Making Connections - Turing user insights into impact
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The document discusses the importance of connecting different types of user insights to gain a holistic understanding of users and turn those insights into impact. It emphasizes connecting quantitative analytics data with qualitative research methods like contextual inquiry, surveys, usability testing, discussion groups, interviews and ongoing conversations to understand user behavior in context, needs, and motivations. By connecting various insights over time, organizations can gain a more complete picture of users to solve problems and create impact.
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Making Connections - Turing user insights into impact
- 1. Making Connections Turning user insights into impact Serena Rosenhan, PhD Stephen Kemsley, MBA
- 2. 2ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. • Connecting context with quantitative data • Connecting developers and decision makers with pain points and needs of users • Connecting customers and partners UX impact is about making connections
- 3. 3ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Making Connections: Analytics Analytic s Clicks Time on page Pages/Session # entrances # requests Activity over time The behavior you are passively recording
- 4. 4 • Only records what you've planned on recording ahead of time • Limited to behaviors within predefined areas • Usually limited to physical actions • Necessary but insufficient for action Analytics: precise but shallow ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
- 5. 5 Analytics: the whole picture? ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Only 4% of users click on the “Email” and “Print” buttons Have users really stopped printing and emailing documents?
- 6. 6ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Making Connections Behavior in Context Analytics Behavior in Context Contextual Inquiry Surveys Usability Testing
- 7. 7ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Web Analytics 4% Percentage that use the “Print” function Survey 43% Percentage that print research documents
- 8. 8 Behavior in Context ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. 26% 4%
- 9. 9ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Capturing data where it’s relevant
- 10. 10ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Making Connections Needs and motivations Analytics Needs and motivations Behavior in Context Discussion groups Workshops Interviews
- 11. 11 The power of conversation ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. • Deeper than contextual observation and self- reported survey responses. • Create ongoing conversations with users to solve problems. ProQuest UX – Alma Customer Forum
- 12. 12 Turning user insights into impact ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
- 13. 13ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. • Users became more aware of the universe of issues • Learned from each other Partnering with users to solve problems
- 14. ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
- 15. ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
- 16. 16ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. • Connecting “the dots” • Connecting qualitative and quantitative insights • Connecting insights over time Turning user insights into impact
- 17. Better research. Better learning. Better insights. Serena Rosenhan, PhD VP, User Experience Design Serena.Rosenhan@proquest.com Stephen Kemsley Sr. User Experience Designer Stephen.Kemsley@proquest.com
Editor's Notes
- I’m Serena Rosenhan and this is Stephen Kemsley. In the few minutes we have today, we thought we’d share a few examples from our experience as UX Designers at ProQuest that show some of the impact UX practices and insights can have.
- So, as we thought about the question of the impact of UX activities, we have found that happens when we use the insights we gain to make connections: When we put the understanding of the user context together with analytics data, we do a better job of using that data; when we connect developers and stakeholders with the pain points and needs of users – we empower them to create better solutions, and when we connect with our customers in collaborative ways, we make a difference.
- When we make connections, we have to start somewhere, and Analytics is a natural place to start. These are the behaviors we're passively recording. In the ProQuest world, these are things like where a user clicks, Time the user spends on a page, how many pages they look at in a session. In the world of libraries, this may be the number of people that walk through your front entrance, or the number of requests for a type of resource.
- I'll get to the answer in a minute, but it's not surprising that analytics don't give us the whole picture. They're precise, but they're shallow. They only record what you've thought to record, and only record events that occur in specific predefined areas. We often need data to identify a problem or to justify a course of action, but data are often insufficient for decision making.
- But are analytics the whole picture? I turn to an observation we made on our proquest platform. On our document pages, we found through analytics that only 4% of users clicked on the Email and Print buttons. After seeing this data, many colleagues asked themselves if people had stopped printing and emailing documents.
- When we broaden our scope, we start making connections between analytics and behavior in context. Here, we're talking about methods like Contextual Inquiry, Surveys, and Usability Testing.
- A few slides back, I talked about our analytics, and how they showed only 4% usage of our print function. This year, we conducted of a survey of researchers, asking them questions about how they saved documents. As a matter of course, we included methods like printing. We were surprised to find that 43% of them said they printed documents. So, printing hasn't gone away to the extent that we thought. People aren't using the Print button using the button on our platform. They were downloading PDFs and printing them with their PDF viewers.
- Another example was with Emailing, where we found once again that only 4% used the email feature. When we broadened the scope of our observations and conducted contextual inquiries, we found that people were indeed emailing documents, they were just copying the URLs and pasting them in emails instead of using our tools.
- Here's a great example of capturing data where it's relevant, right on the walls where patrons pass every day. This is a picture from a trip to the Harvard University library. They use their wall space to gather data, like a survey, about which ideas and spaces patrons are excited about.
- So, by broadening our scope and making connections between analytics and the users behavior in context, we were able to get better, more complete insights. Pulling out the camera even further, we can start making connections between the users behavior and their needs and motivations. Here, we're talking about methods like Discussion groups, Workshops, and Interviews.
- This is a screenshot from a forum we have between the ProQuest design team and Alma customers. We use this forum to get customers reactions to new feature ideas, to hear about their pain points and how our products affect their lives. By creating an ongoing conversation, we can dig deeper than contextual observation, develop a rich understanding of their tasks and needs, and develop relationships with customers.
- The last example of UX impact we want to share today comes from our experience developing the new Alma UI. When ExLibris joined ProQuest about 18 months ago, the UX team was approached to help improve the usability of the Alma UX. As we began the significant redesign efforts, we knew success depended on connecting with the users to make sure we understood and solved the right problem, so we committed to driving the process through a strong partnership with the Alma community. We were able to form a customer team of representatives from 9 institutions to help inform and validate the approach. This included on going dialog through group meetings, discussion boards, and lots of individual interviews and usability feedback sessions. This picture was taken earlier this year when representatives from each institution spent a week at the ExLibris offices in Jerusalem with the team, test driving the early beta instance of the new design.
- Working in pairs and side by side with members of the development team, the users ran through real tasks they had defined with help from others at their libraries. They helped capture and prioritize things that created inefficiencies or roadblocks. We worked visually to help quickly externalize thinking and identify re-occurring themes or patterns. We didn’t know going in to the process how we would negotiate competing demands or agenda, but we found that the dialogs and show/tell sessions of the week made us all smarter. Users, much more aware of the universe of issues, gave well-informed guidance about what to focus on addressing, and they made connections among themselves as they shared approaches and best practices. xLibris’ conforming with their customer’s process, but about how they could refine their processes as well.
- We found that one benefit of this level of partnering was the chance to observe the impact of design decisions in less-structured, less mediated interactions. My favorite example of this was when I overheard one librarian sharing with her partner that she wasn’t a fan of our new filter design for tables, because it made a frequently used option harder to access. We had based this design on usage data, and it had not come up in an issue in the usability tests we ran, but in this context of use, we gained a different perspective. (I don’t think she ever put this concern on the wall, but I was able see the impact of the approach and we reworked it. (as seen on next slide).
- Conversation is still on going as we are in an early release period, collecting feedback from a wider set of users at these institutions.
- So we find as we focus on using UX practices to create connections between “the dots” the data points, the constituencies, the tasks and the users, we create more impact- not just on individual initiatives but also on the broader culture and mind set of the team or institution. In our experience, this is not usually accomplished through a nicely packaged report of a single research study (though there is a place for that); Impact is achieved more cumulatively – as we interject specific user insights into the conversation at the point of need -- and longitudinally, as we stay connected to our users whose needs and habits evolve over time. The bottom line is we are never done learning about users, and the more we connect the organization with data and insights about them, the more impact there will be.