Observing users on site

A weeknote starting 7 October 2024.

Posted from the train, I've missed train blogging!

2 day trip

This was my second week on the new team. I was focused on getting ready for (and then taking part in) a 2 day onsite visit to shadow and do some workshops with users.

It was a great way to learn about the existing legacy service, and the environment, needs, behaviours, frustrations etc of the people who use it.

Day one was a sort of contextual enquiry with unstructured interviews. I got to observe around 4 users in their environment. In total, as a team, I think we observed over double that. I think the main takeaway was that everyone uses the system in very different ways. And different teams have developed different workarounds over many years.

Hopefully now the existing legacy service documentation will also make more sense, now that I've seen it in action.

On day 2, we invited the users to spend time with us and talk more indepth about some of their needs. We didn't manage to recruit as many people as we'd hoped on day 2. I think we all reflected that it could have been more focused. In the afternoon, we let the users go back to work so that we could sketch and explore some of the things we'd learnt.

Meeting in real life

It was also great to spend some time with the new team. Meeting in real life is always a good way to speed up that alignment process.

Sadly we didn't manage a team meal or anything like that though. Hopefully next time.

Prototype time?

I'm itching to put what I’ve learnt into a prototype to start testing the journey. I have a new sticker on my laptop that says "build to learn".

Some of the initial designs (done earlier in the Alpha) have been very detailed. But they focus on the initial couple of screens in great detail. I'd really like to create a string of basic screens that start to carve out the end-to-end process.

The earlier work won't be wasted though. We can iterate and add that detail later.

We have sprint planning tomorrow (a bit delayed because of the trip) so hopefully I can float that idea there and get it into the next sprint.

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