Build Empathy for Customers

I follow a design-thinking process where the first step is gaining knowledge of target users and the support people who make the product or service a success. I tailor the data-gathering activities to the type of project and the resources and time available. Activities typically include competitive research and analysis, conducting interviews, field studies, empathy maps, journey maps, defining user tasks and environment profiles, and developing personas.

Competitive Analysis

As part of a comprehensive Comparative Analysis for Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal, I analyzed competing pharmacy service providers relative to customer perception. My analysis uncovered many opportunities to differentiate product and service offerings.

I perform competitive and comparative analysis from a user-centric perspective. I focus on how customers perceive the company, brand, products and services provided. I typically work closely with the Marketing Department when conducting this activity and I often find that much of the data needed already exists within the organization. This activity is a fast, inexpensive and relatively easy way to gain a good understanding of customers' options.

Personal Interviews

To uncover important qualitative insights for Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal, I conducted personal interviews with pharmacy customers, pharmacy managers, store managers, pharmacists, technicians, and clinical services providers.

Speaking directly with people who use the product or service is the best way that I've found to gather qualitative data. By doing this simple and cost-effective activity, I gain insights that would otherwise go undiscovered until much later in the process. Conducting interviews is a great way to make sure that I'm building the right solution for the target audience.

Observation

I observed Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal target users (pharmacists and technicians) performing everyday activities in the context of the use environment (in a pharmacy) to uncover routine behavioral data that might not surface in interviews.

I perform observational studies to uncover behavioral aspects that are so routine that users may forget to mention them during interviews. It's amazing how much one can learn just by watching people. This activity helps form the basis for understanding how people complete tasks — multi-tasking, job aids and work-arounds are often exposed by observing people perform the activities that a product or service is intended to address.

Contextual Inquiry

I've developed a precise method of gathering data that combines personal interviews and observation conducted in a target user's environment. In these photos, I'm interviewing and observing pharmacists and technicians while they are performing the activities that new products and services will be designed to address.

My contextual inquiry approach takes a bit more practice and preparation in order to use this data gathering technique correctly — I have to know exactly when and how to interrupt the user to ask questions without disrupting their normal activities. The time investment is worth the results, and I've found this is another excellent way to gather valuable information. It's become a preferred method I frequently employ when time and access to users allows it.

Focus Groups, Surveys and Secondary Data Sources

I conducted a number of focus groups for the Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal project, to gather useful information from stakeholders.

I typically conduct focus groups and additional activities when I gather a group of stakeholders, such as journey mapping, story boarding and participatory design. I use surveys to collect large amounts of quantitative data in a short period of time. I supplement this information with secondary data from support forums, web logs, customer feedback forms and other sources. I find that decisions based on data are better than those based on intuition or a gut-feeling.

Personas

Personas that I developed for the Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal project helped to keep design solutions focused on improvements for target users.

After learning about target users, I use the data gathered to develop detailed Personas. I focus on creating Personas that represent a user group in a way that is easily relatable. I share the Personas with cross-functional groups to help remind everyone to base decisions on what will work for the target users, rather than what we might prefer to build. I establish group consensus that a product or service must address our target user needs to be successful.

Define a Problem Statement

After building user profiles based on gathered data, highlighting user likes and dislikes, and considering all collected intelligence about what will make the product or service successful, I have insight needed to define a problem statement that can be solved. My experience has proven that by clearly defining the problem statement, a product or service is very likely to be successful because it solves an identified problem for users. The steps to defining the problem statement also provide additional valuable insights about users and processes, and typically produce materials that aid in the outlining of the project, such as user journeys and scenarios.

Journey Mapping

An important part of my design process involves a lot of sticky notes on walls. These photos show the initial output of journey mapping workshops for the Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal project. Each set of sticky notes was converted to digital form and analyzed.

Journey mapping is an essential tool that I use to understand customers' activities, thoughts, feelings and pain points for every customer touch point associated with the product, service or brand. I work with a group of cross-functional stakeholders, users and customers to create journey maps. I frame the process as a fun way for groups to help surface real opportunities to impact the customer experience and make positive changes to customer perceptions of the brand, product or service.

Develop Scenarios

I developed the user scenarios above to help Walgreens' stakeholders understand user needs and motivations. The detail that I provided helped stakeholders understand the reasons why users need access to different types of information in order to do their job, which was essential to making decisions about the technical infrastructure.

I create user scenarios as narratives based on a specific situation a user encounters when engaging with a product or service. The narratives explain the context of the user need and the users' motivations. I frame user scenarios to answer the "Why?" question from the users' point of view for a specific situation. The goal of the scenarios is to provide a deeper understanding of user activities and challenges. I include enough detail for the scenarios to also be a helpful guide for usability testing.

Define a Problem Statement

Using accumulated data, I made a presentation with several recommendations for approaches to address Walgreens' Pharmacy customer pain points. I included metrics which document the problem and can be used to track the success rate of solutions.

Clearly defining the problem you want to solve is a critical step in the process. I've found that a well-written problem statement helps communicate the problem to the organization, and it helps the organization focus efforts on solving the right problem. After I accumulate information from data gathering activities, I present the information to stakeholders. The presentation explains customer insights based on that information and, based on those collective customer insights, defines a problem in clear and concise language. The presentation also includes several recommendations for approaches to address the problem and metrics which document the problem and can be used to track the success rate of solutions.

Ideation

I lead a collaborative process to generate differentiated ideas to solve the problems that have been defined. Activities include brainstorming with stakeholders and techniques like journey mapping, creating scenarios, use cases, and user stories.

Concept Ideation with Stakeholders and Users

The output of idea generation workshops that I conduct are an essential part of the process and form the beginning of new solutions to address customer and user needs with innovative products and services.

I use many techniques for idea generation, tailored to the situation and resources. The goal of these techniques is to get stakeholders to think creatively about potential solutions to a problem. This can be achieved by brainstorming, questioning assumptions, re-expression, mind-mapping, role playing and other methods.

Concept Mapping

After idea generation, I employ concept mapping to identify the relationships between ideas and to help evaluate the potential of an idea set.

Whiteboard Activities

I used whiteboarding exercises on every project, as a tool to quickly clarify ideas and iterate on them.

Whiteboard activities serve many purposes during the design process that I lead. I use whiteboarding exercises to quickly clarify ideas and iterate on them, to quickly diagram complex processes and explore changes to those processes. I then use whiteboarding exercises to rapidly illustrate user interface concepts and engage stakeholders to do the same. I use whiteboards daily to clarify communication throughout the entire product or service design process.

Task Analysis

I used task analysis to identify a series of manual tasks which were prime candidates for automation as part of Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal. The process that I led exposed a single blocker issue to automating tasks. Resolving that issue resulted in a better experience for both users (pharmacists and technicians) and customers.

Task analysis and task decomposition are useful techniques that I employ for breaking-down high-level tasks into their component sub-tasks. By completing this process, I identify tasks and activities which can be optimized, or even eliminated.

Map the Site or App

I create site maps and app maps as part of the process of defining the information architecture for digital products.

I believe that good information architecture is the backbone of apps, websites and desktop software, so I create detailed maps for all digital products early in the design process. It's critically important for users to be able to easily find the content or features in an app or site. If they can't, they probably won't continue to use the product or site. The maps help ensure good design solutions.

Prototyping

After idea generation, the best or most achievable idea is selected for prototyping. I set the vision for high-level wireframe concepts that can be produced for user feedback testing and ensure usability before spending resources developing high-level prototypes. Working with visual designers, we start with wireframes and non-functional paper prototypes. Through an iterative testing process with users and stakeholders, the prototypes are refined. Using storyboards, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes, I outline the information architecture with sitemaps/app maps and identify all artifacts in a user's environment. The design specification is created and the concept evolves into a full design solution.

Storyboards

I used the storyboards above to visually communicate proposed new customer experiences when filling prescriptions at Walgreens'. The storyboards made it easy for cross-functional groups to visualize how new systems would function once implemented.

Storyboards are a tool that I use to visually communicate a new experience with a product or service. I like to use storyboards throughout the design process, especially if the new experience is difficult to describe or involves multiple systems and people. I've found that images can often communicate more than technical explanations.

Sketching and Paper Prototyping

I use sketches and paper prototypes to quickly illustrate user interface ideas to share with team members before moving on to digital concept development.

Sketching on paper is still one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest ways that I've found to rapidly illustrate product and user interface ideas. In fact, in early stages of concept development, I find that there are good reasons to conduct usability tests with paper prototypes versus a digital counterpart. I usually start concepts on paper and then iterate on paper before moving to higher fidelity digital prototyping.

Digital Prototyping

I develop high fidelity digital prototypes, after user testing and iterating with paper prototypes, to make sure that the concept is worth further investment.

I use many different tools such as Axure, Figma, InVision, Sketch and others to create click-through prototypes and fully interactive prototypes. If the situation warrants it, I create semi-functional prototypes in order to test complex interactions or data-intensive systems. My purpose is to validate the concepts with actual users before making a large investment in developing a final product. At this point in the process, it is still much easier, faster and less costly to redesign the entire product, if needed, than it would be if the product had been fully developed. I use prototypes to "fail fast" — to find and address issues before they make it into the final product.

UX Research

UX research serves many purposes throughout the design process. In order to make good decisions about design and implementation, I gather data about how people use the designs through research and usability testing. I use the data to help identify and prove or disprove assumptions, find commonalities across target user groups and recognize user needs and goals.

I have designed, executed and managed UX research. I typically use the following process, depending on time and resources:

• Conduct interviews for internal stakeholders to understand the business vision and requirements
• Conduct interviews with users
• Facilitate workshops and design and execute user research activities, including field studies and/or lab studies with customers and potential new users
• Generate and effectively communicate insights and recommendations
• Gather market research and industry patterns to help inform/inspire design for various features and functions across mobile and desktop experiences
• Conduct basic market research to inform product positioning and feature development
• Discover and validate business and user requirements
• Work closely with analytics team members to drive evidence-based decision making
• Conduct analysis and synthesis sessions with whole team and stakeholders
• Document and present findings and recommendations to cross-functional teams and stakeholders; strategize with stakeholders on how to act on research findings and synthesize requirements into effective use cases
• Lead design validation activities and report recommendations to stakeholders

Usability Testing

The images above show usability testing that I led for Walgreens' Pharmacy Renewal. Users are interacting with product prototypes while stakeholders watch the process in a nearby observation room.

I find that a very important step in product implementation is for stakeholders to watch actual users interacting with a prototype and to hear their commentary so that they have better insight about strengths and any weaknesses that need to be addressed.

Participant Feedback

I create "Highlights and Lowlights" videos showing the good and not-so-good moments from usability test sessions for those stakeholders who are not able to attend in-person. This effort also provides a great way to internally share impactful moments with other team members who can benefit from the information.

Deployment & Monitoring

Design solutions are a constant consideration, from concept to launch, to continuous updates after release. Once a full design solution has been released, I closely monitor user acceptance in order to be able to react to any problems or undesirable effects that may be present. Throughout the product lifecycle, I follow a continuous improvement process, with updates to the design, and additional testing to address any issues and add features.