Examples of defining the bigger picture and the steps to get there with STRATEGY
Because if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know how to get there.
Course-correcting a ship that has been sailing on a we’ll-deal-with-it-later (because it’s not on fire) mentality around accessible services requires a shared strategy to reach sharply defined targets short-term heading towards an ideal future point that’s defined just enough to instill a level of confidence to believe and continue to invest one’s energies.
And paced appropriately to prevent burnout.
Accessibility should NOT be an afterthought.
Many of the things HCD and UX specialists pine away about revolve around how to improve the digital interconnection between humans and their digital technology devices — how to make them more intuitive, seamless, predictive, productivity enhancing. How to simplify, reduce, or eliminate the complexity of getting X done. How to enhance, clarify, dig deeper, ask better questions, be more inclusive when the user is trying to accomplish X.
This level of interconnectedness and understanding bigger picture variables at play — THIS IS MY JAM. Is there a random cog is in the works, that could potentially derail the whole thing? Not on my watch.
Guess what other groups are deeply invested in knowing about those interaction touchpoints? Your business intelligence colleagues know what’s behind X and the UX’s user research into those places will hopefully shed insight into Y.
X = getting money, paying bills, finding a doctor, scheduling a convenient appointment, ordering & receiving food/product purchases, booking transportation from A to B, printing special occasion invitations etc.
Y= Did you see what I did there? Go back and read it again.
Befriend business intelligence and machine-learning peers!
The Recognition Program was the most popular and frequently used internal program at Fulton Bank, with an employee usage rate of 96% of all employees (employees numbered around 3600 people) using the program to send shout-outs, high fives, and quick public recognition of appreciation to fellow colleagues.
The designs pictured here addressed improvements to the layout, hierarchy, content clarity, simplification of clicks, and flow. Outlined were responsive designs for multiple devices as well.
Simplify a frequently used process for even bigger wins.
Thus far, I’ve been involved in two companies’ broader leadership efforts around communication strategy and communication protocols to be followed. Both stemmed from a need to formulate intention and boundaries around efficiently communicating with one another, answering a common employee comment around “not having enough transparency” into important matters.
One effort took place prior to the pandemic, the other after the pandemic was underway for over 18 months.
Both identified the need for management to more clearly identify their expectations up front, how to squash premature assumptions with clearly defined measures at each level of seniority, and examples of the different types of communication and the governance of such.
Support the communication between colleagues for a better employee experience.
With one of my UX interns, I pioneered the research of and the proper user testing of an enterprise-wide survey tool solution.
We gathered and crafted a refined list of requirements full of must-haves and nice-to-haves.
We sifted through multiple known and unknown survey tools refining it down to the final two tools of Sogo Survey and Zoho Survey — with Sogo edging out Zoho for its ability to handle more complex branch logic and offering specialized help for greater complexities.
As an ideal test of the tool and to reap user research results on something truly valuable at that time, we shaped a questionnaire to gain more understanding on next possible steps to take for the Agile Transformation Team I was helping to lead.
Seeing the detailed results for the various question types we carefully crafted was truly insightful for recommending areas of the newly-formed Agile Transformation Team that needed TLC.
The results visualizations in the Sogo Survey tool can be customized as well, which made for a delightful and intuitive survey-crafting experience for survey creators.
Overall, a worthwhile endeavor. Being able to define professional, human-centric standards and drive better research results was truly satisfying!
Set enterprise-wide survey standards for measureable user feedback .
With the intention of proposing additional business opportunities that might fill the sails with wind enough to stay afloat and move forward with purpose, my Citizen Advocate and I researched all known county websites (local government) within the Commonwealth of PA.
We established all of the realistic must-have measures as well as additional tests that could serve as the next level of research to run after the initial measures were evaluated and recorded (seen below in the color-coded snippet from the Excel spreadsheet).
We performed an opportunity assessment on a third of the counties (23 county websites, seen in the top graph). Then, with the top 9 metrics, we invested additional time in researching the remaining 2/3rds and tallying all results (seen in the middle graph).
With all results in hand and a need to make wise recommendations, I flipped the results upside down. I recommended addressing found issues (on the new) top-down, with an HCD approach. Site maturity levels increase from basic to advanced in those metrics. Basic being examples of site security, having responsive behavior, digital forms, and so forth. Advanced being examples of having payment processing, publicly available access to search contracts, and of highest site maturity would be an implemented Chatbot.
Jumping the shark and insisting that a chatbot would solve more basic site problems when the site isn’t even secure, or when forms are manual, or there is a lack of valuable content, or when the site only works on the largest monitor size would result in a very poor user experience. Not to mention the frustrated customers who still would have major site issues that hadn’t been addressed.
Use quantitative research to inform additional business opportunities.
There should be no such allowable thing as ignoring ones employees to focus on ones customers. Especially with services provided by an organization’s employees directly to its customers.
If leadership ignores its employees (EX = Employee Experience) there won’t be anyone to provide services to its customers. If the customer experience (CX) suffers enough, customers will go elsewhere.
This is the underlying ecology of Service Design in delivering value from its organization to its customers.
This is the bigger picture.
Here are some visuals I created to illustrate the flows, the common blockers, and possible places to start when forming strategic goals and prioritized research efforts. My requestor and recipient of these concepts was the C-suite Technology director.
Not pictured here were also the top initiatives within the entirety of IT and where they fit in the service design ecology as conceptualized here.