For those of you who are involved in systems implementation and change processes, understand that the actual meaning of your implementation project is the net sum experience of all users involved. That means that the quality of your work is a direct reflection of the change in quality of user experience. Ga!
Frightening, right? We all know that there will be a bit of aching and groaning and gnashing of teeth, so the onus is on us to make it more than worthwhile. We are in this world to provide value.
I often take inspiration from a trend that seemed to take place during the late 1990’s that involved a study of the way users and would-be users of applications experience things. Tech companies, or one company in particular, were hiring students out of social science grad programs – instead of IT or business, go figure – to study user experience to best shape application and user interface design. The practice was called Experience Modeling, sort of the Avant Gard of IT development at the time,. The word was out that the Information Age was over, and the Experience Age had begun.
I’m not sure what happened to this trend, or what past experience modelers are doing now, but if you look closely enough, you’ll see its subtle implications everywhere, and an overall mindset among tech companies to provide the maximum best experience, whether the most pleasurable, most convenient or most useful, or any combination of the three.
When I say I take inspiration from this practice, I mean it helps to form my whole approach to dealing with clients. Whether I am scoping a future implementation, streamlining current user processes, providing training or demonstrations, or actually gathering requirements and writing specs for a specific client-requested enhancement, I try as much to enter that person’s world, to step into her shoes and see things the way she does.
So we’re not talking about simply sitting down, asking a few questions about what a user wants to see on a screen, what buttons they want to press, and what results they want to see as a result of that. This goes beyond simple requirements gathering, beyond best practices and rote procedures. It is more of a holistic approach that requires all our interpersonal skills, imagination and other “soft skills.
The good news is that the basic set of core soft skills are things that are natural to you as a human being, i.e. the tendency to connect social, share experience, learn from each other. It’s written into your DNA, and manifests in our mirror neurons, and their activity. And though they are implicit skill sets, they are also things we can develop further by tuning into them more, as artists might do with the subtle connection between their visual and emotional functioning.
For a business analyst, this could mean gaining an intuition for the right types questions to ask, to gain high quality information about her client’s experience, to not only get an image of what a the flows might look like, but the experience of eye and hand movements, the sense of time passing, the adrenaline boosts that might lead to decision making. As you flesh out the experience and create a detailed fictional model in your own experience, more will come to light. You will begin to understand better what it is she is grappling with, and from that you can go beyond the mere gathering of requirements and begin partnering with her to design something that truly adds a bounty of surplus value.
My next few posts will provide approaches to developing and utilizing these intuitions and soft skills. However, in the meantime, practice by imagining what it would be like to be your client in the midst of her workday. Imagine what it would feel like to be her using your application. Ask yourself while you do so, what is it that I really want and need right now?