Prioritising almost anything – UXcamp London

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+ Giuseppe Pepe 3 months ago
Great presentation Eva-Lotta!

Giuseppe
+ Boon Chew 3 months ago
I want to know how you designed your slides!!! they’re awesome!
great presentation, too. sad i missed it at uxcamplondon.

Notes on slide 1

Prioritise what?
Anything really
Todo lists
Things you want to see on your trip to Paris
Business opportunities
Feature lists

Why prioritise?

Bringing things in order
deciding what is important, what is less important
knowing what to do first, where to start

And how?
A simple technique to the rescue:
As all things have more than one side to them,choose two parameters to rate the items by.

For example:
Urgency of item vs. hassle of getting it done (for the todo lists)
Possible enjoyment vs. how much you can impress your friends with photos
Business importance vs. Market viability
Potential revenue vs. Development cost
Business benefit vs. User needs

Possible enjoyment vs. how much you can impress your friends with photos(for your trip to Paris)

Business importance vs. Market viability(for business opportunities)

Potential revenue vs. Development cost(for for feature lists)

Business benefit vs. User needs(for for feature lists)

I used these two axis for some of my projects and found them to work quite well for getting a first prioritisation of feature lists to define scope.

We need a scale to rate the things on.
Keep it simple: 1 to 5 points.

But as we have limited resources (in time, in money, in attention, ...) we somehow need need to limit the amount of points we can give out.

A simple formula:(Max. points) = (Middle value of your point scale) * (# of items)

Example:
If we have 5 items to rate on a scale from 1 to 5, we have 15 points maximum to dish out.

So when we rate, we need to stay within this limit.

Use it with a group
and that’s where it becomes really handy!

When to use it with a group?
In a project with several stakeholders
when defining skope
when you need to build consensus

1. Identify all stakeholders
that need to be involved in the prioritisation.
Get experts from different areas who have insights that will help to priorotise (business/financial, UX, user research, customer support)

2. Gather all items that should be prioritised
Write a short description for each item
Fill them in the participant template

3. Preparation session with all stakeholders involved
Get everybody in one room.
Explain the technique, how it works and and its benefits
Go through all items on the list together. Make sure that everybody has the same understanding of what they mean.
Gather any items that are missing from the list

4. Send out the rating template to all participants
Give the participants 2-3 days to send back the sheet (don’t leave them too much time, the whole process should be wrapped up within a week)
Include invite to the evaluation session together with the spreadsheet.
Schedule the evaluation session shortly after the deadline for sending the ratings in. Give yourself some time to merge the results.

5. Collate the ratings in one spreadsheet
Tip: when copying and pasting the numbers into the synthesis part of the template, paste them into a non-formated text file first to keep formatting of target cells
Sort the spreadsheet descending by overall rating to get a ranked list (note that this ranking is not necessarily the order of importance as you might see on the diagram that you’ll create)

Create a diagram of the first ranking
export data on “csv export” tab as csv file
use the ruby script to create svg file from your csv file
open svg file in illustrator and format to your liking
you can see the clustered areas which things to focus on, which ones to consider and which ones to neglect

Evaluation session
Present the diagram with the first rough rating
Go through each item on the spreadsheet from the highest ranked to the lowest. Discuss if the ranking makes sense.
In the collated view it is easy to spot items that were ranked controversially. Discuss why people ranked it high or low.
You can correct the ranking by modifying the points in the “corrected values” columns on the right to reflect the group consensus
Capture comments and reasons for re-ranking in the spreadsheet

Things to keep in mind
The outcome of the rating is NOT gospel.
First and foremost this rating tool is great to get a first stab at prioritisation (so that you don’t start from a blank slate) and to trigger a discussion and facilitate consensus amongst a group of stakeholders

Wrapping up
Create a new diagram based on the corrected ranking values and take it from there.

Who should you involve?
the stakeholders on the project
it’s possible to have different stakeholders rating only one aspect (their area of concern / expertise) though it might also be interesting to force all stakeholders to put themselves in the shoes of the others and rate on the other axis as well (make them think about user needs)

Why does it work?
people feel involved
their opinion is heard
easy to spot controversial items and start a discussion around these
Extra Bonus: you impress the business guys with your excel skills and make them marvel at the functional AND beautiful excel file. And they’ll want to use it as well :) (yes, you talk their language and you talk it with style :)

Questions?

http://evalottalamm.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/prioritising-almost-anything/

mail: evalotta@evalotta.net
twitter: @evalottchen
url: www.evalotta.net
download this presentation and the templates here:
http://evalotta.net/_stuff/prioritisation_kit.zip

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Prioritising almost anything – UXcamp London - Presentation Transcript

How to make the right stuff bubble to the top A little technique to prioritise almost anything. Alone or with groups.
Prioritise what? Todo lists
Prioritise what? Things you want to see on your trip to Paris
Prioritise what? Business opportunities
Prioritise what? Feature lists
Why prioritise? not that important!! kind of important, important really
And how? Urgency for todo lists hassle of getting it done
And how? Possible enjoyment for the Paris trip how much you can impress your friends
And how? Business importance for business opportunities Market viability
And how? Potential revenue for feature lists Development cost
And how? Business beneﬁt for feature lists User needs
And how? Business beneﬁt 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 User needs
And how? 5 Focus Business beneﬁt 4 3 2 Consider 1 Neglect 1 2 3 4 5 User needs
And how? 5 Focus Business beneﬁt 4 3 2 Consider 1 Neglect middle value x # of items = Max. points 3 5needs 15 1 2 3 4 5 User
Rating s es y pr jo En Im Eiffel Tower 1 Palais de Tokyo 4 Louvre 2 Artazart 5 Canal St. Martin 5 3 Total 17
Rating s es y pr jo En Im Eiffel Tower 1 Palais de Tokyo 4 Louvre 2 Artazart 5 Canal St. Martin 5 Total 15 :)
Using it with a group
1. Identify all stakeholders
2. Gather the items to be prioritised
3. Hold a preparation session
4. Send out the rating templates
Participant rating sheet
5. Gather the ratings 2 4 4 5 3 2 5 1 1 3 3 2 1 5 5 3 5 3 3 3 2 4 4 3 1 5 2 4 4 5 1 2 3
Generated Scatter Plot
6. Hold an evaluation session
Collated ratings spreadsheet
? ? ? Thanks :) ? !
download this presentation and the templates here: http://evalottalamm.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/ prioritising-almost-anything/
me mail evalotta@evalotta.net twitter @evalottchen url www.evalotta.net