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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6 things to consider when setting up a research practice

With UX research so closely tied to product success, setting up a dedicated research practice is fast becoming important for many organizations. It’s not an easy process, especially for organizations that have had little to do with research, but the end goal is worth the effort.

But where exactly are you supposed to start? This article provides 6 key things to keep in mind when setting up a research practice, and should hopefully ensure you’ve considered all of the relevant factors.

1) Work out what your organization needs

The first and most simple step is to take stock of the current user research situation within the organization. How much research is currently being done? Which teams or individuals are talking to customers on an ongoing basis? Consider if there are any major pain points with the current way research is being carried out or bottlenecks in getting research insights to the people that need them. If research isn't being practiced, identify teams or individuals that don't currently have access to the resources they need, and consider ways to make insights available to the people that need them.

2) Consolidate your insights

UX research should be communicating with nearly every part of an organization, from design teams to customer support, engineering departments and C-level management. The insights that stem from user research are valuable everywhere. Of course, the opposite is also true: insights from support and sales are useful for understanding customers and how the current product is meeting people's needs.

When setting up a research practice, identify which teams you should align with, and then reach out. Sit down with these teams and explore how you can help each other. For your part, you’ll probably need to explain the what and why of user research within the context of your organization, and possibly even explain at a basic level some of the techniques you use and the data you can obtain.

Then, get in touch with other teams with the goal of learning from them. A good research practice needs a strong connection to other parts of the business with the express purpose of learning. For example, by working with your organization’s customer support team, you’ll have a direct line to some of the issues that customers deal with on a regular basis. A good working relationship here means they’ll likely feed these insights back to you, in order to help you frame your research projects.

By working with your sales team, they’ll be able to share issues prospective customers are dealing with. You can follow up on this information with research, the results of which can be fed into the development of your organization’s products.

It can also be fruitful to develop an insights repository, where researchers can store any useful insights and log research activities. This means that sales, customer support and other interested parties can access the results of your research whenever they need to.

When your research practice is tightly integrated other key areas of the business, the organization is likely to see innumerable benefits from the insights>product loop.

3) Figure out which tools you will use

By now you’ve hopefully got an idea of how your research practice will fit into the wider organization – now it’s time to look at the ways in which you’ll do your research. We’re talking, of course, about research methods and testing tools.

We won’t get into every different type of method here (there are plenty of other articles and guides for that), but we will touch on the importance of qualitative and quantitative methods. If you haven’t come across these terms before, here’s a quick breakdown:

  • Qualitative research – Focused on exploration. It’s about discovering things we cannot measure with numbers, and often involves speaking with users through observation or user interviews.
  • Quantitative research – Focused on measurement. It’s all about gathering data and then turning this data into usable statistics.

All user research methods are designed to deliver either qualitative or quantitative data, and as part of your research practice, you should ensure that you always try to gather both types. By using this approach, you’re able to generate a clearer overall picture of whatever it is you’re researching.

Next comes the software. A solid stack of user research testing tools will help you to put research methods into practice, whether for the purposes of card sorting, carrying out more effective user interviews or running a tree test.

There are myriad tools available now, and it can be difficult to separate the useful software from the chaff. Here’s a list of research and productivity tools that we recommend.

Tools for research

Here’s a collection of research tools that can help you gather qualitative and quantitative data, using a number of methods.

  • Treejack – Tree testing can show you where people get lost on your website, and help you take the guesswork out of information architecture decisions. Like OptimalSort, Treejack makes it easy to sort through information and pairs this with in-depth analysis features.
  • dScout – Imagine being able to get video snippets of your users as they answer questions about your product. That’s dScout. It’s a video research platform that collects in-context “moments” from a network of global participants, who answer your questions either by video or through photos.
  • Ethnio – Like dScout, this is another tool designed to capture information directly from your users. It works by showing an intercept pop-up to people who land on your website. Then, once they agree, it runs through some form of research.
  • OptimalSort – Card sorting allows you to get perspective on whatever it is you’re sorting and understand how people organize information. OptimalSort makes it easier and faster to sort through information, and you can access powerful analysis features.
  • Reframer – Taking notes during user interviews and usability tests can be quite time-consuming, especially when it comes to analyze the data. Reframer gives individuals and teams a single tool to store all of their notes, along with a set of powerful analysis features to make sense of their data.
  • Chalkmark – First-click testing can show you what people click on first in a user interface when they’re asked to complete a task. This is useful, as when people get their first click correct, they’re much more likely to complete their task. Chalkmark makes the process of setting up and running a first-click test easy. What’s more, you’re given comprehensive analysis tools, including a click heatmap.

Tools for productivity

These tools aren’t necessarily designed for user research, but can provide vital links in the process.

  • Whimsical – A fantastic tool for user journeys, flow charts and any other sort of diagram. It also solves one of the biggest problems with online whiteboards – finicky object placement.
  • Descript – Easily transcribe your interview and usability test audio recordings into text.
  • Google Slides – When it inevitably comes time to present your research findings to stakeholders, use Google Slides to create readable, clear presentations.

4) Figure out how you’ll track findings over time

With some idea of the research methods and testing tools you’ll be using to collect data, now it’s time to think about how you’ll manage all of this information. A carefully ordered spreadsheet and folder system can work – but only to an extent. Dedicated software is a much better choice, especially given that you can scale these systems much more easily.

A dedicated home for your research data serves a few distinct purposes. There’s the obvious benefit of being able to access all of your findings whenever you need them, which means it’s much easier to create personas if the need arises. A dedicated home also means your findings will remain accessible and useful well into the future.

When it comes to software, Reframer stands as one of the better options for creating a detailed customer insights repository as you’re able to capture your sessions directly in the tool and then apply tags afterwards. You can then easily review all of your observations and findings using the filtering options. Oh, and there’s obviously the analysis side of the tool as well.

If you’re looking for a way to store high-level findings – perhaps if you’re intending to share this data with other parts of your organization – then a tool like Confluence or Notion is a good option. These tools are basically wikis, and include capable search and navigation options too.

5) Where will you get participants from?

A pool of participants you can draw from for your user research is another important part of setting up a research practice. Whenever you need to run a study, you’ll have real people you can call on to test, ask questions and get feedback from.

This is where you’ll need to partner other teams, likely sales and customer support. They’ll have direct access to your customers, so make sure to build a strong relationship with these teams. If you haven’t made introductions, it can helpful to put together a one-page sheet of information explaining what UX research is and the benefits of working with your team.

You may also want to consider getting in some external help. Participant recruitment services are a great way to offload the heavy lifting of sourcing quality participants – often one of the hardest parts of the research process.

6) Work out how you'll communicate your research

Perhaps one of the most important parts of being a user researcher is taking the findings you uncover and communicating them back to the wider organization. By feeding insights back to product, sales and customer support teams, you’ll form an effective link between your organization’s customers and your organization. The benefits here are obvious. Product teams can build products that actually address customer pain points, and sales and support teams will better understand the needs and expectations of customers.

Of course, it isn’t easy to communicate findings. Here are a few tips:

  • Document your research activities: With a clear record of your research, you’ll find it easier to pull out relevant findings and communicate these to the right teams.
  • Decide who needs what: You’ll probably find that certain roles (like managers) will be best served by a high-level overview of your research activities (think a one-page summary), while engineers, developers and designers will want more detailed research findings.

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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.

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1 min read

Understanding UI design and its principles

Wireframes. Mockups. HTML. Fonts. Elements. Users. If you’re familiar with user interface design, these terms will be your bread and butter.An integral part of any website or application, user interface design is also arguably one of the most important. This is because your design is what your users see and interact with. If your site or app functions poorly and looks terrible, that’s what your users are going to remember.

But isn’t UX design and UI design the same thing? Or is there just an extremely blurred line between the two? What’s involved with UI design and, more importantly, what makes good design?

What is UI design exactly?

If you’re wondering how to test UI on your website, it’s a good idea to first learn some of the differences between UX and UI design. Although UI design and UX design look similar when written down, they’re actually two totally separate things. However, they should most definitely complement each other.

UX design, according to Nielsen Norman Group, “encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” Meanwhile, UI design focuses more on a user’s interaction, the overall design, look and feel of a system. The two still sound similar, right?For those of you still trying to wrap your ahead around the difference, Nielsen Norman Group has a great analogy up on its site that helps to explain it:

"As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios.”

This just goes to show the complementary relationship between the two and why it’s so important.User interface was popularized in the early 1970s, partly thanks to Fuji Xerox’s ‘Xerox Alto Workstation’ — an early personal computer dubbed “the origin of the PC”. This machine used various icons, multi windows, a mouse, and e-mail, which meant that some sort of design and design principles were needed to create consistency for the future. It was here that human-centred UI was born. UI design also covers graphical user interface design (GUI design). A GUI is the software or interface that works as the medium between a user and the computer.

It uses a number of graphical elements, such as screen cursors, menus, and icons so that users can easily navigate a system. This is also something that has stemmed from Fuji Xerox back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Since then, UI has developed quickly and so has its design principles. When the Xerox Alto Workstation was first born, Fuji Xerox came up with eight of its own design principles. These were:

  • Metaphorically digitize the desk environment
  • Operating on display instead of entering on keyboard
  • What you see is what you get
  • Universal but fewer commands
  • Same operation for the same job at different places
  • Operating computers as easily as possible
  • No need to transfer to different jobs
  • System customized as desired by users

Over time, these principles have evolved and now you’ll likely find many more added to this list. Here are just a few of the most important ones identified in “Characteristics of graphical and web user interfaces” by Wilbert Galitz.

UI design principles:

Principle #1: Clarity

Usability.gov says that the “best interfaces are almost invisible to the user”.Everything in the system, from visual elements, functions, and text, needs to be clear and simple. This includes layout as well as the words used — stay away from jargon and complex terms or analogies that users won’t understand.Aesthetic appeal also fits into this principle. Ensure colors and graphics are used in a simple manner, and elements are grouped in a way that makes sense.

Principle #2: Consistency

The system should have the same or similar functions, uses and look throughout it for consistency. For example, the same color scheme should be used throughout an app, or the terminology on a website should be consistent throughout. Users should also have an idea of what to expect when they use your system. As an example, picture a retail shopping app. You’d expect that any other retail shopping app out there will have similar basic functions: a place to log in or create an account, account settings, a way to navigate and browse stock, a way to purchase stock at the press of a button. However, this doesn’t mean copying another app or website exactly; there should just be consistency so users know what to expect when they encounter your system.Apple even states an “app should respect its users and avoid forcing them to learn new ways to do things for no other reason than to be different”.

Principle #3: Flexibility and customizability

Is there more than one way people can access your system and its functions? Can people perform tasks in a number of different ways, too?Providing your users with a flexible system means people are more in control of what they’re doing. Galitz mentions this can also be done through allowing system customization.Don’t forget use on other kinds of devices, too. In a time when Google is using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, and research from Ericsson shows smartphones accounted for 75% of all mobile phone sales in Q4 2015, you know that being flexible is important.

Examples of good UI design

For a list of some of the best user interface examples, check out last year’s Webby Awards category for Best Interface Design. The 2016 category winner was the Reuters TV Web App, while the People’s Choice winner was AssessYourRisk.org.As an aside, this is the second year that the Webby Awards introduced this category — just goes to show how important it is to have good UI design!While you don’t want your site or application to look exactly the same as these winners, you still want yours to function well and be aesthetically pleasing.

To help you get there, there are a number of UI design tools and UI software available.Here’s a list of some of the many out there:

  • UXPin - An online UI design tool that allows you to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes all on one platform.
  • InVision - A prototyping and collaboration tool. More in-depth than Balsamiq, and it allows you to go from mockup to high-fidelity in minutes.
  • Balsamiq - A simple mockups tool for wireframing, which allows users to test out ideas in the early stage of interface design.
  • Atomic - An interface design tool that allows you to design in your browser and collaborate with others on your projects.

Have you got any favorite UI design examples, or tips for beautiful design? We’d love to see them — comment below and let us know!

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