The second phase of the design engagement is all about synthesizing research and information collected in the Understand phase. While the research around the business and data can vary in how they are synthesized (depending on which Define method best fits the project), the user research should be synthesized in at least a persona card and task analysis. Other artifacts can be used to organize additional information that isn't adequately captured in those two artifacts; for example, an empathy map or user journey map can be used to organize more observational and emotion-based data.
The team should revisit knowledge from client interviews to build personas.
The team should be mindful of assumptions and key take-aways from user interviews. This shall provide ability to better develop user scenarios and personas that address a wide range of possibilities and use cases.
The team should develop personas, based on the user interviews. Personas define common goals, tasks and activities of either a group of users or individual users.
The team should perform detailed task analysis to clearly determine aspects of the business process that the design engagement aims to address.
An organization chart helps the designer clarify the relationship between different personas/roles within the client's organization, and provide a baseline for prioritizing needs or grouping information. It is especially helpful when many personas or multiple business functions are involved in the Understand phase.
The team should make efforts to model the business process that serves as the basis of the problem at hand. This shall help determine any missing aspects or loopholes in the understanding and could also help realize potential risks.
During the business SME interview, you might hear the SME talk about some key measures used in the business. Make a note of these measures and try and understand what the measures mean and why they're used. The purpose of this method is not to get a comprehensive list of every single measure used in the business functions. Look at this as a way to familiarize yourself with some key measures that are important to the business. If users bring up some of these measures during user interviews, you will already have an understanding of what they mean.
This method is used to capture key dimmensions, business functions and map them to each other. A business matrix is usually an output of the Business SME Interview.
Business terms diagram is a method for organizing the definitions of and relationships between specific business terms. It usually puts these terms in the context of a larger business process, rather than simply listing terms and their definitions.
Creating personas help categorize and segment various aspects of the problem and the desired solution. They aid in providing personal characteristics and attributes to multiple viewpoints of the problem that the team as well as clients could easily relate to. Creating personas should be a comprehensive task that takes all outcomes of interviews with the client and assumptions, bundled into a relatable use case.
Task analysis is the process of learning how the users perform their tasks and achieve the intended goals. It helps the designer decide the tasks the solution needs to support and define the navigation and workflow.
An empathy map is a collaborative tool teams can use to gain a deeper insight into their customers. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment. The empathy map was originally created by Dave Gray and has been gaining popularity with the agile community.
A user journey map demonstrates the flow of user experience, and highlights user's goals, actions, and emotions along the way.
Storyboards illustrate the how the user interact with the solution, and what the user does, thinks, or feels in the process.
A user scenario is a detailed narrative that focuses on one persona. By typing it out, the team thinks through the details and tell a compelling, easy-to-understand story about the user's needs.
Identifying the problem will help to determine if there is a problem, if that problem is solvable, and how to solve that problem. This step will be the first step to answering this question: What is this solution, and is it useful?
User stories are brief statements (1 or 2 sentences each) regarding the requirement of the solution from the end-user's perspective. It is a very simple method to document design requirements and it helps the design team communicate with both the client and the developers.
A collaborative tool used to model business events and their dimensions, and to define simple data structures for BI prototyping.
- Personas (Required)
- Empathy map
- Org chart
- Problem statement
- Card sorting
- User scenario
- Storyboard
- User journey map
- Task analysis
- User stories/Use cases
- Business process mapping