Experience Mapping to Uncover Pain Points and Opportunities
Aim. Provide management with a holistic view of the process and user experience of a continuous integration tool by: mapping how different teams use the tool; highlighting the gap between user needs and sources of pain; and identifying opportunities for improvement to the process and/or the tool.
My Role
Discovery research to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement
Methods
Stakeholder Interviews
User Interviews
Experience Mapping
Focus
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Barriers and inefficiencies
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Process versus tooling issues
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Comparison between teams
Problem Statement
Different users face different issues using the company's continuous integration tool. Opinions of the system are disparate, based on the individual pressures and needs of particular teams. I needed to piece together the end-to-end experience of various employees into a bigger picture so that management could make decisions to improve the experience of both the tool and the process as a whole.
Process
Following stakeholder interviews, I drew out the archetypal workflow, including key users and the tasks involved at key stages. I updated this based on discussions with employees about the process in user interviews. The resulting workflow was used to structure an experience map, which visually represented who, where, when, and how employees interacted with the tool.
By showing how different team members move through and experience each phase in the workflow, I was able to identify sources of friction, provide a summary of the main pain points between and within teams, and outline which issues emerged from company processes and which were tool-specific.
Challenges
The initial workflow identified with stakeholders was linear. Experience mapping drew attention to overlapping workflows, resulting in interesting but challenging insights to present. This was in no small part due to the range of users from whom I had garnered these insights. I had no shortage of willing participants. The challenge was in collecting and representing all the voices in just a 3-week period. Of the > 20 users I interviewed, I was under pressure to present findings before I had finished collating the data. I transcribed all interviews and chose half of these to include in the experience map based on how well they represented common opinions across their team.
Outcomes
I used the experience map to pull out four main pain points encountered by employees attempting to meet the company's requirements for continuous integration. I highlighted reasons for these pain points, separating process from tool-specific issues, and presented these to management in the context of three overarching themes (satisfaction, uncertainty, and relationships between teams).
Based on these insights, I identified user needs and presented opportunities for improvement for specific teams and for the company as a whole. Recommendations included improvements to: UI navigation and system feedback; workflow efficiency; increased resources and hardware capacity; and streamlined communication and co-ordination between teams.