March 2007

Chapter Business

  • Thanks to Iron Mountain
  • The Mini-upa conference was a huge success 260 people attended. Majority of feedback has been positive. Anyone who want's the attendance material can contact Chris Hass (it's taking up room on his porch).
  • Several jobs were announced WSI, Iron Mountain and others. Check the mailing list for future updates.
  • Chauncey announced that he's looking for people who may want to contribute to the "Body of Knowledge" project.
  • Boston UPA - is also accepting articles, book reviews and similar information if people want to get involved.
  • NH UPA is getting started with a new chapter for anyone who's interested.
  • Elections, Greg Raiz is the new secretary. Jen Hocko is new VP. Anyone interested in running or being on the board or a sub-committee should let us know.
  • The last quarterly workshop went well... "How to design for mobile devices" by Anthony Hand. Reviewed how to design for a wide range of devices. Upcoming workshops coming up in the fall. Agenda is being put together. Stay tuned.

Presentation

Ali Mischke - Welcome

Iron Mountain has a new open specialist position for cross product interactions in usability. They also have a brand new usability lab that was built from the ground up. (Very nice.)

Tonight's presentation is on a new technique for finding gaps in complex processes.

Chris Thurrott - Workflow rehearsals: using interactive walkthrough to uncover process gaps.

The problem:

  • There are processes that have many steps.
  • These steps and hand offs have a complex workflow that's hard to visualize.
  • Swim-lane diagrams and flow charts are used but this loses effectiveness for large complex interactions with lots of steps.
  • Gaps can be hard to spot because the process is so complex.

The Technique:

  • The technique is to work through the process in the physical form as if it was a theatre play. Use actors, props and a script to act out in the real world scenario.
  • By acting out the process you can see the issues in workflow. It becomes more obvious when the process is visually seen.

How to perform the technique:

  • Get buy in from the team.
  • Identify participants/actors in the workflow.
  • Assign a scribe and director to make sure everyone is moving in the same direction and that issues are identified but don't stop or inhibit the process.
  • The Script tells people the roles they need to take and the props they need to perform the skit/technique. Physical objects symbolize digital mechanisms. A soda can represent a process, crushing the can is a symbol of deleting, etc.
  • Practice the skit/play to see what happens.
  • You get richer understanding from seeing the process rather then reading it.
  • Rehearsal helps you see the process and what works/doesn't.
  • Start the role-play take notes by the scribe.
  • If users get stuck you help them keep going. Like a usability test you record issues to resolve later.

What did we learn?

  • Very effective. Everyone felt it was a good use of time and learned a lot about the process.
  • Seeing the process also helped identify bottlenecks and ways to streamline.
  • Acting out the process was a good check on the physical reminders of what was happening.
  • This made it easy to find gaps and problems with the workflow and made it easy to identify problems and cognitive load.

(Demonstration showing how the process works with a sample website stringbean.com):

  • Example Players - customer, dispatcher, shopper, driver.
  • Example Props: Shopping Bag=control, Shipping list, Money, Flip Pad=website, Order printouts, Groceries, box= truck.
  • Walking through the demonstration shows a potential gap that the shopper may not have the money from the customer to finish the checkout process. Other gaps could also be identified in the demonstration.
    • Demo - Customer walks over to flip pad and writes down what they order.
    • Dispatcher - gets the order and prints out two copies. Passes one copy to the shopper
    • Shopper goes to the store and gets groceries...
    • Wait! she doesn't have the money... we identified a process gap...
    • Next step - shopper passes groceries to the driver...
    • Driver drives to the customer and delivers the order, signs receipt, continue...

By seeing the process visually you can identify the gaps. It's easier to see these gaps then to read them.

Questions, Answers and Comments

Questions & Answers

Q: This was shown at the UPA the previous year as "Process theater" one fo the problems is that some people represent small parts of the process and found less value in the long process.

A: Making the process interactive and fun made it worth their time. Certain players could call in so they didn't have to play the part on-site.

Q: The example shown was a waterfall process, what happens if the process has parallel steps?

A: This wasn't explored although parallel proceses shoudl work if you use multiple props. Other people added that this approach has been done with multiple paths.

Q: What level of granularity do you use for props and process, how low level do you get?

A: Get all the core stuff to idntify process and hand offs, each individual step wasn't as important as the hand-offs.

Comments:

This has been done in the past as participatory design, experience prototyping, body storming, etc. There is established work on this topic.

"Have the drama, before you ship."

Writing the script discovers many of the problems. 80% of gaps are identified by writing the script. 20% came out during the performance. Identifying props and players takes a while but is a useful step.