Understand: Conduct secondary research, understand users and their goals, expose assumptions and unknowns
The first phase of the design process aims to collect all the information necessary to design an effective and impactful solution. It involves three different areas of focus: the overall business context, the users’ tasks & needs, and the feasibility & availability of the data. At the end of Understand phase, the team should have established a solid understanding of the users and the problem at hand.
The SOW will outline the constraints, the expected outcome, the timeline, and other relevant information about the project.
All team members present at a meeting ought to upload raw notes to a central repository such as SharePoint.
The raw notes can be used to create the Running List of AQI (Assumptions, Questions and Ideas). Design members can decide which assumptions have been addressed, what key ideas and themes were mentioned, and what new questions have arisen.
After a period of debriefing, the design lead should send a Thank You email to the people that were interviewed and include, if possible, a brief list of key items learned, or any pending questions that still exist.
Before the engagement begins, have an internal meeting to walk through the SOW, raise any potential risks, and identify the key people on the project. Set up a loose timeline and a plan for knowledge sharing / content management, and discuss any guidelines or rules for data privacy.
Business SME Interview (Required)
A business SME interview is a method used to get an understanding of the industry, various business functions and processes involved. This is a method that's required and is conducted before the user interviews.
Desk research is the act of discovering information about the client through the means of online information. Research can be about the company, industry, business function, and client history.
The Business Model Survey uses the Business Model Canvas as a tool to understand a business as a whole.
Stakeholder Interview (Required)
The Stakeholder Interview can also serve as the kickoff meeting, and should be used to align expectations and understand the "job to be done."
User Interviews (Required)
Conducting user interviews is the primary and required method the design team uses in the understand phase. By talking to the users directly, we can learn what they do, what they need and all the reasons behind.
Group interviews are similar to user interviews but with more than one user present. Group interviews are conducted in situations where user interviews are not possbile.
It is valuable to review existing documents to understand what information users currently look at and how they get to the information they need.
During the interview session, it's always useful to observe the user's interactions with the existing solution. By seeing how a report is read during a meeting or how a user clicks through a dashboard to learn information, the team will be able to gain insights into a user's actual workflow and where their needs are or aren't being met.
While interviews are useful in gathering explicit insights from users, there is also value in observing them in their natural enviornment to see their organic workflow. Contextual inquiries let the designers develop greater empathy for thier users by watching them in their own environment.
In the event that there are more users than can be interviewed, use a survey to gather multiple perspectives and understand themes and trends in a user base.
During the interview, the designer can perform this activity to dig down deep into what the actual reasons are for a problem or what the problem actually is. It is good to use when the apparent problem seems to only be a symptom of a larger problem.
AQI Tracking (Required)
AQI (Assumptions, Questions and Ideas) Tracking will allow designers to monitor the questions that don't yet have answers as well as the assumptions that are being relied upon. Tracking the AQI will be useful for later organization and analysis, and will also provide a paper trail for design concepts and decisions.
We will also be generating a lot of ideas throughout the week. Some of the ideas will be pertinent to the tasks at hand, but others, although interesting, won’t be. We will capture these good but not immediately relevant ‘back-burner ideas’ on a sticky note board.
An Affinity Diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on their natural relationships.
Modelstorming is a conversation between business users and data experts to brainstorm on the data model based on how it relates to business events.
- Review existing documents (Required)
- Create data dictionary
- User interviews (Required)
- Observation
- Five why’s
- Affinity mapping
- Update Running List of AQI (Required)