Clara Kliman-Silver: AI & design: imagining the future of UX

It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand, you need to submit a business case and, as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand, you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way. 

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Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?

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Meera Pankhania, Design Director and Co-founder of Propel Design, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on traceability and her learnings from delivering a $300 million Government program.

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In her talk, Meera helps us understand how to use service traceability techniques in our work and apply them to any environment - ensuring we design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model.

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Background on Meera Pankhania

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As a design leader, Meera is all about working on complex, purpose-driven challenges. She helps organizations take a human-centric approach to service transformation and helps deliver impactful, pragmatic outcomes while building capability and leading teams through growth and change.

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Meera co-founded Propel Design, a strategic research, design, and delivery consultancy in late 2020. She has 15 years of experience in service design, inclusive design, and product management across the private, non-profit, and public sectors in both the UK and Australia. 

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Meera is particularly interested in policy and social design. After a stint in the Australian Public Service, Meera was appointed as a senior policy adviser to the NSW Minister for Customer Service, Hon. Victor Dominello MP. In this role, she played a part in NSW’s response to the COVID pandemic, flexing her design leadership skills in a new, challenging, and important context.

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Contact Details:

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Email address: meera@propeldesign.com.au

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Find Meera on LinkedIn  

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From funding to delivery: ensuring alignment from start to finish 🏁🎉👏

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Meera’s talk explores a fascinating case study within the Department of Employment Services (Australia) where a substantial funding investment of around $300 million set the stage for a transformative journey. This funding supported the delivery of a revamped Employment Services Model, which had the goal of delivering better services to job seekers and employers, and a better system for providers within this system. The project had a focus on aligning teams prior to delivery, which resulted in a huge amount of groundwork for Meera.

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Her journey involved engaging various stakeholders within the department, including executives, to understand the program as a whole and what exactly needed to be delivered. “Traceability” became the watchword for this project, which is laid out in three phases.

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• Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables
• Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness
• Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices

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Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables 🧮

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Research and discovery (pre-delivery)

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Meera’s work initially meant conducting extensive research and engagement with executives, product managers, researchers, designers, and policymakers. Through this process, a common theme was identified – the urgent (and perhaps misguided) need to start delivering! Often, organizations focus on obtaining funding without adequately understanding the complexities involved in delivering the right services to the right users, leading to half-baked delivery.

After this initial research, some general themes started to emerge:

1. Assumptions were made that still needed validation
2. Teams weren’t entirely sure that they understood the user’s needs
3. A lack of holistic understanding of how much research and design was needed

The conclusion of this phase was that “what” needed to be delivered wasn’t clearly defined. The same was true for “how” it would be delivered.

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Traceability

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Meera’s journey heavily revolved around the concept of "traceability” and sought to ensure that every step taken within the department was aligned with the ultimate goal of improving employment services. Traceability meant having a clear origin and development path for every decision and action taken. This is particularly important when spending taxpayer dollars!

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So, over the course of eight weeks (which turned out to be much longer), the team went through a process of combing through documents in an effort to bring everything together to make sense of the program as a whole. This involved some planning, user journey mapping, and testing and refinement. 

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Documenting Key Artifacts

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Numerous artifacts and documents played a crucial role in shaping decisions. Meera and her team gathered and organized these artifacts, including policy requirements, legislation, business cases, product and program roadmaps, service maps, and blueprints. The team also included prior research insights and vision documents which helped to shape a holistic view of the required output.

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After an effort of combing through the program documents and laying everything out, it became clear that there were a lot of gaps and a LOT to do.

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Prioritising tasks

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As a result of these gaps, a process of task prioritization was necessary. Tasks were categorized based on a series of factors and then mapped out based on things like user touch points, pain points, features, business policy, and technical capabilities.

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This then enabled Meera and the team to create Product Summary Tiles. These tiles meant that each product team had its own summary ahead of a series of planning sessions. It gave them as much context (provided by the traceability exercise) as possible to help with planning. Essentially, these tiles provided teams with a comprehensive overview of their projects i.e. what their user needs, what certain policies require them to deliver, etc.  

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Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness 🙌🏻

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Meera wanted every team to feel confident that we weren’t doing too much or too little in order to design and build the right service, the right way.

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Standard design and research check-ins were well adopted, which was a great start, but Meera and the team also built a Delivery Readiness Tool. It was used to assess a team's readiness to move forward with a project. This tool includes questions related to the development phase, user research, alignment with the business case, consideration of policy requirements, and more. Ultimately, it ensures that teams have considered all necessary factors before progressing further. 

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Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices 🍃

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As the program progressed, several sustainable work practices emerged which Government executives were keen to retain going forward.

Some of these included:

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• ResearchOps Practice: The team established a research operations practice, streamlining research efforts and ensuring that ongoing research was conducted efficiently and effectively.
• Consistent Design Artifacts: Templates and consistent design artifacts were created, reducing friction and ensuring that teams going forward started from a common baseline.
• Design Authority and Ways of Working: A design authority was established to elevate and share best practices across the program.
• Centralized and Decentralized Team Models: The program showcased the effectiveness of a combination of centralized and decentralized team models. A central design team provided guidance and support, while service design leads within specific service lines ensured alignment and consistency.

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Why it matters 🔥

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Meera's journey serves as a valuable resource for those working on complex design programs, emphasizing the significance of aligning diverse stakeholders and maintaining traceability. Alignment and traceability are critical to ensuring that programs never lose sight of the problem they’re trying to solve, both from the user and organization’s perspective. They’re also critical to delivering on time and within budget!

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Traceability key takeaways 🥡

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• Early Alignment Matters: While early alignment is ideal, it's never too late to embark on a traceability journey. It can uncover gaps, increase confidence in decision-making, and ensure that the right services are delivered.
• Identify and audit: You never know what artifacts will shape your journey. Identify everything early, and don’t be afraid to get clarity on things you’re not sure about.
• Conducting traceability is always worthwhile: Even if you don’t find many gaps in your program, you will at least gain a high level of confidence that your delivery is focused on the right things.

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Delivery readiness key takeaways 🥡

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• Skills Mix is Vital: Assess and adapt team member roles to match their skills and experiences, ensuring they are positioned optimally.
• Not Everyone Shares the Same Passion: Recognize that not everyone will share the same level of passion for design and research. Make the relevance of these practices clear to all team members.

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Sustainability key takeaways 🥡

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• One Size Doesn't Fit All: Tailor methodologies, templates, and practices to the specific needs of your organization.
• Collaboration is Key: Foster a sense of community and collective responsibility within teams, encouraging shared ownership of project outcomes.

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The word “persona” has many meanings. Sometimes the term refers to a part that an actor plays, other times it can mean a famous person, or even a character in a fictional play or book. But in the field of UX, persona has its own special meaning.

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Before you get started with creating personas of your own, learn what they are and the process to create one. We'll even let you in on a great, little tip — how to use Chalkmark to refine and validate your personas.

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What is a persona?

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In the UX field, a persona is created using research and observations of your users, which is analyzed and then depicted in the form of a person’s profile. This individual is completely fictional, but is created based on the research you’ve conducted into your own users. It’s a form of segmentation, which Angus Jenkinson noted in his article “Beyond Segmentation” is a “better intellectual and practical tool for dealing with the interaction between the concept of the ‘individual’ and the concept of ‘group’”.

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Typical user personas include very specific information in order to paint an in-depth and memorable picture for the people using them (e.g., designers, marketers etc).

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The user personas you create don’t just represent a single individual either; they’ll actually represent a whole group. This allows you to condense your users into just a few segments, while giving you a much smaller set of groups to target.

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There are many benefits of using personas. Here are just a few:

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• You can understand your clients better by seeing their pain points, what they want, and what they need
 
• You can narrow your focus to a small number of groups that matter, rather than trying to design for everybody
 
• They’re useful for other teams too, from product management to design and marketing
 
• They can help you clarify your business or brand
 
• They can help you create a language for your brand
 
• You can market your products in a better, more targeted way

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How do I create a persona?

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There’s no right or wrong way to create a persona; the way you make them can depend on many things, such as your own internal resources, and the type of persona you want.

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The average persona that you’ve probably seen before in textbooks, online or in templates isn’t always the best kind to use (picture the common and overused types like ‘Busy Barry’). In fact, the way user personas are constructed is a highly debated topic in the UX industry.

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Creating good user personas

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Good user personas are meaningful descriptions — not just a list of demographics and a fake name that allows researchers to simply make assumptions.

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Indi Young, an independent consultant and founder of Adaptive Path, is an advocate of creating personas that aren’t just a list of demographics. In an article she penned on medium.com, Indi states: “To actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.”

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One issue that can stem from traditional types of personas is they can be based on stereotypes, or even reinforce them. Things like gender, age, ethnicity, culture, and location can all play a part in doing this.

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In a study by Phil Turner and Susan Turner titled “Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?” the authors noted: “Stereotyped user representations appear to constrain both design and use in many aspects of everyday life, and those who advocate universal design recognise that stereotyping is an obstacle to achieving design for all.”

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So it makes sense to scrap the stereotypes and, in many instances, irrelevant demographic data. Instead, include information that accurately describes the persona’s struggles, goals, thoughts and feelings — all bits of meaningful data.

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Creating user personas involves a lot of research and analyzing. Here are a few tips to get you started:

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1) Do your research

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When you’re creating personas for UX, it’s absolutely crucial you start with research; after all, you can’t just pull this information out of thin air by making assumptions! Ensure you use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative research here in order to cast your net wide and get results that are really valuable. A great research method that falls into the realms of both qualitative and quantitative is user interviews.

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When you conduct your interviews, drill down into the types of behaviors, attitudes and goals your users have. It’s also important to mention that you can’t just examine what your users are saying to you — you need to tap into what they’re thinking and how they behave too.

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2) Analyze and organize your data into segments

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Once you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to analyze it. Look for trends in your results — can you see any similarities among your participants? Can you begin to group some of your participants together based on shared goals, attitudes and behaviors?

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After you have sorted your participants into groups, you can create your segments. These segments will become your draft personas. Try to limit the number of personas you create. Having too many can defeat the purpose of creating them in the first place.

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Don’t forget the little things! Give your personas a memorable title or name and maybe even assign an image or photo — it all helps to create a “real” person that your team can focus on and remember.

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3) Review and test

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After you’ve finalized your personas, it’s time to review them. Take another look at the responses you received from your initial user interviews and see if they match the personas you created. It’s also important you spend some time reviewing your finalized personas to see if any of them are too similar or overlap with one another. If they do, you might want to jump back a step and segment your data again.

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This is also a great time to test your personas. Conduct another set of user interviews and research to validate your personas.

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User persona templates and examples

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Creating your personas using data from your user interviews can be a fun task — but make sure you don’t go too crazy. Your personas need to be relevant, not overly complex and a true representation of your users.

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A great way to ensure your personas don’t get too out of hand is to use a template. There are many of these available online in a number of different formats and of varying quality.

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This example from UX Lady contains a number of helpful bits of information you should include, such as user experience goals, tech expertise and the types of devices used. The accompany article also provides a fair bit of guidance on how to fill in your templates too. While this template is good, skip the demographics portion and read Indi Young’s article and books for better quality persona creation.

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Using Chalkmark to refine personas

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Now it’s time to let you in on a little tip. Did you know Chalkmark can be used to refine and validate your personas?

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One of the trickiest parts of creating personas is actually figuring out which ones are a true representation of your users — so this usually means lots of testing and refining to ensure you’re on the right track. Fortunately, Chalkmark makes the refinement and validation part pretty easy.

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First, you need to have your personas finalized or at least drafted. Take your results from your persona software or template you filled in. Create a survey for each segment so that you can see if your participants’ perceptions of themselves matches each of your personas.

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Second, create your test. This is a pretty simple demo we made when we were testing our own personas a few years ago at Optimal Workshop. Keep in mind this was a while ago and not a true representation of our current personas — they’ve definitely changed over time! During this step, it’s also quite helpful to include some post-test questions to drill down into your participants’ profiles.

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After that, send these tests out to your identified segments (e.g., if you had a retail clothing store, some of your segments might be women of a certain age, and men of a certain age. Each segment would receive its own test). Our test involved three segments: “the aware”, “the informed”, and “the experienced” — again, this has changed over time and you’ll find your personas will change too.

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Finally, analyze the results. If you created separate tests for each segment, you will now have filtered data for each segment. This is the real meaty information you use to validate each persona. For example, our three persona tests all contained the questions: “What’s your experience with user research?” And “How much of your job description relates directly to user experience work?”

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A

bove, you’ll see the results for Persona #2. This tells us that 34% of respondents identified that their job involves a lot of UX work (75-100%, in fact). In addition, 31% of this segment considered themselves “Confident” with remote user research, while a further 9% and 6% of this segment said they were “Experienced” and “Expert”.

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These results all aligned with the persona we associated with that segment: “the informed”.

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When you’re running your own tests, you’ll analyze the data in a very similar way. If the results from each of your segments’ Chalkmark tests don’t match up with the personas you created, it’s likely you need to adjust your personas. However, if each segment’s results happen to match up with your personas (like our example above), consider them validated!

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For a bit more info on our very own Chalkmark persona test, check out this article.

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Further reading

   
• "From personas to user stories" - an article by Roman Pichler on how to discover the right stories and integrate them into a sprint.
   
• "Personas make users memorable for product team members" - Aurora Bedford looks at how personas support user-centered design throughout a project’s lifecycle.
   
• "Developing successful personas" - Luke Wroblewski presents notes from a talk by Tamara Adlin who outlines a set of practical ways to align stakeholder, developers, and designers to use personas.
   
• "Describing personas" - Indi Young looks at some of the problems in accurately describing personas.
 

Few UX research techniques can surpass the user interview for the simple fact that you can gain a number of in-depth insights by speaking to just a handful of people. Yes, the prospect of sitting down in front of your customers can be a daunting one, but you’ll gain a level of insight and detail that really is tough to beat.

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This research method is popular for a reason – it’s extremely flexible and can deliver deep, meaningful results in a relatively short amount of time.

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We’ve put together this article for both user interview newbies and old hands alike. Our intention is to give you a guide that you can refer back to so you can make sure you're getting the most out of this technique. Of course, feel free to leave a comment if you think there’s something else we should add.

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What is a user interview?

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User interviews are a technique you can use to capture qualitative information from your customers and other people you’re interested in learning from. For example, you may want to interview a group of retirees before developing a new product aimed at their market.

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User interviews usually follow the format of a guided conversation, diving deep into a particular topic. While sometimes you may have some predefined questions or topics to cover, the focus of your interviews can change depending on what you learn along the way.

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Given the format, user interviews can help you answer any number of questions, such as:

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• How do people currently shop online? Are there any products they would never consider purchasing this way?
• How do people feel about using meal delivery services? What stops them from trying them out?
• How do ride sharing drivers figure out which app to use when they’re about to start a shift?

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It’s important to remember that user interviews are all about people's perception of something, not usability. What this means in practical terms is that you shouldn’t go into a user interview expecting to find out how they navigate through a particular app, product or website. Those are answers you can gain through usability testing.

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When should you interview your users?

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Now that we have an understanding of what user interviews are and the types of questions this method can help you answer, when should you do them? As this method will give you insights into why people think the way they do, what they think is important and any suggestions they have, they’re mostly useful in the discovery stages of the design process when you're trying to understand the problem space.

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You may want to run a series of user interviews at the start of a project in order to inform the design process. Interviews with users can help you to create detailed personas, generate feature ideas based on real user needs and set priorities. Looked at another way, doesn’t it seem like an unnecessary risk not to talk to your users before building something for them?

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Plan your research

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Before sitting down and writing your user interview, you need to figure out your research question. This is the primary reason for running your user interviews – your ‘north star’. It’s also a good idea to engage with your stakeholders when trying to figure this question out as they’ll be able to give you useful insights and feedback.

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A strong research question will help you to create interview questions that are aligned and give you a clear goal. The key thing is to make sure that it’s a strong, concise goal that relates to specific user behaviors. You don’t want to start planning for your interview with a research question like “How do customers use our mobile app”. It’s far too broad to direct your interview planning.

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Write your questions

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Now it’s time to write your user interview questions. If you’ve taken the time to engage with stakeholders and you’ve created a solid research question, this step should be relatively straightforward.

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Here are a few things to focus on when writing your interview questions:

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• Encourage your interviewees to tell stories: There’s a direct correlation between the questions you write for a user interview and the answers you get back. Consider more open-ended questions, with the aim of getting your interviewees to tell you stories and share more detail. For example, “Tell me about the last car you owned” is much better than “What was the last car you owned”.
• Consider different types of questions: You don’t want to dive right into the complex, detailed questions when your interviewee has barely walked into the room. It’s much better to start an interview off with several ‘warm-up’ questions, that will get them in the right frame of mind. Think questions like: “What do you do for work?” and “How often do you use a computer at home?”. Answering these questions will put them in the right frame of mind for the rest of the interview.
• Start with as many questions as you can think of – then trim: This can be quite a helpful exercise. When you’re actually putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and writing your questions, go broad at first. Then, once you’ve got a large selection to choose from, trim them back.
• Have someone review your questions: Whether it’s another researcher on your team or perhaps someone who’s familiar with the audience you plan to interview, get another pair of eyes on your questions. Beyond just making sure they all make sense and are appropriate, they may be able to point out any questions you may have missed.

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Recruit participants

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Having a great set of questions is all well and good, but you need to interview the right kind of people. It’s not always easy. Finding representative or real users can quickly suck up a lot of time and bog down your other work. But this doesn’t have to be the case. With some strategy and planning you can make the process of participant recruitment quick and easy.

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There are 2 main ways to go about recruitment. You can either handle the process yourself – we’ll share some tips for how to do this below – or use a recruitment service. Using a dedicated recruitment service will save you the hassle of actively searching for participants, which can often become a significant time-sink.

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If you’re planning to recruit people yourself, here are a few ways to go about the process. You may find that using multiple methods is the best way to net the pool of participants you need.

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• Reach out to your customer support team: There’s a ready source of real users available in every organization: the customer support team. These are the people that speak to your organization’s customers every day, and have a direct line to their problems and pain points. Working with this team is a great way to access suitable participants, plus customers will value the fact that you’re taking the time to speak to them.
• Recruit directly from your website: Support messaging apps like Intercom and intercept recruiting tools like Ethnio allow you to recruit participants directly from your website by serving up live intercepts. This is a fast, relatively hands-off way to recruit people quickly.
• Ask your social media followers: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be great sources of research participants. There’s also the bonus that you can broadcast the fact that your organization focuses on research – and that’s always good publicity! If you don’t have a large following, you can also run paid ads on different social platforms.

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Once a pool of participants start to flow in, consider setting up a dedicated research panel where you can log their details and willingness to take part in future research. It may take some admin at the start, but you’ll save time in the long run.

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Note: Figure out a plan for participant data protection before you start collecting and storing their information. As the researcher, it’s up to you to take proper measures for privacy and confidentiality, from the moment you collect an email address until you delete it. Only store information in secure locations, and make sure you get consent before you ever turn on a microphone recorder or video camera.

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Run your interviews

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Now for the fun part – running your user interviews. In most cases, user interviews follow a simple format. You sit down next to your participant and run through your list of questions, veering into new territory if you sense an interesting discussion. At the end, you thank them for their time and pass along a small gift (such as a voucher) as a thank-you.

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Of course, there are a few other things that you’ll want to keep in mind if you really want to conduct the best possible interviews.

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• Involve others: User interviews are a great way to show the value of research and give people within your organization a direct insight into how users think. There are no hard and fast rules around who you should bring to a user interview, just consider how useful the experience is likely to be for them. If you like, you can also assign them the role of notetaker.
• Record the interview: You’ll have to get consent from the interviewee, but having a recording of the interview will make the process of analysis that much easier. In addition to being able to listen to the recording again, you can convert the entire session into a searchable text file.
• Don’t be afraid to go off-script: Interviewing is a skill, meaning that the more interviews you conduct, the better you’re going to get. Over time, you’ll find that you’re able to naturally guide the conversation in different directions as you pick up on things the interviewee says. Don’t be discouraged if you find yourself sticking to your prepared questions during your first few interviews.
• Be attentive: You don’t want to come across as a brick wall when interviewing someone – you want to be seen as an attentive listener. This means confirming that you’re listening by nodding, making eye contact and asking follow-up questions naturally (this last one may take practice). If you really struggle to ask follow-up questions, try writing a few generic questions can you can use at different points throughout the interview, for example “Could you tell me more about that?”. There’s a great guide on UXmatters about the role empathy has to play in understanding users.
• Debrief afterwards: Whether it’s just you or you and a notetaker, take some time after the interview to go over how it went. This is a good opportunity to take down any details either you may have missed and to reflect and discuss some of the key takeaways.

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Analyze your interview findings

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At first glance, analyzing the qualitative data you’ve captured from a user interview can seem daunting. But, with the right approach (and some useful tools) you can extract each and every useful insight.

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If you’ve recorded your interview sessions, you’ll need to convert your audio recordings into text files. We recommend a tool like Descript. This software makes it easy to take an audio file of your recording and transform it into a document, which is much faster than doing it without dedicated software. If you like, there’s also the option of various ‘white glove’ services where someone will transcribe the interview for you.

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With your interview recordings transcribed and notes in-hand, you can start the process of thematic analysis. If you’re unfamiliar, thematic analysis is one of the most popular approaches for qualitative research as it helps you to find different patterns and themes in your data. There are 2 ways to approach this. The first is largely manual, where you set up a spreadsheet with different themes like ‘navigation issue’ and ‘design problem’, and group your findings into these areas. This can be done using sticky notes, which used to be a common ways to analyze findings.

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The second involves dedicated qualitative research tool like Reframer. You log your notes over the course of several interview sessions and then use Reframer’s tagging functionality to assign tags to different insights. By applying tags to your observations, you can then use its analysis features to create wider themes. The real benefit here is that there’s no chance of losing your past interviews and analysis as everything is stored in one place. You can also easily download your findings into a spreadsheet to share them with your team.

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What’s next?

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With your interviews all wrapped up and your analysis underway, you’re likely wondering what’s next. There’s a good chance your interviews will have opened up new areas you’d like to test, so now could be the perfect time to assess other qualitative research methods and add more human data to your research project. On the other hand, you may want to move onto quantitative research and put some numbers behind your research.

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Whether you choose to proceed down a qualitative or quantitative path, we’re pulled together some more useful articles and things for you to read:

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• Qualitative research methods – A breakdown of various qualitative research methods and why you’d want to use this research approach in the first place.
• Taking better notes for better sensemaking – Learn how you can improve your notetaking abilities before your next user interview or usability test.
• 13 time-saving tips and tools for conducting great user interviews – User interviews can be time-sinks, so take a look at these tips to make the process as smooth as possible.
• Pros and cons of conducting user interviews (Interaction Design Foundation) – A really useful resource that breaks down the pros and cons of user interviews.
• Tool: Reframer – You can use Reframer (our qualitative note taking tool) to capture detailed notes during your interviews. Then, you can apply tags and use Reframer’s analysis features to make the most of your interview data.
• Tool: Descript – Transcribing interviews is arduous, and can often take more time than the interview itself. Use a transcription tool like Descript to speed the process up.
• 16 tips for better user interviews – If you’d like another checklist to run through before you start your user interviews, this one is worth checking out.