WorkSafeBC DevOps | digital transformation I
User Research, Design Sprint, Cloud application
my role: UX Designer
department size: Around 100 people; UX team and 8 Product teams
I am currently working as the first UX Designer Co-op at WorkSafeBC, helping my UX Lead Darlene Arriola to establish a design practice for the IT DevOps team from scratch. We are currently in the process of transferring legacy applications to the cloud, in a multi-year endeavour.
The following project was the first project I worked on for this organization. I collaborated with another UX designer, Mina Kang together. Our goal was to conduct some initial UX research for the “Notice of Project” Cloud application. We hosted a user research session to interview our stakeholders so we can collect some research data to kickstart the project.
As shown above, Mina listed all the key elements on the whiteboard. After the interview session, we documented and sorted out all the data and used Figma to come up with our Persona, User Scenario, and Workflow Diagram.
As shown above, the user scenario document might have too much text to read. In order to better show and tell the story of our persona’s job tasks with many of the other information we collect. We combined the two documents to come up with the following journey map to better show our persona’s journey.
After a few iterations, I designed the page cover artifact, a journey map contains how our stakeholder persona feels and thinks when while she is doing her daily tasks. This information helped us to identify when the pain points are happening and where they are. Which enabled us to have the opportunity to resolve the problem with our new cloud app design.
Following images are the Process and Variations of the Journey Map designs.
I believe the keystone of the Persona is to identify the goal and pain points, and the purpose of creating the Persona and the Journey Map is to adopt them into the product design process later on and also help stakeholders to better understand the story.
Reflection:
One month later, when our UX team was helping with a new “Hearing Conservation Program” project to create another set of User Persona for 8 different stakeholders, I want to find out whether the previous Persona and Journey Map we created have served their purpose or not. After a quick feedback session with the Product Owner of the “Notice of Project” product team, I was shocked by the reality. The feedback was that the Business did not use the Persona nor the Journey Map, because they did not know how to use them. Plus, they thought the information we put in was fictional data, not the real one.
I then analyzed the problem, identified two insights. Firstly, people who are not familiar with the UX design process do not know how to use the information which the Persona and the Journey Map can provide. The second discovery is we should conduct deeper research to include the real data instead of the fictional information in the Persona documents to enhance the credibility of the research findings.
The existing data we collected were from the Research session with the Project Owner and the Business Analyst. Instead, for this new “Hearing Conservation Program” project, we are going to conduct some on-site ethnography research studies where we would be able to include credible data in our research findings. We as the UX team still need to fill up the gap where colleagues do not know how to benefit from UX research findings in their work process.
