February 20, 2024
3 min

Meera Pankhania: From funding to delivery - Ensuring alignment from start to finish

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. 

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?

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.

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.

Background on Meera Pankhania

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.

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. 

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.

Contact Details:

Email address: meera@propeldesign.com.au

Find Meera on LinkedIn  

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

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.

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.

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

Phase 1: Aligning key deliverables 🧮

Research and discovery (pre-delivery)

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.

Traceability

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!

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. 

Documenting Key Artifacts

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.

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.

Prioritising tasks

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.

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.  

Phase 2: Ensuring delivery readiness 🙌🏻

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.

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. 

Phase 3: Building sustainable work practices 🍃

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

Some of these included:

  • 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.

Why it matters 🔥

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!

Traceability key takeaways 🥡

  • 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.

Delivery readiness key takeaways 🥡

  • 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.

Sustainability key takeaways 🥡

  • 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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Moderated vs unmoderated research: which approach is best?

Knowing and understanding why and how your users use your product is invaluable for getting to the nitty gritty of usability. Delving deep with probing questions into motivation or skimming over looking for issues can equally be informative. 

Put super simply, usability testing literally is testing how usable your product is for your users. If your product isn’t usable users often won’t complete their task, let alone come back for more. No one wants to lose users before they even get started. Usability testing gets under their skin and really into the how, why and what they want (and equally what they don’t).

As we have been getting used to video calling regularly and using the internet for interactions, usability testing has followed suit. Being able to access participants remotely has allowed us to diversify the participant pool by not being restricted to those that are close enough to be in-person. This has also allowed an increase in the number of participants per test, as it becomes more cost-effective to perform remote usability testing.

But if we’re remote, does this mean it can’t be moderated? No - remote testing, along with modern technology, can mean that remote testing can be facilitated and moderated. But what is the best method - moderated or unmoderated?

What is moderated remote research testing? 🙋🏻

In traditional usability testing, moderated research is done in person. With the moderator and the participant in the same physical space. This, of course, allows for conversation and observational behavioral monitoring. Meaning the moderator can note not only what the participant answers but how and even make note of the body language, surroundings, and other influencing factors. 

This has also meant that traditionally, the participant pool has been limited to those that can be available (and close enough) to make it into a facility for testing. And being in person has meant it takes time (and money) to perform these tests.

As technology has moved along and the speed of internet connections and video calling has increased, this has opened up a world of opportunities for usability testing. Allowing usability testing to be done remotely. Moderators can now set up testing remotely and ‘dial in’ to observe participants anywhere they are. And potentially even running focus groups or other testing in a group format across the internet. 

Pros:

- In-depth gathering of insights through a back-and-forth conversation and observing of the participants.

- Follow-up questions don’t underestimate the value of being available to ask questions throughout the testing. And following up in the moment.

- Observational monitoring noticing and noting the environment and how the participants are behaving, can give more insight into how or why they choose to make a decision.

- Quick remote testing can be quicker to start, find participants, and complete than in-person. This is because you only need to set up a time to connect via the internet, rather than coordinating travel times, etc.

- Location (local and/or international) Testing online removes reliance on participants being physically present for the testing. This broadens your ability to broaden the pool, and participants can be either within your country or global. 

Cons:

- Time-consuming having to be present at each test takes time. As does analyzing the data and insights generated. But remember, this is quality data.

- Limited interactions with any remote testing there is only so much you can observe or understand across the window of a computer screen. It can be difficult to have a grasp on all the factors that might be influencing your participants.

What is unmoderated remote research testing? 😵💫

In its most simple sense, unmoderated user testing removes the ‘moderated’ part of the equation. Instead of having a facilitator guide participants through the test, participants are left to complete the testing by themselves and in their own time. For the most part, everything else stays the same. 

Removing the moderator, means that there isn’t anyone to respond to queries or issues in the moment. This can either delay, influence, or even potentially force participants to not complete or maybe not be as engaged as you may like. Unmoderated research testing suits a very simple and direct type of test. With clear instructions and no room for inference. 

Pros:

- Speed and turnaround,  as there is no need to schedule meetings with each and every participant. Unmoderated usability testing is usually much faster to initiate and complete.

- Size of study (participant numbers) unmoderated usability testing allows you to collect feedback from dozens or even hundreds of users at the same time. 


- Location (local and/or international) Testing online removes reliance on participants being physically present for the testing, which broadens your participant pool.  And unmoderated testing means that it literally can be anywhere while participants complete the test in their own time.

Cons:

- Follow-up questions as your participants are working on their own and in their own time, you can’t facilitate and ask questions in the moment. You may be able to ask limited follow-up questions.

- Products need to be simple to use unmoderated testing does not allow for prototypes or any product or site that needs guidance. 

- Low participant support without the moderator any issues with the test or the product can’t be picked up immediately and could influence the output of the test.

When should you do which? 🤔

Each moderated and unmoderated remote usability testing have its use and place in user research. It really depends on the question you are asking and what you are wanting to know.

Moderated testing allows you to gather in-depth insights, follow up with questions, and engage the participants in the moment. The facilitator has the ability to guide participants to what they want to know, to dig deeper, or even ask why at certain points. This method doesn’t need as much careful setup as the participants aren’t on their own. While this is all done online, it does still allow connection and conversation. This method allows for more investigative research. Looking at why users might prefer one prototype to another. Or possibly tree testing a new website navigation to understand where they might get lost and querying why the participant made certain choices.

Unmoderated testing, on the other hand, is literally leaving the participants to it. This method needs very careful planning and explaining upfront. The test needs to be able to be set and run without a moderator. This lends itself more to wanting to know a direct answer to a query. Such as a card sort on a website to understand how your users might sort information. Or a first click to see how/where users will click on a new website.

Wrap Up 🌯

With the ability to expand our pool of participants across the globe with all of the advances (and acceptance of) technology and video calling etc, the ability to expand our understanding of users’ experiences is growing. Remote usability testing is a great option when you want to gather information from users in the real world. Depending on your query, moderated or unmoderated usability testing will suit your study. As with all user testing, being prepared and planning ahead will allow you to make the most of your test.

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1 min read

How to convince others of the importance of UX research

There’s not much a parent won’t do to ensure their child has the best chance of succeeding in life. Unsurprisingly, things are much the same in product development. Whether it’s a designer, manager, developer or copywriter, everyone wants to see the product reach its full potential.

Key to a product’s success (even though it’s still not widely practiced) is UX research. Without research focused on learning user pain points and behaviors, development basically happens in the dark. Feeding direct insights from customers and users into the development of a product means teams can flick the light on and make more informed design decisions.

While the benefits of user research are obvious to anyone working in the field, it can be a real challenge to convince others of just how important and useful it is. We thought we’d help.

Define user research

If you want to sell the importance of UX research within your organization, you’ve got to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of what user research is and what they stand to gain from backing it.

In general, there are a few key things worth focusing on when you’re trying to explain the benefits of research:

  • More informed design decisions: Companies make major design decisions far too often without considering users. User research provides the data needed to make informed decisions.
  • Less uncertainty and risk: Similarly, research reduces risk and uncertainty simply by giving companies more clarity around how a particular product or service is used.
  • Retention and conversion benefits: Research means you’ll be more aligned with the needs of your customers and prospective customers.

Use the language of the people you’re trying to convince. A capable UX research practice will almost always improve key business metrics, namely sales and retention.

The early stages

When embarking on a project, book in some time early in the process to answer questions, explain your research approach and what you hope to gain from it. Here are some of the key things to go over:

  • Your objectives: What are you trying to achieve? This is a good time to cover your research questions.
  • Your research methods: Which methods will you be using to carry out your research? Cover the advantages of these methods and the information you’re likely to get from using them.
  • Constraints: Do you see any major obstacles? Any issues with resources?
  • Provide examples: Nothing shows the value of doing research quite like a case study. If you can’t find an example of research within your own organization, see what you can find online.

Involve others in your research

When trying to convince someone of the validity of what you’re doing, it’s often best to just show them. There are a couple of effective ways you can do this – at a team or individual level and at an organizational level.

We’ll explain the best way to approach this below, but there’s another important reason to bring others into your research. UX research can’t exist in a vacuum – it thrives on integration and collaboration with other teams. Importantly, this also means working with other teams to define the problems they’re trying to solve and the scope of their projects. Once you’ve got an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, you’ll be in a better position to help them through research.

Educate others on what research is

Education sessions (lunch-and-learns) are one of the best ways to get a particular team or group together and run through the what and why of user research. You can work with them to work out what they’d like to see from you, and how you can help each other.

Tailor what you’re saying to different teams, especially if you’re talking to people with vastly different skill sets. For example, developers and designers are likely to see entirely different value in research.

Collect user insights across the organization

Putting together a comprehensive internal repository focused specifically on user research is another excellent way to grow awareness. It can also help to quantify things that may otherwise fall by the wayside. For example, you can measure the magnitude of certain pain points or observe patterns in feature requests. Using a platform like Notion or Confluence (or even Google Drive if you don’t want a dedicated platform), log all of your study notes, insights and research information that you find useful.

Whenever someone wants to learn more about research within the organization, they’ll be able to find everything easily.

Bring stakeholders along to research sessions

Getting a stakeholder along to a research session (usability tests and user interviews are great starting points) will help to show them the value that face-to-face sessions with users can provide.

To really involve an observer in your UX research, assign them a specific role. Note taker, for example. With a short briefing on best-practices for note taking, they can get a feel for what’s like to do some of the work you do.

You may also want to consider bringing anyone who’s interested along to a research session, even if they’re just there to observe.

Share your findings – consistently

Research is about more than just testing a hypothesis, it’s important to actually take your research back to the people who can action the data.

By sharing your research findings with teams and stakeholders regularly, your organization will start to build up an understanding of the value that ongoing research can provide, meaning getting approval to pursue research in future becomes easier. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but it’s a practice that all researchers need to get into – especially those embedded in large teams or organizations.

Anything else you think is worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.

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1 min read

Bear Liu: How visual thinking can improve communications in design workplaces

When Bear Liu was teaching himself design, he struggled remembering concepts since English wasn’t his first language. To help, he started doodling. By drawing pictures that related to what he was learning, he found he could not only remember them better, he could understand and communicate more effectively too. Ever since, he’s used the power of drawings and pictures to relay information in ways people can use.

Bear gives examples of how visual communication can help design workplaces to relay information in a more memorable and usable way. It may only seem like a minor change, but the difference can be significant.

Bear’s background 🎤

Bear Liu is a Product Designer at Xero, an online accounting platform that’s used all over the world. He’s also a Design Mentor at Springboard and CareerFoundry, and an Apple Award-Winning podcast host at BearTalk.

His background is in science education. As a self-taught designer, Bear has helped a raft of large and small businesses with digital products over the last 16 years. His clients come from diverse backgrounds and industries across the globe. Bear's professional passions also carry over into his hobbies. Outside of work he enjoys reading, drawing, and producing videos & podcasts on tech and design.

Contact Details:

You can find Bear on LinkedIn, or listen to his podcast, BearTalk.

Unleash your visual superpower as a communication pro 🦸🏻

When it comes to addressing business challenges it is important to keep these three aspects in mind: 

  1. Understanding - break down complex problems and solutions so everyone can understand. 
  2. Memory - retaining information in your mind is difficult even with note taking.
  3. Communication- People relate to words differently, and the meaning of something can easily get lost in translation. This issue is more prevalent with remote work.

Bear Liu strongly believes that visual communication helps people understand, remember and communicate information more effectively. Why?

  • It helps to focus. Pictures remove distractions and draw attention to where it’s desired.
  • It’s a token. A picture is universal - a house or a smiley face means the same thing to people that speak different languages. 
  • Most people are visual thinkers. Studies have found humans are hard-wired to process visual information faster. We are better at storing information in images, rather than numbers and letters.

But what if I can’t draw? This is a common issue Bear finds when talking to people about this. It’s not about the quality of the drawing itself, it’s about what it means. By delivering a message through a picture, it becomes understandable. Many of Bear’s drawings only ever remain in draft form. Even simple doodles can have meanings that make concepts clear.

In his design work at Xero, Bear has used drawing and sketches to great effect in a range of instances:

  • The accessibility tree was a complex, abstract system, but by drawing it (on a literal tree), and adding a few notes alongside it, the terminology became much more understandable.
  • Sketching how customers work made it easier to describe how Xero could help them. It was much more memorable than writing it out in paragraphs.
  • Wrapping the year in product design. A written summary of a year’s work is long-winded. Instead, Bear drew a tree and pinned key words, quotes and achievements to communicate the highlights.
  • UX terminology explanations can be difficult for those outside the industry to comprehend. Bear challenged himself to share 1 minute videos that accompanied simple drawings to help colleagues understand them, and had rave reviews.
  • Sketching notes is a great alternative to writing notes at conferences or meetings. Presenters can draw to help audiences follow along, and people in the audience themselves can also sketch their own notes.

Why it matters  🔥

Bear has adapted visual thinking to his own product design process and has seen a noticeable improvement in communication as a result.

People are busy - their brains are packed with all sorts of information, and they’re easily distracted by other things they have on their minds. By delivering information in a way that helps them to focus on it, remember and understand it, designers can achieve their ultimate goals.

As Bear also notes, drawing is fun. It’s much more rewarding than using words, as well as much more effective.

Bear used the example of his talk at UX New Zealand 2023 as a great place to use a drawing. Rather than follow along with his message by scribbling notes the whole way through, those in the audience could capture the biggest lessons easily in one simple drawing.

  • First, Bear drew one stick figure to represent himself as a speaker. He drew three speech bubbles, where audience members could write the most notable points he said.
  • Then he drew another stick figure, which represented the audience member listening to him. They had three thought bubbles, which people could populate with their biggest takeaways from the speech.

That one simple drawing is a template that can be used in any speech or meeting to remember the key points.

Seeing is believing

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