Eric Eichbauer | User Experience Designer

OVERVIEW

Because of covid, there was a large demand for sample processing to determine who might have the virus. The process consists of lab instruments my company provides, so we wanted to validate a concept that would decrease turn around time of results by adding automation to the process.

My role was to get team alignment and provide the materials we could conduct interviews with. Over the course of three months I would lead team workshops, produce an interview script, and synthesize findings...with more workshops. This project an example of some of the techniques I use to approach a problems and find solutions.

I created a visual diagram of the process we wanted to validate. We used thise during our interviews to explain the process at a high level before diving deeper into specific areas.

As we continued to look over the conceptual process, themes started to bubble up that we would later organize our interview into.

MY PROCESS

The people (scientist & engineers) brought in for the project all brought unique domain expertise around instrumentation, automation, and software. I used an online collaboration tool to facilitate conversations and activities. Depending on the project, my process may consist of problem definition, personas, desired outcomes, goals, challenges, and solutions. For this project we would align around the following...

Problem analysis
This one is always needed. We (myself included) love to jump into solutions before really understanding the problem past face value. Terminology alignment
Throughout this process I noticed people were using key domain terminology differently, so I paused the group to get alignment around those key terms. Concept journey & themes
We listed out the sequence of events that needed to take place in order for the concept to work and from this, formed themes we could organize our interview by. Question formation
I led the group in a series of exercises to determine what we wanted to learn and formed those into the questions we would ask in our interviews.

Under each of the themes we had formed, I asked everyone to add questions they thought were relevant. We then worked through the sequence of the questions so the interview would flow well.

I created slides as a conversation pieces around the questions. I am a software designer and there was a software component to the concept but it wasn't our focus at this point. Any visualizations I added were very high level to keep participants focused on the concept and not the details.

INTERVIEWS

Since the subject matter of the interviews was domain heavy, we decided to let a product manager, who was subject matter expert from our team, conduct the interviews. Research isn't rocket science – ironically some of the people I work with are – so I advised as best I could on dos & don'ts of interviews, and we refined as we went. We successfully conducted eight interviews.

After we conducted our eight interviews we did some affinity diagraming. I then asked the team to select a specific number of sticky notes from the participant note boards with a comment about why it was important. We voted on the notes and captured the top 13 insights.

I created participant boards for each interview and had a couple note takers for each interview. This is a cleaned up version of one of the boards.

This is the insights board I referred to above. The most significant insight was around what attributes the lab was looking for once the results were in.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Many of us hadn't worked together previous to this project so I thought it was a good opportunity to work on my workshopping skills by running everyone through a series of collaborative exercises. Sometimes the documented output of the exercises is secondary to the conversations they spark in order to gain team familiarity. I'm a designer first but I've found that having a more strategic approach to problem solving helps me get closer to designing the right solution.