As Jama’s first design strategist, I began with the people who use the product. The company had more experience with buyers, not users, and somewhat confused the two in setting product direction.
So, I planned customer visits to people in various roles who make complex products that integrate hardware and software. I took along either a product manager or another designer to help capture these “day in the life” sessions and because it offered a good way to introduce the power of field studies and building more empathy for what people want or need to do and why it’s difficult. We used an unobtrusive GoPro camera and Livescribe pen and asked people to show us how they go through their day, who they get information from or give it to, what’s difficult about that, and what part our product plays in it.
I took everything, transcribed it, and looked for patterns in what I found. From this analysis, I created a set of user personas. I also surfaced key themes and product opportunities for Jama Software.
I noticed a serious problem that popped up throughout and turned it into one of my key themes. The persona Aaron the Architect often created an elaborate way to organize information in our product that proved hard for others to use. Paige in Pain spent a lot of time working in Aaron’s structure, but always had to help others like Connor the Consumer or Brad the Bridge find the information they needed to complete their additions to the work.
I offered a design plan to understand Jama’s findability problem.
In the plan, I suggested useful design activities with time/date estimates. I requested that a product manager and software developer join the project to help me learn more about how users seek and organize information, define the problem well, choose a direction, then make and test concepts with our intended audiences.
To begin, I did a facet analysis of customer data to find common approaches in how they organize their content. From there, I recommended categories that would help less frequent Jama users find what they need. Two stood out: a product category that mirrored how they organize their work, from broad to specific, and a time category that would let them select a few ways to organize product data by when it happened, like releases, projects, or versions.
The project did pause for awhile at this point over other priorities, but finally resumed, and I made a project space where anyone at the company could follow our progress and comment on the work.
This is something I usually do, both to expose the value of design thinking and to pull in needed expertise or quickly orient the team who will build a backlog and estimate the effort. Through the project space, they can immerse themselves in what we’re doing, for whom, and why it matters.
I produced some concepts for navigating in Jama using the Product and Time categories and for setting up and maintaining them. I also included how categories could be applied to existing data as a simple, powerful way to reuse that information for new versions of a product–Jama customers often build new products as variations of past products.
We took the concept animations and reviewed them with our intended audiences: users like our persona Aaron the Architect, Paige in Pain, and Connor the Consumer. Could it prevent Aaron from creating overly complicated ways to organize information in Jama? Could it make Paige’s job easier by letting her help Connor only once, and knowing he can find what he needs in Jama after that, because he’ll see categories and topics he already understands for products and releases?
I often recommend a concept review like this, as early as possible, to confirm we’re headed in the right direction and learn deeper details about our users and the challenges they meet, every day. It helps the product manager and tech lead identify with users and contribute ideas of their own, early in the process.
We did encourage participants to talk about the findability problem and heard an earful. We were moving in the right direction. If Paige is helping people like Connor find content in Jama several times a day, that’s easily two full weeks of unproductive work for her, every year. To make the point very clear, another designer helped me produce audio highlights presentations for the major themes in the feedback from our concept reviews, while I wrote the findings and recommendations.
The technical hurdles for categorization have meant bringing this thinking into the product in smaller ways, like more personalized displays that push recently used content or anything that mentions the user to the front.
Or simple metadata filters based on existing content that give less frequent Jama users a way to quickly filter large sets of information to the kinds of items they need to see within a project.
The rich work I led on findability and categorization continues to infuse new features and product direction at Jama, shining a light on how much more you can do with data that has both place and time within a complex product development landscape.