Feb 17

Feb 17 Personalized product builder

Overview

Beginning with a 3-day remote workshop including a group of marketers, analysts, technologists, designers and specialists, I ushered a collaborative team to define a goal, map current and future journeys, interview experts, consider and rank how-we-might solutions, iteratively sketch pinpoint scenarios, define success metrics and choose a recommended design direction.

Problem statement

Create an improved global solution finder experience that is easily updated, to serve as a foundation for current and future products/solutions sets that drive business results (leads, revenue) and leave the customer satisfied.

Users & audience

Director of Public Safety - IT Director/Assistant Director - Communications/Radio system manager - Radio communications/technician - Police/Fire Chief - Procurement manager/agent - CAD manager

My roles & responsibilities

Workshop facilitator, UX designer

Scope & constraints

Conducted remotely. Condense a 5 day workshop into 3 half days. Heavily contingent on product data.

Process

Day 1 kicked off with a round of introductions, definitions and rules for the next three days. We discussed aspirations, opportunities, challenges and aligned on a long term goal: OUR LONG TERM SPRINT GOAL Create an improved global solution finder experience, that is easily updated, to serve as a foundation for current and future products/solutions sets that drives business results (leads, revenue, etc) and leaves the customer satisfied.

With clear direction in sight, we progressed to diagnose our current situation by mapping the current tool and ask ourselves tough questions about the type of customers we should target, their corresponding business needs and the actions that will lead them towards our objective: selling a solution.

While interviewing our experts, each of us made notes about how-might-we build a solution to a variety of challenges and needs our customers face. Using an affinity mapping exercise, we categorized all our potential solutions, assigned the category to the appropriate customer journey phase and then voted on the phase and solution to focus our efforts.

Participants vote for a phase of the customer journey as a focus for sketching solutions

On Day 2 we flexed our creative muscles through an iterative sketching technique, Crazy 8’s, where we separated into 3 teams, all with the same objective in mind - designing a user experience that addresses our B2B customers’ Business needs.

Every individual sketches their 8 ideas, 3 times. After each of the 3 rounds, teams discussed the good points and points to improve for their sketches. The team is responsible for creating one solution sketch. The sketch is an opinionated hypothesis for how to solve the challenge at hand, in detail — and these will be looked at and judged by the rest of the team tomorrow.

Day 3 started with Solution Sketch presentations where each team presented design ideas, workflows and rationale for their solution. Similar to the sketching, after each presentation all members are encouraged to note Good Points, Points to Improve and Comments.

After all 3 teams presented their solution sketches, everyone voted for the best solution by placing Red Dots on the project in general or a particular phase. The majority of participants voted for Team 1’s project. After some discussion, valuable suggestions and ideas were noted in other Team projects which are also documented.

In conclusion, our solution will initiate B2B Business needs through a series of questions that address HOW the user wants to build the solution. Overwhelmingly, our group favored the proposal that initiates the Solution finder by asking B2B users to choose a solution by technology, industry or outcome.

By Technology: They know what they are looking for and we are going to help them choose the right one. Current solution finder would be an example.
By Industry: We present technology and solutions based on commonly purchased solutions within this industry
By Outcome (help me solve a problem): We present various common challenges that commercial customers face that we can address and

Each method will progress to include a series of further qualifying questions. Preliminary designs will use placeholder questions and be limited to 5 +/- 1 (presentation 3) including, but not limited to:

Outcomes & lessons learned

Our condensed schedule forced us to forego testing until we have a more viable prototype. UX designers took workshop artifacts and built a prototype using wireframes outlined below.

Overall, the workshop was received as a resounding success with many participants and leadership publicly thanking and congratulating us. It greatly improved the UX teams position as strategic thought leaders.