Here’s a quick one that has saved me time and helped me mask my frustration:
When dealing with a support agent via online chat, keep a copy of everything you type in a separate text file. That way when you think of a better way to explain yourself, or inevitably have to re-explain everything to another agent, you have text at the ready. It’s much less work to copy and paste the relevant bits than to write them all again, is less emotionally taxing, and you can look like the nice person you really are, even if this all has gone on far too long.
In early October I was asked to give an eight-to-ten-minute presentation summing up the year for UX. A tall order, but I embraced blazing through the content to alight briefly on things I though the general company audience should know about UX and how we were trying to help.
With most of our work going toward rewrites that have not yet launched there’s little to say about outcomes, so I followed a rapid tour of our outputs with a couple of quick demos and an invitation to view my upcoming Cayuse Connect Conference talk about UX philosophy and practice.
My eight minute talk wherein I tried to explain/demo the accomplishments of my department over the prior year seemed to go fine. Folks in my department liked it, anyhow.
The gym was closed on Tuesday. No matter – I went for a run. And it was somewhat enjoyable.
A former coworker sent me a very nice message. It made my week!
I hope you’re doing well! It’s been quite a while since I last spoke to you, and I wanted to say how much I appreciate the impact you have had on my life. I reap the benefits of it almost daily, and I hope to be like you when I grow up.
I blasted through a workout centered on lunges this weekend. This would have been unthinkable a year ago, or even six months ago.
In an attempt to be a little more social I had coffee with local friend Joey. It was very nice.
I’m out of the woods far enough on my coming presentations that my stress level has gone down. Now to practice, polish, and cut.
My adjustments to “find maintenance” with my food intake have, with the help of nutrition coach Christine Imperato, seemingly been successful: I’m now hovering easily at around 200 pounds and know how to stay there at my current activity level. It’s a good place from which to try a cut later, as an experiment. It’s a good place from which to try lots of things.
A service blueprint is typically a design deliverable, showing a user’s journey, the touch points they interact with in whatever channels (web site, application, retail store, call center, etc.), and the behind-the-scenes activities that need coordinating to make that journey a smooth one.
A service blueprint can also be a research deliverable, describing the existing journey and where that coordination breaks down, what the touch points are and whether they are succeeding or failing, etc. usually you’d just do a user journey for this, but sometimes the additional investigation in to the channels and coordination is helpful.
But what if you have not just one user but multiple players interacting with one another? What if you need to understand how all of these players interact so you can decide who to serve, for whom what you already have would be useful, and where the holes in your product are?
Enter the “super service blueprint”. It’s not really a service blueprint as the focus is on the various interacting players you are investigating. But understanding their collective processes and interactions will give you a clear look at the process you’d like your product to be a part of. A clear map of these allows you to locate little chunks of user value that your product already provides and identify opportunities in the collective process to intervene on behalf of one or more users.
You can also see which of the players you are serving the most and the least, just by looking at which users have the build of the interface capabilities and which users have more of their goals and informational needs met across the timeline.
The super service blueprint pictured here is the product of an investigation my team did into the Cayuse Vivarium operations products and the handful of different user types who either use them , might use them, or were part of the processes that we intended to help along via our products. This super service blueprint led to a re-thinking of the product strategy, since the investigation revealed that there’s a key user involved in nearly every phase of the overall process, and we could serve that person especially well by reorganizing and improving several software capabilities we already had somewhat in hand.
This super service blueprint involved nine group interviews with different large-institution vivarium operations teams throughout the United States, the production of seven intermediate service blueprints, and a lot of cleanup to make sure it was as communicative as possible. It remains a critical resource to the product management team today.
I involved the team in figuring out how we would rearrange ourselves now that we have new product priorities, and they came up with what I expect is a good solution without any teeth-gnashing at all.
Conference talk #1 is nearly done, #2 is well-in-hand, and the participatory design exercises are coming along nicely.
I’ve graduated to weighted pushups, “wearing” a 45lb plate.
While a weights workout still leaves me with a sore knee, these bouts are less painful and last less time than in the past. I’m taking it as a sign that I’m pushing hard at workouts and am happy to give myself a little pat on the back for this.
I don’t find it useful to ask users directly for the answer to a question of detail. For example, I hope I’d never ask a user what they think the order of columns in a table should be, or even if a table was appropriate for the data at hand.
If we ask a user a question of detail such as one of these we will receive an answer, and we would likely be able to fulfill that answer through design, but we would not have learned why; the resulting design would be indefensible, hearsay. It’s akin to asking for and expecting a “sandwich order;” you receive a request you can meet but with no insight by which you could critique or improve upon the request. (This is a problem not just for designers but also for product managers.)
Rather, we should ask questions that help us understand better how the data will be used – where attention needs to be brought, what decisions need to be made, what activities encouraged – so we can come up with and offer a sensible arrangement of data, possibly so we can transform that data into information.
While the team is sad at the departure of a great employee, they are holding together.
I made less progress than I had hoped on my conference presentation scripts, but more than I was in danger of making, and I’ll take that as a win.
I wisely skipped a workout in favor of a friend’s birthday party, and it was good to see here and some old friends from a prior job. We fell right in as if we’d never been out. It was nice. I’ve been “bad at social” for a little while and it is nice to be reminded that I’m not actually bad at social, I’m bad at getting around to asking for and scheduling it.
One shouldn’t have to sell the concept of three-in-a-box planning, where product management, design, and engineering get together to make product decisions, but sometimes conditions make it necessary. In this case, product managers and engineers embattled by an overwhelming pile of customer commitments had been in hurry-up mode so long that they felt the only way to survive was to be heads-down and ask as few questions as possible. Just accept a brief and punch out a feature, quick and broken. It’s no way to live.
I skipped a couple of these since I was on vacation. One win of that period, though, is that the vacation was amazing, despite some RV plumbing mishaps (nothing gross). Here are some wins since then:
I disappeared for two weeks and my team at work continued to ably make progress without my help. Nothing caught on fire, no one got stuck, no one complained. It was heartening to read the scroll back in the team Slack channel and see them tackling issues, supporting each other, making good decisions. :feelsgoodman:
The Huskies look like a much better team than last year, as well they ought. Not a personal win, but this also feels good.
I started learning Norwegian via Duolingo. I feel a little like I’m succeeding through deduction rather than actually learning the language, but it’s early yet.
I had a great meeting with a new Product Manager, and see real opportunity to help lead her product family into an interesting and more-obvious-for-users future.
