XYZ: Capital Project Coordinator

Project Background

XYZ Services (fake name to protect client), a large Oil & Gas Equip and Services company, has been in business for years and has been using paper reports and other out-of-date forms for providing their customers with the latest project information. Their intention is to revolutionize how they deliver major project updates and info to their customers. Stakeholders want to identify the common day-2-day practices, preferences, and expectations of their customers so they can change the way their users deal with the oil industry as a whole. For this particular project, we decided the best way to get started was to run a Design Thinking Workshop.

Research

Market Research

This customer has their own product team, so much of the initial market research had already been performed. In essence, their team spoke for their customers. I did have an opportunity to invite 4 experts that were going to be the final users for the product to the design thinking workshop. Ultimately, I got to interview 4 Subject Matter Experts on the customer side and 3 of the Product Experts from our client's organization.

Expert Interviews

I conducted interviews with all 7 SMEs the week before the workshop was scheduled. In the interviews we gathered enough information to create a current systems map. The goal of the initial interviews is to get a high-level overview of the current system and what it could be as a user interacts with it. These same experts are interviewed again during the workshop in order for the entire group to hear the pertinent answers and also to provide any additional context the participants would like to learn.

Define Challenges

How Might We?

Based on the responses from the experts above, all participants in the workshop anonymously create "How might we" questions. The HMW format helps us define our biggest challenge without prescribing a solution. "How" assumes that there are solutions out there, so it provides confidence. "Might" suggests that the group can put ideas out there that might work or might not - either way it is ok. "We" suggests the group will work together and build on each other's ideas. Once all HMW statements are taken and categorized, the group votes on which ones are most important to the success of the project. This act of voting gives everyone equally weighted clout in the overall direction of the workshop and helps gain buy in moving forward.

2 Year Goals

By this point in the workshop, we have a pretty good idea of the challenges that we face. Our next step is to start focusing on what success looks like for our company and our product. To do this, we have all participants write down their "2 year goals" for the product. These statements are intended to be very inspirational and without regard to current roadblocks. Once everyone has anonymously entered their 2 yr goals, the entire group votes on which ones they find most critical to success. The statements that move forward in the workshop become very key building blocks to helping create the actual "Sprint Questions" the solutions will be based on.

Sprint Questions - The Cornerstone of the Workshop

Building on the results from the "HMW" questions and the "2 year goals" we move on to focusing on our Sprint Questions. These are the questions we will spend the rest of the workshop trying to answer. These are also going to be top of mind while we are solutioning. We use the same method of voting in order to select the sprint questions as we have used in the other exercises.

Current Process Map

Now is the time in the workshop where our initial interviews and discovery play a bigger role. Following the SME interviews, myself and another designer created a map of what we believed to be the company's current workflows. In this exercise, I explain this workflow to all the workshop participants to get feedback and get help making any adjustments to better fit the actual workflow if needed. Once this map is agreed on, we bring forward the elected How Might We's, 2 year goals, and sprint questions and place them in the appropriate area on the map. This will show us an area of interest on the map and allow us to narrow our focus to one specific part of the workflow. This exercise is SUPER IMPORTANT to the success of the workshop since it is the foundation to start bringing in possible solutions. You can see an example of the map with notes below.

Inspiration and Solutions

Lightning Round Inspirations

For this project, we started to think about overall solutions with an exercise called "Lightning Demos". This is where we ask all participants to bring in screenshots from other applications and products that solve similar problems in an interesting way. Each participant gets the opportunity to explain why they chose these solutions and how it relates to the Sprint Questions chosen previously.

Wireframes & Solutions

Once everyone has had the opportunity to gain some inspiration, we have the participants take their best shot at drawing what they think the designs might look. This tends to be the area where we get the most negative feedback from folks in the workshop since most people don't feel they have artistic abilities. That being said, this exercise is extremely useful to the design team because it shows us how the experts frame the problem and how they might solve it digitally. Below is a view of how we facilitate this exercise.

Validating our Solution

This step in the workshop is done to allow all participants the opportunity to weigh in on possible solutions in a major way. Everyone writes down how they would solve for all the "Sprint Questions" in a 6 or 7 step user flow. Once all solutions are entered and voted on, the "Decider" gives final approval for the steps that will be used to build the prototype that will go to testing. This flow will become a key part of the sprint, as the design team will build a clickable prototype incorporating each step as defined by the team. Below, you will see an example of how this process works along with the dots that are used for voting.

Creating the Sprint Contract

The final step in the workshop is to define the features and affordances that will need to be incorporated into each step of the prototype. As you can see below, we use the original flow that was decided in a previous step and add notes and visual examples in order to best deliver a useable solution for the client. This step is one of the more time consuming parts of the workshop, but is also one of the most important. This is where our team gets to finalize what they will be designing and testing over the next 3 to 7 days. The steps and notes actually become part of the contract for delivery in the Sprint.

Wireframing & Prototyping

The wireframing and prototyping phase of the sprint was mostly handled by myself and one other designer. We did have access to several of the experts from our customer's organization to answer any questions we had and we also shared our progress after the first 3 days of work to ensure we were on the right path. That meeting gives us a "gut check" with the stakeholders and also will let us fail fast if we need additional feedback. After 6 days of design and stakeholder meetings, we delivered the artboards and prototypes below:

Testing and MVP Prototype

Once the final prototype was delivered to the stakeholders we scheduled 5 users to test the flow, compiled all findings into a report, and presented the findings to the entire group. In collaboration with the stakeholders and SMEs, we applied the feedback and passed the information ahead to one of our Project Managers to set up a Sprint schedule. The prototype below is the one that was used for the original test for the workshop and follow-on. This product has evolved since then and all branding guidelines have changed, but much of the UX is current. Below is a link to the prototype: