec reviews with customers and business partners
Open Dialog
Contextual interviews / round table discussions
Prioritize features with key customers
Customer discussion forums
IdeaJam
Notes Design Blog

Usability Testing
Fairly standard test methods
Goal: Identify as many usability issues as possible
Think aloud, observers both local and remote
From simple prototypes  real-time collaboration in a realistic test environment with 80 fictitious employees of a company we called “Renovations, Inc.”
475+ sessions on Notes 8
Tests conducted in the usability lab, and at Lotus conferences, and best of all…

“ Renovations on the Road”
At customer sites, participants were close matches to our personas
Prompted rich dialog about use of Notes for their sites and job roles
Added other activities that fostered open dialog, e.g.
Demonstrations of new features
Participation in local user groups
Contextual interviews
Usability Testing (at Customer Sites)

Contextual Interviews & Round Table Discussions
Visited ~25 customer sites
Interviewed people representing our personas and other roles
Learned about their jobs and how they use Notes & other technology to support their work
No substitute for these rich first-hand experiences with users
Unexpected, memorable events
Creates dialog that lasts far beyond the visit

Spec Reviews with Customers & Business Partners
Tuned UX Specs with input from stakeholders
Held 20+ web-conferenced and face-to-face design reviews
Included UX team, developers, customers, and business partners (under nondisclosure agreements)
Reviewed specs together before any code was available
Merged internal and external feedback
Built good will with customers
Note:
Still need to conduct internal reviews
Need a strong moderator (in addition to the spec presenter)
Need someone to monitor and respond to the group chat.

Prioritize Features with Key Customers
Incorporated customer priorities into decisions about the features to include
Conducted prioritization exercises at customer sites and conferences
Printed “Samantha can” features on “stickies”
Small groups sorted items into Priority levels
Everyone added red dots to most important items

Customers reported on their small group consensus
Important in later, on-going decisions
Challenges
Allow participants to add items
Limit number of items rated high priority
Include a “Trash Can” category
Provide experts to disambiguate items
Group dynamics need managing
Results are a bit “sloppy”
Be sure to understand the logic, not just priorities
Prioritize Features with Key Customers

Customer Discussion Forums & IdeaJam
Monitored customer forums and blogs to stay in touch with customer issues
Lotus developers took this input very seriously
We answered UX items and tried posting questions
Limitations
Too many forums for our group to monitor (different programs, customers)
Tedious to sort through and find UX-related items
Input was usually way behind what we were working on

Notes Design Blog
Gave us quick answers & provided a public face to Lotus UX
Mary Beth Raven (et al.) blogged about Notes 8 design
~20,000 hits a month, often dozens of replies within a day
Quick feedback to UX questions from people outside IBM who care
Visibility with customers and leverage with developers
A consensus often emerged among respondents
Established a community of customers/partners empowered to influence the design
Some limitations
Respondents are often not typical end users
The blog is public, which limits certain posts
Customers cannot initiate topics, only comment & discuss topics we post
www.notesdesignblog.com

Open feedback comes from a biased sample
Some customer feedback carries more weight
Data are often qualitative, anecdotal, unstructured, uncategorized
Amount of data was sometimes overwhelming
Need to be prepared for difficult customer situations
Depends on energetic and skilled user experience team, knowledgeable about the product area
Opening Design to the User Community: Challenges

Opening Design to the User Community: Benefits
Broader knowledge of users and their work contexts
Richer design ideas
Customer consensus on design direction
Professional partnerships with key customers
Increased customer loyalty
Better professional interconnections inside IBM
Fast, flexible methods

So, how did we do???????

Inbox with Preview & Sametime

Calendar, Quickr Sidebar

Great Customer Feedback
Extremely positive reactions from customers, partners, and analysts
Faster deployment rate than with previous versions of Notes
Increased revenue
And, perhaps most gratifying for those of us who feel so connected to our user community…

Great Customer Feedback Lotus Notes 8 received a standing ovation at Lotusphere 2007

“ Open by Design” continues to characterize our UX methods today
For more information, contact me at: b et [email_address]
Or see the full paper:
Comstock, E. M., Raven, M. B., Branco, S. F., Cooper, M. L., & Maurer, D. E. Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes. CHI 2009 Extended Abstracts , Boston, MA, 2931-2944.
Thank You!

© IBM Corporation 2008. All Rights Reserved.
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References in this presentation to IBM products, programs, or services do not imply that they will be available in all countries in which IBM operates. Product release dates and/or capabilities referenced in this presentation may change at any time at IBM’s sole discretion based on market opportunities or other factors, and are not intended to be a commitment to future product or feature availability in any way. Nothing contained in these materials is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, stating or implying that any activities undertaken by you will result in any specific sales, revenue growth or other results.
All references to Renovations refer to a fictitious company and are used for illustration purposes only. All references to Samantha Daryn, Ted Amado, and Betty Zechman are fictitious.
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Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes

by BetsyComstock on Apr 15, 2009

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Open by Design: How IBM Partnered with the User Community in the Redesign of Lotus Notes Presentation Transcript