“None of us is as smart as all of us” (Ken Blanchard)
Working in a team of complete strangers on the first Ironhack project
Written by Alice Boter, Lidija Krcmar, Gabriela Riveros and Maaike Wachters
As a team, we have just finished our first Ironhack challenge, and apart from learning a lot about user research, it was quite a challenge in itself to (re)learn how to work in a team with complete strangers. It was a good learning experience to be reminded of how that works and how rewarding it can be to have lots of different backgrounds (career and otherwise) on one team.
So what did we do over the past week and a half, except getting to know each other and our team dynamic?
The brief
The assignment was to redesign the interface of a national transport service. We chose to redesign the English version of the website of Statens Järnvägar (SJ), the Swedish national railways. We chose the Swedish transport service as they’re website seemed very customer friendly and easy to use at first sight, so it would be a fun challenge to find improvements for the design. We chose to look at the English version, simply because we don’t speak Swedish ourselves. We did decide our team name was ABBA though, to make sure we would incorporate a bit of a Swedish mindset.
Design Thinking
The steps of Design Thinking are: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. So how did we incorporate these steps into our project?
Empathise
Starting off with empathising with the user, we used techniques such as online research, a survey, interviews and usability testing. These are good ways of finding out a broad number of things about how your users experience the website, what their pain points are, and what they like about it. In our online research we found very little comments about using the website, but mostly people being very angry about trains being cancelled or delayed. We decided to ask a few broad questions in our survey, to see if we could get some pain points to surface. We asked them about how often they travel by train, how they prefer to book tickets, how far in advance, and several questions about payment options and receiving the tickets. Then we conducted interviews with some of the respondents to get some more insight, and did a usability test on the website with them, to see how they used it and what issues they might run into. And it turned out, to our surprise, that there actually were quite a few pain points. A good reminder of the lesson our teachers keep telling us: You are not your user! Just because we didn’t see any pain points at first sight, doesn’t mean they are not there. Repeat after me: You are not your user.
Define
In order to make sense of all the data we got from our research we decided to bring out the UX designer’s most important tool: the post-it notes. As a team, we wrote down all the data we found and then grouped them according to topic. We found many pain points: they were confused about which price was for which ticket, they didn’t know how much a Swedish krone would be in their own currency, some parts of the website were in Swedish, they didn’t know where any of the destinations were, they wanted other methods of payment, they couldn’t change their booking, etc. To be fair, they did also like a few things about the website: a nice and clear design, the option to choose your own seat, and some tourist information being available. But we also had plenty of pain points to choose from. In order to narrow it down we used dot-voting on our affinity diagram, each team member choosing the pain points they thought to be most useful to work on. It turned out there were two pain points we all thought important: our users don’t know where places are in Sweden and they can’t change their booking without losing information already entered.
Ideate
Having decided what to work on, we went to the next stage: coming up with solutions. We decided it would be best to get as many different ideas as possible and worked on possible solutions separately from each other. We then got back together to exchange our ideas. A funny thing happened: for the “change booking” problem, we all pretty much came up with the same idea of making the breadcrumb at the top of the screen clickable. So that one was easy to decide on. And then some of us also came up with adding a “Change Journey” button at the end of the booking process, which the others thought was a good idea, so we added that. And then we got to the other issue, our users not knowing Sweden well enough to decide on their journey, and that’s where the quote “None of us is as smart as all of us” really came into play. We had all come up with the idea of adding a map, but in different ways, none of which was the best solution. Some of us wanted to add a Google Pin, some of us a pop-up, and others incorporated it into the homescreen. In the end we went for the Frankenstein solution: mixing and matching ideas to get the best end product.
Prototype
The ideas for the redesign of the website were then made into a paper prototype, and then made interactive through Figma.
Test
Final step of the first iteration, testing! In order to make sure our solutions were actually helping our users, we tested our prototype on five users. We made them go through the booking process and asked them about why they did tasks a certain way, and what their expectations were of different actions. The main result from the prototype usability test was that some of our changes actually confused people even more. The map was a good addition as our users felt more confident about where places are in Sweden, but some of them expected the map to be interactive as well and were confused when nothing happened when they clicked the map. Some of them were confused by the map itself, not being sure if this meant if they could also book tickets from, for example, Denmark to Sweden, as Denmark was included on the map.
But, the changes we made to make it possible to change your journey were well received. All of our tested users understood how to use the clickable breadcrumb and went straight to that part of the website when asked to change something about their booking. The “Change Journey” button in the final booking screen was also well received and well used during the test.
Back to empathise…
So, having both confused and delighted our users, it’s now time to go back to the drawing board. For the second iteration of our redesign we would like to go back to ask our users in more detail about their expectations of the functionality of the map, and how they would prefer to use it. And perhaps, also ask them some more questions about all the other pain points we found in our initial research, that we didn’t address in our redesign.
Final comments
Repeat after me: You are not your user. Also, dot-voting really works to get the decision making process going in a group. And Miro is very cool.
Written by Team ABBA: Alice Boter, Lidija Krcmar, Gabriela Riveros and Maaike Wachters.