The document summarizes the importance of user experience (UX) and provides examples of how UX was implemented in projects at Harvard. UX ensures design decisions are based on both business and user needs through user research and usability testing. Case studies show how user research informed the redesign of the Harvard Gazette website and a student portal through analytics and user interviews. Implementing UX best practices like iterative testing can improve usability and prioritize user goals, but also requires more time and resources.
Introducing a social intranet at Freshfields Bruckhaus DeringerHeadshift
Steve Perry, former Head of KM at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, talked about the development and deployment of a new Intranet at Freshfields during the Confluence User Group in London.
Introducing a social intranet at Freshfields Bruckhaus DeringerHeadshift
Steve Perry, former Head of KM at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, talked about the development and deployment of a new Intranet at Freshfields during the Confluence User Group in London.
Introduction to Knowledge Centered Support - Knowledge Management FrameworkPaul Jay
This is presentation that was completed at the ITSFM Tasmania and Sydney in 2013. It Introduces the concepts of the knowledge management framework called Knowledge Centered Support (KCS)
Knowledge Centered Support ( KCS ) is a holistic knowledge management framework, with;
- knowledge management processes
- knowledge management procedures
- knowledge management governance, and
- knowledge management growth phase
KCS gives clear instructions on:
- Knowledge Management Roles & Responsibilities
- Knowledge Management Databases
- Knowledge Articles
- Knowledge Documentation
- Information Management
- Knowledge Management Tools and Technology
To see an online video of this process visit youtube
Chapter 1 - Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf0_X7R84AY
Chapter 1 - Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya22c0hta3I
Chapter 1 - Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLowyjH6VrE
Or Vimeo https://vimeo.com/57426113
IT Service Management (ITSM) Model for Business & IT AlignementRick Lemieux
Today’s multi-faceted business world demands that Information Technology provide its services in the context of a fully integrated corporate strategic model. This transformation becomes possible when IT evolves from its technological heritage into a Business Technical Organization, or an “internal service provider.” This paper describes how the itSM Solutions reference model integrates five widely used service management domains to create a powerful model to guide IT in its journey into the business leadership circle.
Don Casson, CEO and Jeff Benedict, ITSM Practice Manager share best practices you can use to clearly define and communicate - who is the Customer and what are the Services? They also share how a service catalog taxonomy framework helps you organize and manage this as ONE team. You may download or playback the recording here: http://bit.ly/1BWnEkX #servicecatalog #servicenow #itsm
IT Service Catalog: Build a Service Taxonomy in 4 Easy StepsEvergreen Systems
IT Service Catalog - Service Taxonomy
What services do we offer? How do we organize them? How can we make them "customer-centric?" What is a good starting point?
Successful IT Service Catalogs have well-organized services. The services taxonomy, or framework is the key to organizing and managing your services effectively.
Please join us to learn how to build a good service taxonomy in 4 logical steps, as well as 3 key mistakes to avoid.
We will also briefly demonstrate our beautiful and innovative customer-centric IT Service Catalog (built on ServiceNow).
Collaborative Information Architecture (ias17)Abby Covert
You’ve worked hard on the information architecture models you’ve created but haven’t been able to sell them to the client, or your co-workers. Maybe the conversation around the IA has broken down into an unhealthy debate over semantics. In another scenario, you are tasked with creating a controlled vocabulary for a large organization that has a silo mentality and a lot of legacy content. Where to begin?
These scenarios will sound familiar to most IA professionals.
In this workshop, Abby will share her techniques for getting an organization that may have different ideas about how to organize and name content to agree upon a controlled vocabulary.
Abby will share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas. And she’ll share techniques for practicing information architecture with clients collaboratively.
I want to focus on the soft skills that make someone good at IA. So the lessons here are really about leveling up in skill set. Including:
- Conflict Resolution in IA
- Selling IA to others in your organization
- Improving stakeholder interviews
- Facilitating Low Fidelity Conversation about language
- Visualizing language with simple pictures to get clarity
Stakeholder Engagement: Simple Steps to Better Public ConsultationCam McAlpine, APR
What is stakeholder engagement? Why on earth would you want to engage with the negative nellies and nimby's who just want to oppose what you're doing? And how might you go about conducting a stakeholder engagement or public consultation program?
Advocating for your users is key to project success. Kirsten Burgard and I show how, even developers can accomplish this via our process and case studies.
Slides Ian Multon recently used in his discussion w/ mentees of The Product Mentor.
The Product Mentor is a program designed to pair Product Mentors and Mentees from around the World, across all industries, from start-up to enterprise, guided by the fundamental goals…Better Decisions. Better Products. Better Product People.
Throughout the program, each mentor leads a conversation in an area of their expertise that is live streamed and available to both mentee and the broader product community.
http://TheProductMentor.com
Mobile Center of Excellence is perfect for organizations looking to ensure the long-term success of their mobile strategies and Applications. It’s built to help you create and define the building blocks of a successful Center of Excellence for Mobile.
Mobile UX COE Strategists will work with your team to understand your current state readiness, build a vision for the Mobile Center of Excellence within your organization, and define the requirements for standing up a Mobile COE. Beyond just the components of a Center of Excellence, helps team creates a realistic roadmap for COE creation based on the people, process, and technology maturity within your business
Investment in UCD Pays off
Bringing the users into every stage of the design process is an investment of effort and other resources of the design team, which makes understanding the benefits of a user-centered design approach relevant (IDF - www.interaction-design.org)
Designing User-Centered Digital Experiences
Explore the process of designing intuitive and engaging digital experiences during this presentation. From conducting thorough research and analysis to understand user needs and business goals, to creating wireframes, prototypes, and final interfaces, this process is designed to create user-centered solutions. Learn how a focus on the user drives each step and leads to successful digital products.
This is a high level overview of this presentation. This focus of this presentation is how to leverage lean UX in Drupal. First this is not a development / UX approach for everyone. First determine your site vision and key performance indicators. Then craft user stories and define functional specs. Build, test, iterate! Go with the flow of Drupal and find more project success.
On November 12, 2014, Elizabeth Quigley gave a talk titled "UX @ Harvard's IQSS."
Details of the talk appear below.
---------------------------------------------
When: November 12th @ 3:30-5:00pm
Title: UX @ IQSS
Who: Elizabeth Quigley, Usability Specialist, Data Science Team, Institute of Quantitative Social Science
Where: Harvard University, Lamont Library, Forum Room
Description: Over the past year and a half, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) has integrated multiple user experience methods into their product development cycle to enhance the user experience for multiple products and websites developed at IQSS.
Elizabeth Quigley, Usability Specialist at IQSS, will outline how to start a user experience program for your products and/or websites, demonstrate the UX methods she uses, and show examples of how the UX of IQSS products and websites has been enhanced through these methods. If you have ever wondered how to start a user experience program, this is the talk for you.
Bio: Elizabeth has an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. She has conducted user research on the collaborative processes and profiles of undergraduates interacting with a Microsoft surface table, academic portals, the use of a library website by faculty members as well as the products and websites developed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
ui42 World Usability Day 2013 Martin Krupa Ako zapojit UX do vyvoja SWui42
Slovakia World Usability Day 2013: Martin Krupa z ui42 rozprava o tom, ako zapojit UX postupy do vyvoja softveru. Zalozene na skusenostiach s UX projektami od roku 2008.
This presentation covers how to combine traditional qualitative methods and user research approaches to satisfy your clients and add value to findings.
Presented at the University of British Columbia, Computer Science Alumni Lecture Series - Nov. 27, 2014
The presentation introduces techniques to position User Experience (UX) Practice as a standard within an organization. It outlines not only standard UX techniques but also ways to demonstrate UX's value and ability to contribute to an organization's bottom line.
World Usability Day 2016 in Antwerp (Belgium), Thursday, November 10th - Jan Moons, UX expert and co-founder at UXprobe
"Hands on with Lean and Agile User Testing"
Jan Moons shows how to use the latest tools to easily integrate user testing into a lean process. Discover how user testing can be the answer for problems of conversion, usability, and UX quality. In the workshop you will explore all sides of user testing (be the user, be the moderator, be the client) and you will see how lean and agile user testing can be.
Jan is the co-founder of UXprobe, company that is focused on a mission of helping companies build great digital products that deliver a fantastic user experience. Jan has almost 20 years of experience as a software engineer and is a certified usability designer.
This proposal of work contains details and samples of the user centric design process I follow. I have been trying to find a good graph that represents the process, but at the end I have decided to make my own! ;)
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4
Making the Case for UX
1. Making the Case for
User Experience (UX)
Members of the Harvard User Experience Group:
Andrew Malone, Dan Cabral, Dorian Freeman, JaZahn Clevenger,
Mike Petroff, Roderick Morales, Vittorio Bucchieri
IT Summit June 4, 2015
2. What is UX?
UX is an end user’s behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a
particular product, system or service. Successful UX must be:
● Useful: Content should be original and fulfill a need
● Usable: Must be easy to use
● Desirable: Image, identity, brand, and other design elements are used to evoke emotion and
appreciation
● Findable: Content needs to be navigable and locatable
● Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities
● Credible: Users must trust and believe what you tell them
● Mobile: Must be cross-device compatible
Good UX equates to data-driven (validated) design!
3. Why is it important?
UX best practices and goals are always user-focused.
● Benefits of inserting UX into your project:
○ Design decisions are based on business needs, balanced with user
needs
○ Standard best practices make the experience more consistent for
the users and the developers
○ Follows the HUIT core values: user-focused, collaborative,
innovative, and open
4. Lightning Round: Case Studies
From User Research to Implementation
Roderick Morales and Vittorio Bucchieri
UX for Developers
JaZahn Clevenger
User Research Within the Harvard Environment
Andrew Malone
Using Analytics In User Research For Web Redesigns
Mike Petroff
Interface Design Decisions Based on User Research
Dorian Freeman and Dan Cabral
5. From User Research to Implementation
Vittorio Bucchieri | Roderick Morales
18. Benefits of expanded research
- Stakeholder engagement and buy in
- Easier prioritization
- Increased overall goodwill across the
userbase
19. Challenges of expanded research
- More expensive (time and money)
- Didn’t significantly improve what we learned
- Difficult to sustain and scale for the future
23. Exploration, strategy, and goals
•More contemporary look and feel
•Marry mobile and desktop experiences
•Increase and improve overall traffic
•Elevate multimedia content
•Draw more content from across University
•Deepen coverage of key university themes
•Enable easier posting from the archives
26. Detailed event tracking in Google
Analytics
The ‘NEXT’ box even drove more
internal story clicks than the
‘POPULAR’ stories sidebar (since
launching)
27. Using Analytics in User Research for
Web Redesigns
Allows you to:
● Design for specific business goals
● Test new website features for specific audiences
● Adjust website features through iterative
processes
● Show value of new website features
39. Resources
● Safari Books Online (with Harvard PIN)
● Secrets of the UX team of One
● Rocket Surgery Made Easy, The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
● UX Project Checklist
● UX Myths
● What UX is Not
● Google’s Tag Manager
● Harvard.edu/guidelines
● Subscribe to the Digital Roundup newsletter
● Usability.gov website
● Harvard User Experience website http://tinyurl.com/harvarduxgroup
● Join the Harvard UX Group! email dorian_freeman@harvard.edu
40. Up Next:
● Afternoon Keynote by Frances Frei of HBS
at 3:30 in Sanders Theatre
● Reception in Annenberg following the
keynote
Hi, how’s everyone? Thanks for joining us today! I’m Dorian Freeman, and here with me is Andrew Malone, Dan Cabral, JaZahn Clevenger, Mike Petroff, Roderick Morales, and Vittorio Bucchieri. We’re part of the Harvard User Experience group, which has members from all across Harvard. Our goal in forming the group was so that those of us focusing on User Experience could connect with each other and to provide UX best practices and standards for all of Harvard. Today we’re making the case for UX while building applications and websites. Just a note: we’re covering a lot today and we’ve saved time for questions at the end. If you can hold your questions until then, that would be great. Also, we’ll be providing these slides for you on our brand new Harvard User Experience Group website.
So, a quick overview of user experience: it essentially has to do with behaviors, attitudes, and emotions you have about a product, system or service. This definition is from usability.gov, which is a great resource. useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable, usable, mobile, and valuable. source: usability.gov
When you make design decisions based on business needs balanced with user needs, it saves you from making mistakes, which end up costing you time and money
Using things like styleguides and pattern libraries which follow best practices make life a lot easier for users and also for developers.
For those of you in HUIT, you’ll recognize these core values
Now we’ll present 5 5-minute case studies in some ways we’ve managed to keep the user in mind for our website and application projects. We’ll talk about how to incorporate UX into the Agile process, some user research methodologies, and we even have a case study about how to use analytics as user research in order to make our websites better.
My name is Vittorio Bucchieri, Senior User Experience Lead, Teaching and Learning Technology, primarily working on Canvas, the University’s suite of technologies for teaching and learning.
Vittorio
You may already know about user centered design, the practice of creating engaging, efficient user experience: every step of the product design and development takes the user into account.
Following this principle, here is a very high level journey of our user centered design cycle, from initial detection of opportunities, the gathering of user feedback, and the definition, prioritization, and implementation of the feature lists.
1:00 - 2:00 - Vittorio
Here is a more detailed description of a critical step of the user centered process - Testing Thursday.
Testing Thursdays is a continuous user research effort that generates regular and reliable feedback of users’ experience.
Every week we meet with a few members of each School to present new or ongoing design projects and to gather as candid as possible reactions, ideas, and criticism (each school is not contacted every week.)
This feedback helps us to define and plan the next testing session. Prototypes built with users’ feedback or existing interfaces are often used at Testing Thursdays. Improvements are often presented back to the Schools.
source unknown
JaZahn
Hi, I'm JaZahn Clevenger from Academic technology. Unlike the others presenting today, I'm not a UX person, and further we don't have UX people on our team. I think this is the case with a lot of teams, especially small teams so I wanted to talk a little about how UX happens without UX.
JaZahn
I'm going to say, for us, it all revolves around agile. This is the first principle listed in the agile manifesto. But it's not just an agile thing. This is a theme that seems to gravitate toward the buzzwords of the day. Agile, devops, UX -- the theme is iterative development that allows for course correction.
We, like everyone, do a modified scrum thing. We have time boxed work that we presumptuous call sprints. At the end of those sprints, we have demos. Those demos are supposed to be to the clients, and we try to have that be the case as often as possible. When we can’t get them at exactly the end of the sprint, we get them scheduled a day or two after.
We want clients in front of our product as often as possible. They need to see it, they need to experience it, let them drive it in a test environment as often as we can. We want to catch where we’re off target and I catch it quickly.
JaZahn
But we don’t get it done all the time. Getting clients in is hard work. And it needs to be prioritized.
Here in academic technology, our projects tend to be lumpable into two distinct categories. Administrative and Academic. One way to describe the two is that administrative applications have a captive audience. They are applications where the users don’t have a choice in their use. I’m sure you can think of some examples around the university. Academic, on the other hand, have a more targeted audience. The users make use of these applications optionally. They can choose a different product.
Given that, function is the most important aspect of administrative apps, so UX tends to get less attention. But with the academic, UX becomes just as important as function, otherwise the app won’t be used and it will have been a wasted effort. Which, I can tell you from experience, creating an application and having it go completely unused is the worst.
JaZahn
A good user experience doesn’t start with user testing or client feedback. It starts with a solid base.
One thing we find helpful are wireframing tools. We use Balsamiq, To be able to show the client what they’re getting before we start coding is super valuable. Helping them visualize the product with a minimum of effort on our part can course correct us at the concept phase.
We find style frameworks to be important in providing good styling without much work. We use Bootstrap, but anything that assists in providing a proven good look and feel is helpful.
We often build tools within other systems. iSites and now Canvas. Which means we want the way our applications look and feel to be similar to the designs of other tools. This often means adopting the styles and patterns of other projects. But the point is to make sure the user isn’t jarred into a context switch.
It’s important to us that our applications work well on mobile devices. It’s easy to forget “mobile first” if someone’s not constantly saying it in the meetings. And we actually have interest in making sure things are accessible. Gaining an appreciation for how differently abled people use your application can open your eyes to how everyone experiences it.
We know and use patterns associated with accessibility and mobility. And we build our designs off of those patterns.
What to walk away from this with:
UX fits into processes you probably already have in place. By making it part of your agile process, it doesn’t feel like something extra to do, it’s just part of the process. And it’s easy to start small. You’re not going to be able to do everything talked about by all of these people, but you can do some of it. Figure out what you can do and evolve your process. This is why I’m here, to listen to what these people have to say and figure out what tweaks I can make to my process.
Intro - summary of FSS and my team
Summary of our project and the “planning” phase
Andrew
As part of our project planning phase, we wanted to do user research to make sure that we understood:
How are people currently using our application
What are the biggest gaps and areas to prioritize
We have 3 main roles, UX best practice says we could get good information from 5-10 user interviews.
Andrew
This is an image from PowerPoint for now (will change depending on final version)
As part of our project planning phase, we wanted to do user research to make sure that we understood:
How are people currently using our application
What are the biggest gaps and areas to prioritize
We have 3 main roles, UX best practice says we could get good information from 5-10 user interviews.
Andrew
More challenging overall (especially logistics)
scheduling
finding rooms
designing the focus group sessions
more raw data to coordinate and synthesize
Andrew
Andrew
I’m Dorian Freeman, user experience lead for Harvard Web Publishing, this is Dan Cabral, we’d like to talk today about a project we’re working on: overhauling the user interface of OpenScholar
Problem: Frustrating UX
When I first started as User Experience lead for Harvard Web Publishing, I created a strategy for understanding the experience our users were having with OpenScholar, with a combination of emailed feedback surveys, in-person interviews with both stakeholders and users, and the SUS (system usability scale). The SUS is a standard survey to measure the perceived usability of your product. Our results were marginal (about a C- as a letter grade), so I knew we had room for improvement.
Also, the feedback from the interviews showed frustration with inconsistent interaction flows, labeling and language. This told me then that some work needed to be done on the UI to combat this.
First hurdle: buy-in
There’s a move at Harvard now to improve the user experience of our applications and websites, and the trend caught on with our group. We were lucky to have a top-down directive to go ahead with this project of redesigning the user interface.
* Hi. I’m Dan Cabral. I’m the themer and UI designer for OpenScholar.
* With support from management, we assembled a six person team to tackle the project from a usability, design, technical and product management standpoint.
* The team from left to right: Merce Crosas, Elizabeth Quigley, Dan Cabral, Richard Brandon, Bilsi Balakrishnan and Dorian Freeman (and Sammy)
We started the project by conducting contextual inquiry interviews with about 15 existing OS users. This involved going out into the field and watching these users administer their sites as they normally would, and verbalize their thoughts, feelings and frustrations. We recorded the sessions with screen capture software and took notes.
We then took the information, translated it into data points and created an affinity diagram. With the affinity diagram we were able to see where the pain point patterns were and which categories they fell into. This helped us determine what to tackle first.
We then turned our affinity diagram revelations into several functional requirements documents. The documents highlighted the issues by category.
Using a simple tool called Balsamiq, we created low fidelity wireframes to show new usability ideas and interaction flows. After a few iterations we printed and displayed the wireframes on the walls of our office as a way to encourage feedback, and maintain support and enthusiasm for the project through transparency.
* Once we had the wireframes in a state where we wanted to validate our ideas, we were able to turn them into a clickable prototype using the link feature in Balsamiq. We then wrote up a script with tasks that we wanted to test, and met with 30 users over a 2 week period. Within 2 days of testing and 4 or 5 testing sessions, a flaw in one section of our wireframe prototype was revealed. Given the fact that we had so many users yet to be tested, we were able to create a revised version and use that through the end of our testing schedule.
* With a lot of help from the Harvard User Experience group, we were able to handle a rigorous and condensed testing schedule. So thank you again, to the group.
* With testing complete, we handed the wireframes off to development.
At this point, the dev team is working on technical feasibility of the proposed changes, along with a timeline for when development can be complete. We’re being told its sometime between next weekend and 13.7 billion years.
After development is complete and the improvements are launched, guess what, we’ll start the process all over again to be sure we’ve eliminated the old frustrations and haven’t created new ones in the process
Are you about to ask this?
I’m guessing that this case study is fairly unique in that we have a UX team, and we had buy-in from leadership to spend the time on this. What do you do if you don’t have the luxury of time to do a complete overhaul as we are doing?
We’ll have a list of quick, lightweight user research techniques on the Harvard UX group website. Even if you spend as little as one hour a week talking to your users, over time you will have the data to start designing improvements based on what you’ve learned. The most important thing is to get in front of the people who use your application or website and observe what’s happening. That’s the only way you’ll know for sure what needs improvement.
We’ll put these and other resources on the Harvard UX group website, which you can get to by http://tinyurl.com/harvarduxgroup . Also, if you’d like to join the UX group, you can email me at dorian_freeman@harvard.edu