Week 1
Hi, I am Daniel a designer from Belfast currently studying for a MSc in User Experience at IADT. Working alongside fellow student Michaela McParland our first project is to analyse and then improve upon the MS Teams application, giving us an introduction to the user experience design process.
Working process
For our project our team would follow the five stages of the Design Thinking model. This would give us a framework to tackle our problem and create a human centred solution.
This would be combined with a scrum project management methodology, allowing us to break our project down evenly between each team member into smaller more manageable tasks which could be assessed and discussed each week.
Stage 1.Empathise
Task selection
Our first stage was to identify current problems users had with MS Teams. We did this through an initial overall analysis of the application using Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, these are general principals of best practice and not strict guidelines, but they will give us a quick assessment of areas that could be improved upon (See our heuristic evaluation here). We then expanded upon this by interviewing ‘MS Teams’ users about their issues with the product as well as searching online forums for common problems and researching competing products.
After completing this research, the first problem we planned to address was making a group call where every participant is visible on screen at the same time. As we began to investigate this and following feedback from our tutor we felt that this was too narrow. So we expanded this to someone giving a presentation through MS Teams where the presentation slides and guests would be present on screen at the same time, allowing for better face-to-face engagement.
Task analysis
To help us visualise the steps that are currently required to complete the task we created a task analysis diagram. Maria Rosala notes that
“Task analysis is the systematic study of how users complete tasks to achieve their goals. This knowledge ensures products and services are designed to efficiently and appropriately support those goals”.
This simplified diagram allowed us to see which steps worked and which areas we felt we could improve upon. We then created a new task analysis diagram showing how we would like our finished prototype to work.
Proto-persona
We created a series of proto-personas of potential users to help make our team’s “ implicit assumptions about [our] users explicit ” [Laubheimer P. 2020]. These fictional personas are used as a guide to justify appropriate design decisions and are a great way for the team to get a quick snapshot of a potential user’s needs and desires. Ideally these would be created using real world research, but giving the timescale we are just going base these on general assumptions. Once we began discussing our proto-persona’s within the group it became clear that the personas I had originally created where too similar to Michaela’s, having both created personas for a professional woman in her 30’s and a student. I decided to create two new personas, a teacher in her 40’s and a doctor in his 50’s to give us a wider user experience to base our design on.
Reflection
This step-by-step process really helped us break down the task into incremental detail giving us as a team much greater focus on what we where trying to achieve. While the use of personas really helps us ground our thinking in what the user needs. Although it is easy to see how creating a proto-persona based on assumptions not research could quickly become flawed. For example in our first team meeting we both had personas that where very similar, with similar ages and occupations, so it made me aware of our own biases. However it did highlight the benefit of collaboration and it allowed us to address these biases by creating new personas which would present new problems when developing our final prototypes.
References
Dam & Siang (2020) 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process, Interaction Design Foundation, viewed 14/11/2020,
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
Laubheimer, P. (2020) 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical, Nielsen Norman Group, viewed 14/11/2020, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona-types/
Rosala, Maria. (2020) Task Analysis: Support Users in Achieving Their Goals, Nielsen Norman Group, viewed 14/11/2020, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona-types/
Appendix
Our heuristic evaluation on MS Teams here.
An article about MS Teams view all in gallery view.
A forum with current users concerns.
Competitor visuals
Our task analysis diagram
