UXA2022 Day 1; Jen Blatz - How Enterprise Software Can be Saved by UX Research and Service Design

Enterprise software is often terrible. Through UX research methods, we have the chance to improve it. In this talk, I show how to apply mixed methods to inform UX design on software and services that are not consumer-facing, rather used internally by companies and employees. I will talk about how to take research to new heights, by modifying the traditional Service Design Blueprint, to suite alternative research needs and how this can make any project infinitely better.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2022 – Hybrid Conference Thursday, 25 August 2022 Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Carmel Downes
2. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 31 STEVE BATY: Next up on our program we have Jennifer Blatz who is joining us from Texas, as memory serves, just outside of Houston in Texas, it is only early evening for her, so I got that part right, which is good. It is coming up on about either 7pm or 8pm for Jen in Texas so that is a lot more reasonable of me. Hopefully I haven't made too many of those scheduling hiccups. But anyway. Please join me in welcoming Jennifer Blatz to our program. Jen. JEN BLATZ: Hi, can you hear me, Steve? STEVE BATY: Yes. JEN BLATZ: Having some difficulties starting the video. It says our host needs to let me start the video. STEVE BATY: OK. It's happening. JEN BLATZ: Sounds good. How is everybody in Australia? STEVE BATY: They look good to me, Jen. JEN BLATZ: Good. (LAUGHS) Steve, you are right, it is 8pm my time, yesterday, for you all. STEVE BATY: It is only Wednesday here. I saw on the sheet that it was 2.30am Thursday for Lydia which got me a little bit confused but it is early evening for you in Texas. Is the sun still up? JEN BLATZ: It is going now. By the too many I am done it will be dark.
3. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 32 STEVE BATY: Beautiful. A twilight talk. Are you able to share your screen, please, Jen? JEN BLATZ: I think so, can you all see my screen? STEVE BATY: We see a logo at the moment. JEN BLATZ: Hello. Yeah. Hi, everybody, how is it going? So great to be here. It would be better to be there but thank you so much for having me at another UX Australia, one of my favourite conferences. I am going to talk about how enterprise software can be saved from chaos, I guess you could say, with UX research and service design. I have a lot to talk about so I am going to jump right in. Before I do, very quickly, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am Jen Blatz. I am a lead US researcher and designer. I am currently a researcher at Rocket Mortgage, the largest mortgage lender in the United States. I am one of the cofounders of a meet-up group called US Research and Strategy. You can find me and the group on LinkedIn. I would love to connect. Get your phones out and start to connect with me in the group. I do have one warning, I have a lot of dogs in my presentation tonight so I hope you like them because there is going to be a few of those. Let's get back to the topic at hand. Let's start with the basics. What is enterprise software? No, it is not this space ship for all you Star Trek fans out there. Enterprise software is used to satisfy the needs of an organisation, or company rather than individual users. Sometimes enterprise can be referred to business to business applications, maybe you have heard that. An enterprise software is getting better in design and usability but sometimes I think of it as the
4. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 33 not so sexy side of software development. What makes enterprise systems interesting is they are, like I said, super sexy, or delightful. They are there to help you get a job done. So think of people tend to be in them for long periods of time. Let's think about somebody who is managing content for a web site, they might be in that management system all day long. Also the software is often old and feels kind of dated and it can be tied to legacy systems which makes it difficult to upgrade. The tough part about enterprise software is that its users often don't have say in the purchase of these products. The person who bought this software is likely not to be the one using it on a daily basis. They might be in procurement or technology, so as users, sometimes our hands are tied when we have to use enterprise software. This type of software, like I said, rarely gets UX love, simply put, the companies need these solutions and the great user experience that humans desire, it often gets neglected in enterprise. Some examples of enterprise that maybe you are familiar with are Jira, Sales Force, Service Now and they run systems like human resources, payroll, marketing, project management, accounting, health records, supply change management, all types of industries and solutions. Now that we know, some examples - let me share some enterprise software that I was working on, that I was actually trying to bring this application I'm going to show you into this century. I have to warn you, this might hurt your eyes to see this. You have been warned. Here is some of the lovely enterprise software that I was working on as a designer and a researcher at a security company. Don't you just love the way that this looks? It looks like it was created in 1993. Here is another example of that software that I was working on. This was used by a security operation centre by analysts who are creating or reviewing security tickets or incidents and the company I worked for monitored
5. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 34 Internet traffic for another corporation. They look for things like malware and viruses on another corporation's system. Just imagine looking at these small fonts and this data design for hours on end? It is pretty brutal. See all the buttons in the top left, the grey boxes at the top, through my research I found out that only half of those buttons are ever used. And most that are useable, most of the time they are not useable in the context of the page that they are on. This is a classic example of just adding more items without removing items that are not used for or required anymore. I am sure that you see that a time or two in some of the stuff you have been working on? OK. That is the last time I will scare you with that dated enterprise software. Here is the funny thing. I haven't been working at that company for a few years and I just talked to one of my former colleagues about a month or two ago and asked him if they are still working in that same design. Guess what? They are still working in that. Haven't updated it one bit. That brings us to the other half of this talk. That is service design. Hopefully some of you here are familiar with the idea of service design or maybe you are doing it in your organisation? For those who might be a little bit new to you, service design is a way of organising resources, people and processes in order to improve the employees' experience and then indirectly the customer's experience. To me, it is taking a deep look at the experience your user or your customer is going through each step of the way. Then, determining if there are ways to improve that even more. Let's look at some similarities between service design and enterprise software. Service design is a way of organising business process to improve an employee's experience and then indirectly a customer's experience. Enterprise also has a secondary user. You are
6. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 35 helping the business needs not necessarily the individual using the enterprise software and enterprise software is often purchased by someone else holding the wallet or the budget rather than the person who's actually using it. Here I think is the interesting parallel between service design and enterprise software. They both indirectly effect another person or another aspect, like be that the company or the customer. So how these are related is that service design takes a deep dive and examines the user experience and in the case I am going to go through today, applying service design research methods, I am going to talk about how I was trying to discover how to make an employee's work process better and improving that could in turn improve the customer's experience. To bring these two together, you as the UX professional out there in the audience, can improve enterprise software by applying service design principles. So how is that done? One way is completing a service design blueprint. Hopefully, maybe some of you have seen this template or this layout before. This format of a service design blueprint was developed by the folks at Adaptive Pass. The rows going across horizontally are the swim lanes that a UX professional can examine a customer's interaction with the product or service and the columns are the deep dive into that process. The yellow at the top, you record each step of the journey and then you do a deep examination by going through the columns underneath. I just wanted to get you familiar with the idea of a service design blueprint. I am going to talk a little bit more about this later on. Now let's talk about the problem I was trying to solve for our research initiative. This is for a security operations centre, SOC for short. This is a company who monitors a customer's Internet traffic for other customers. For example, let's say it is Starbucks and Starbucks is our client. We monitor Starbucks Internet traffic and their environment to
7. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 36 make sure nothing is wrong, like no-one is downloading an illegal bit or viruses haven't compromised their system. As part of the service that the SOC offered to these companies, we also provided monthly, or quarterly reports, so the company could have a nice summary of what was going on in their system. These reports were like a word document basically and they were saved as a PDF and sent over electronically. So how the problem to solve came on my radar was the SOC wanted to automate the building of these reports. In order to do that, I have to understand the process of how these reports are actually built. After I started to do a little bit of research, the SOC was up for a big surprise on how difficult it was actually going to be to automate these reports and that's what I am going to go through today. What was wrong with these reports in it is a very manual process to make these reports. It takes one person two hours to create one of these reports. As we know, manually building something like that does not scale. The information to build these reports was also from multiple resources and based on the interviews that I conducted with clients, these reports really weren't giving the clients what they wanted. Plus, the design and the presentation was all over the place and it just wasn't really that visually consistent. I asked myself what methods can I use to investigate how to build a better report for our clients? That is when I decided not only to conduct some research but to use service design to help me discover opportunities. The first thing I did was come up with a plan of attack, which was my research plan. I wanted to conduct a heuristic evaluation, looking at the report to see what design and usability problems the report might have. You can do that sort of evaluation on non-digital or non-interface things as well. Then, I had to get the customer's point of view. Part of the problem with this report is that they were building these reports without ever asking the customer
8. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 37 what they needed in the reports. That is a big no, no. We want to meet customers' needs and have a user-centred approach to problem solving, right? I interviewed some customers to better understand what they wanted and needed from these reports. Then, I needed to figure out how these reports were actually put together. I used the classic anthropology method of contextual inquiry, sometimes called side by sides and then after this, I decided I was going to use a service design blueprint with a little bit of a twist. I was going to do a deep dive examination of how the reports were put together. Finally, through research, I knew I would likely discover gaps and opportunities that would need to my recommendations for improvement. This was my overall research plan. I now want to take a deeper look into each step I did for conducting the research in building out a service design blueprint to help with enterprise systems. In this example, remember service design is the process of improving an employee's experience and then indirectly improving a customer's experience. In order to satisfy the customer, I had to take a multimethod approach to better understand the problem I was trying to solve which was better reports for customers. First, I had to understand the report itself. Heuristic evaluation. Second, I needed to know how the report was built, contextual inquiry. Then third, I needed to know what customers wanted and needed from this report. That was user interviews. Finally, bringing all this knowledge together to come up with recommendations to build better reports would hopefully lead to happy customers. I first had to understand what was going on in these reports, like what is inside. I started with the heuristic evaluation and I know that there are a lot of great frame works out there, like Norman's 10 usability frame works and Abbey Coverts and I was doing a quick and dirty
9. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 38 evaluation, basically to answer what was going on in these reports. And question the status quo. I was looking for inconsistencies, confusing items, design flaws, etc. I am going to be honest, these developers, the people in the security operation centre that are really technical sometimes and they were the ones that were building the reports. They may not be the most empathetic designers, subject matter experts, yes communicating things in a simple and easy way - not so much. I had to look at these reports to see if a dumb person like myself could understand what was going on. Guess what the verdict was? I could not. Let's talk about some of these graphics that were in the reports. Are you ready? Let's start with the top left here, the one that starts with top alert categories. These 3D charts are certainly fancy, hey. Well, there is some problems here. The 3D - the top of the boxes are so far from the scale it is really difficult to see what these numbers even mean. I know that in this example, the black boxes are shorter than the red boxes in the back but if they were bigger, then you would be able to see the red boxes tucked back there in the back. It is not very helpful. It is fancy but it is not very practical. Let's look at the top right, the lovely grey and white table. This table shows IP addresses and device names. You really have to know what all your devices are called, no-one is going to know from an IP address. The real problem is it just shows the status quo. It is not really useful. They want to know what the problems are with their devices and if there is a problem, what is the problem and what to do about it? This chart was really useless, according to our clients. Let's go down to the bottom left, the orange chart. This shows how many emails our SOC company sent to the client per month. The number of emails we sent to clients - who cares? I can tell you clients don't care. They don't want to know the number of emails that we sent them, they
10. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 39 want to know the content or the reasons for those emails. What were the problems? Were there any trends or themes? Then finally, the bottom right, the blue chart - this is my favourite. (LAUGHS) This chart shows how long it took for us to close or resolve a ticket. The X axis going up and down is the number of incidents, or tickets and it comes in half increments. I can assure you, you can't have one and a half tickets, you either have a ticket or you don't have a ticket. They don't come in halves. Then that bottom, along the Y axis is time and the maximum number shown here is 28,619 seconds - seconds! Let's translate that into something that might be a little bit more useful. 28,619 seconds is about 407 minute and it is about eight hours. No-one wants to translate from seconds into a number that makes a little bit more sense. Not super cool. Based on my heuristic evaluation and later from the interviews I conducted with customers who review these charts, I found all kinds of things that needed to be fixed. Then I talked to customers and they are the ones who received the reports and through 101 interviews, I asked them "What do you need?" And I learned that these reports simply are not delivering what the client needs. They told me about how they needed actionable items to take back to their boss. One person told me "If we are in trouble don't just tell me there is a problem, I want to know what to do about it". They want the reports to be reflective of industry trends or concerns. Are there things happening out there in the world right now? Are there current problems that I should be aware of and keeping an eye out for? Our users want context and interpretation. Continue just tell them what the problem is, tell them why it is happening. They also wanted it to be personalised. There are some sections of these reports that have some very generic security-related news articles that they pulled off the Internet. They didn't care. It had zero information that was helpful for them. It had nothing to do with their company or their industry
11. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 40 and the people I talked to were like "I don't like those at all". They don't find it useful. Now, I have a better understanding of what the users or the clients want, but remember the original act from my company was to streamline and automate this report-making process. In order to do that, I have to understand how these suckers are made. That is when I decided to conduct a contextual inquiry. Basically, that is sitting with someone and observer them and asking questions as they go through their tasks. Sometimes it is called side-by-sides, it is similar to ethnographic observations and I sat with the person who built most of the report, his nickname was Bro Sales, so I will call him that. He walked me through every step of the process and he answered all of my questions. I really love this method of a contextual inquiry or observing people. Sometimes you get to observe people doing things they don't even realise that they are doing. Trust me, people do things and their actions can be so routine they don't even know that they are doing them. But if you observe them doing these things, you can notice these actions that they might not tell you about. Plus you get to see their cheat sheets, their hacks, their workarounds and how those things help guide them through their work. You can also ask questions along the way. Why are you doing that? What system are you using there? How does that information help you to do things? You can ask all the questions. And what I learned through observation is that it surfaced where the process was very manual and therefore could introduce human error. It helps you to understand the user flow, how long it takes to do something, what software, what web sites, what other enterprise systems are they working in? While I sat with Bro Sales and watched him build reports, I could have him take screen shots, answer my questions, do things over and over so I understood all
12. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 41 the steps and having this information would later help me build up that service design blueprint. The first thing I noticed in my contextual inquiry is that there are so many systems involved to build out this report. Multiple web sites, other enterprise software, touch points. Not to mention all the calculations and the scripts they have to run to help them determine the data that goes into those reports. It is a lot. Bro Sales didn't even realise that he was using so many systems. Again, this is the real value of sitting with someone and watching them do their work. You see them do things that they are barely aware that they are doing themselves. After seeing all of his systems, I realised that automating these reports is going to be a real challenge. After my observations, I went back to my desk and roughly mapped out the steps of the process. I only had this little white board, I swear it was like maybe this big and so it was pretty limited space and I just mapped out the high level steps and the systems that were involved so I could quickly get my ideas out on paper. I love using a white board like this because it is easy to edit and modify if you need to. This rough draft acted as a reference point for when I would map out my service design blueprint. Let's talk about that service design blueprint. Like I said, I only had that little white board, not very big and I wasn't going to be able to capture everything that I needed to on that small surface, so I went big. When I say I went big, I mean it. My service design blueprint wrapped around five cubicles in the office. I used like those big post yet note flip charts and applied little post it notes and screen shots. Going big like this had some advantages. It provided some visibility into the process. Everyone could see what that researcher, that US designer and researcher had been up to all this time. It also gave me an opportunity to review this with Bro Sales to make sure that I had the
13. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 42 flow accurate. I could confirm that all the steps were captured. It really brought all the jumps and the steps and the different systems involved and it was really an opportunity to start talking about how we could improve this process. Having a large format like this was completely unheard of in this office space like this before and it brought others into the conversation and actually kind of created some excitement. Remember that service design blueprint that I showed you earlier? Again, the gold boxes, each across the top are the steps in the customer's journey and then you deep dive into each step across the swim lanes and a traditional service design blueprint has customer actions, touch points, staff actions and then it has below the line of visibility where the user never sees what is happening. It is kind of behind the scenes. For this project, I took a little bit of a different approach and that's the beauty of the service design framework, is it is flexible and it can be adjusted. Let's walk through a non-enterprise example of where we might use a service design blueprint model. Let's say you are designing a theme park. How fun would that be? You want to create the best experience possible, well you can modify the touch points and the swim lanes on the service design blueprint, and you can even do this examination through a persona. Let's do that now. Let's talk about the persona. Let's say it is a group of people who has an elderly family member with some mobility issues. Maybe they don't ride all the rides. Maybe they need more frequent breaks. Maybe they have different needs, like they need accommodation for wheelchairs or special dietary needs. So what would that theme park experience be for that persona? For this example, the theme park, the land is sci-fi land and I have modified the swim lanes a bit for the service design blueprint to examine things that are important to what we want to discuss as a group, as the UX team.
14. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 43 The customer touch point is the same, it's the area of the theme park that they could visit, so there is different things here, there is rides, the rest room, gift shop, there is restaurants and then the orange/red swim lane is the services that we could provide at that touch point. The blue, the cyan level is the employee interactions that could take place at that touch point. The purple swim lane are the pros or the positives or the good things that could be part of that touch point. The green swim lane is the negative or not so great things that could be part of that touch point. Then, finally, the pink one could be what us as a team could brain storm for better opportunities by having a "How might we" exercise. What we would need to do next is to think about what the personas - experience would be at these touch points and so, for the sake of time, I am going to only walk through one touch point and again the persona is an elderly person with mobility issues and the single touch point I will talk a little bit about is the extraterrestrial burger stand. That is a restaurant in the sci-fi land. Let's talk about this restaurant. What are some of the services that we could provide specifically for this persona? One thing that we could do is provide large print menus, maybe they forgot their glasses? We could offer low glycemic foods if they need to eat foods that are complementary to regulating blood sugar levels. Maybe we have an employee who is trained in CPR in case someone has a heart attack? Maybe we have an employee who has large physical strength and can actually pick somebody up if they have fallen? Some of the pros or positive things that we could offer at this touch point is air conditioning, right. A lot of times when you visit a theme park in the summer and it is pretty hot. Providing some air conditioning would be a good place to somebody who needs relief from the heat. We could also provide free water. Maybe they have to take medication throughout the day and let's not charge them $4 for a bottle
15. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 44 of water. Let's offer it for free. And maybe some seating that isn't required for dining in, like we said, this persona might need to take frequent breaks so to offer seating for them and their family could be another good offering here. Now, let's talk about the flip side a little bit and talk about some of the negative aspects that could happen at this touch point. Well, you know those tall seats, they are often called bar seats that you have to sit up in, like they are pretty high? Seats like that could be very difficult for someone with mobility issues to climb up into. Like we mentioned, this person might have some mobility issues and need to potentially push a wheelchair through aisles, so having aisles too close together could be a challenge for them as well. Then, us as a team could brain storm how might we better still make this good experience for this touch point, which is the extraterrestrial burger stand, and for the persona of an elderly person with mobility issues. Again, I want to emphasise that when it comes to service design blue prints, I think it is OK to modify the swim lanes or the rows or the topics you would like to do a deeper dive - it is OK to modify those to examine the things that are important to the problem you're trying to solve. For my theme park example, it wasn't important to explore the back stage aspects of this attraction, we wanted to focus on that customer experience more. That is what was important for us to focus on. That is what I like about a service design blueprint, is you can modify it again to your needs which is exactly what I did when it comes to the service design blueprint I created for that report building process. Let's switch back to that and talk about that report and the service design blueprint that came out of that. Let's look at the swim lanes. The yellow ones here at the top are the actions, the steps in the
16. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 45 report-building process. The orange are my observations - not exactly the exact step, but some things I noticed along the way, like if a process was a little more manual, or if they used a cheat sheet to help them. The pink ones were my notes, my comments - I called it my editorial comments. This is where I was starting to surface opportunities for improvement, things I noticed but wanted to make a comment on that weren't truly the actions but things I wanted to point out like he made an error and this is why I think this could be a problem. That is what the pink stickers represented. Then I had screen shots so people could see what exactly the screen looked like at the step as Bro Sales built this report. I am not sure if you can see it but there are some little tiny coloured blocks on some of the stickies and they represent the system that was involved, the technology that was being used in that step. Once I got this all mapped out, remember it wrapped around five cubicles, it was time to review with the team. I first showed Bro Sales and he confirmed that the flow was accurate. Mapping it out like this really brings out the jumps and the steps involved and notice it is still not high resolution at all which is a good thing because I did mess up a couple of things, some of the steps I had out of order and I missed a couple of things and it is easy to fix in these rough areas like this. I didn't have a digital white board at this company but that would be a great tool to use for this as well. Also having this format is I could start having some conversations with the developers. They were potentially going to be the one to automate or fix this report-building process so we needed to start having some conversations around this. They needed to understand what the process looked like, what systems were involved, surface those gaps and opportunities for improvement and so they could start thinking about what technical improvements they might be able to make at these
17. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 46 different steps. Finally, this was the first time that managers ever had any visibility into this process. It was really critical for them to understand the complexity involved in making this report. If they had not seen how many steps were actually involved, they probably would still think this would be really simple to automate. Well, once they saw how complicated this process was, they had to put a hold on automating this report. It simply was not an option any more once they realised how complicated it was. So once the process and the stickies were all firm and everything is accurate, then I went a bit high resolution and put the data in the spreadsheet. I know what you're probably thinking "Jen, you could have made the digital version that was so cool, interactive and knocked their socks off", really fancy. Yes, I could have done that but I decided to make this spreadsheet meet the team where they are. I made it a spreadsheet because that is what the stakeholders and the team are comfortable working in. They like Excel, Google Docs. They are not pretty but they are functional and the file size is really small and it is easy to share. Form follows function, my dear friends. I want to note here quickly, the colours here corresponded to the colours that were on that paper in a log version, so it was pretty simple to translate what they had seen on paper to this digital format. It was a little heartbreaking to take down that fantastic work of art that wrapped around five cubicles in the office but the digital version is much more accessible because anyone can open it up at their computer. Plus, it kept them from bugging me every five minutes, walking up and "What's here? What's on this -" pointing out the paper version so it worked out better. I want to revisit my plan of attack, or my research plan and talk about how the different research efforts I conducted helped the team
18. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 47 come to a decision. The heuristic evaluation, again look at the report to see what design, usability problems the report had, question the status quo. Then I uncovered customer needs through one on one interviews. I conducted a contextual inquiry with Bro Sales to observe how he built the report and asked him questions along the way. That helped me to understand simply how the reports were built. And, finally, with the data collected along the way I laid it out in a modified service design blueprint and through the research, I discovered the gaps and opportunities that would lead to recommendations for improvement. As you can see, this fixed method research approach can be a terrific way to ultimately construct a service design blueprint. I think the beauty of a service design blueprint is that you give that holistic view of the process and it surfaces those gaps and opportunities. It showed - when I created the service design blueprint, it showed the challenges of automation. It was not going to be as easy as flipping a switch. It also - get this, it also included the cross functional team that had never worked together or been united in a process before. This organisation was super siloed and segregated. The people in the SOC were the security analysts, where they worked and the ones who put the reports together, they were literally behind a locked door that you needed special badge access - I had that, but the developers who I worked with who sat upstairs, they did not have access to the SOC. They did not have access to half of the team that they should be working with. I can assure you, that ended as soon as I found out about that. I started to get both teams - because they are both very smart and they should be working collectively together. I got both of the teams to start working together. I think in the end, the biggest win for me - that was a huge one - but another big win for me was transparency. It is transparency into this process that I think only a service design blueprint can surface, like
19. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 48 almost nothing else can. I think the question then is is this something that you could do? I would say hell yes. It is very inciteful to go through this process and go through the steps and take a deep dive into each step. It's amazing what you will learn if you go through the process of filling out a service design blueprint. It is amazing. You can do this solo, by yourself like I did, because I was the only UX pro in the company, so I did this alone. Or you could have multiple people working on this service design blueprint at the same time. I think that is a huge plus because bringing in collaborators is a great way to bring in others and have them own it with you. You could bring in developers, users, customers, product owners, the more perspectives you have, the better it will be at exploring all the angles of the problem. Also, you don't need any special tools to do this. You saw I had flip charts, stickies, you could use a white board, you could use a digital white board, I didn't have access to that back then but that would be a great tool to use as well. You could use design software, you could do this in Fig Jam or Switch or anything that you feel comfortable working in. Excel spreadsheet like I did, use the tools you are comfortable with. Also, you don't need tech-pertise, you don't need to have all the knowledge about these systems that you are talking about or learning about. You don't have to be a developer to build out a service design blueprint. Believe me, I knew nothing about the systems that Bro Sales was using but he explained enough for me to understand what he was doing and to get the understanding of the function and the use. That was enough. It was enough. For this, not only did I talk to customers but I also talked to security experts that worked for the company, so that I could weigh the information that they felt the customer also needed to know and it was a
20. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 49 good balance to get both perspectives because I think that there was some value in the information that we were presenting to our customers but the customers didn't interpret it that way. So there was some opportunities for some content alignment or aligning some of the mental models of what's important information for both sides finally, uncovering some low hanging fruit is a great way to recommend improvements and help reduce - like you could help reduce time on task, reduce complexity and suggest some better processes. I would say yes, you too can build a service design blueprint, folks. I know that was a lot. Hopefully you can see the value of applying different research methods and how creating a service design blueprint can be used for something that maybe you're working on. My major take away for you today is that it's OK to modify and evolve the traditional service design blueprint template to meet your needs. Like with all of UX, we always say nothing is set in stone, it depends, right. We say that a lot. Please feel free to adapt this excellent tool for your next UX design or research needs. Thank you very much. I haven't been watching the chat or the Q+A so, Steve, I will rely on you to relay questions if anybody has any? STEVE BATY: We don't have time for questions. We are right on time and we need to transition over to our next speaker but that was an awesome case study. Thank you so much for that. JEN BLATZ: Thanks, everybody, have a good day. STEVE BATY: Our next presenter is going to join me on stage just for something novel. I know! Next up we have Liz Adcock who is going to talk about enterprise service design in Government. Please join me in