Video: Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work

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Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work

Gold

Thursday, November 8, 2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018

Holly Cole

Senior User Research Analyst, iCIMS, Scholarship Judge

Summary

All of us work as part of something bigger, and we have a set of processes that allow us to make sense of our day-to-day work and its value context. What happens when you need to quickly grow and change, how to you understand those processes? How do you grow your understanding, internally, to improve your teams? First things first, you have to understand the processes and experiences that are going on right now. That takes research. So, let’s get meta.

Key Insights

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Treat internal team members as users by applying user-centered research methods to understand their work experiences.
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Using diary studies and contextual interviews can reveal daily pain points and emotional states of team members.
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Creating personas and service blueprints for internal roles uncovers process gaps and support needs.
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Publishing maps and personas publicly encourages team validation and collaboration, reducing political friction.
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Research findings can directly shape precise and evidence-backed hiring requirements rather than generic job descriptions.
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Employing scripts based on real team insights makes recruiting interviews more relevant and effective.
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Improved onboarding, mentoring, and knowledge sharing resulted from understanding team challenges deeply.
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The core problem uncovered was poor communication and alignment between contracting and home companies.
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Building empathy and a community through shared experiences leads to lasting professional and personal networks.
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Presenting research evidence in meetings can help secure resources and tools to fix workflow inefficiencies.

Notable Quotes

"Are you really doing user centered teamwork when you’re thinking about growing a team?"

"Talking to the people that I work with about the experience of doing their job to improve their job experience is probably the most overlooked skill set we have."

"Do you have personas for the people that work for you? Use them to help define how your processes work."

"You need to make sure they’re comfortable by doing it like a true research project, with a script and representative users of your team."

"I make a service map that shows the detritus my team has to make to get their job done every day."

"Put these maps and personas on a wall where people can test them and say, that is not right."

"The answers that your team gives you are the exact questions you need to ask candidates in interviews."

"We had a team that felt like they were working for each other but the two companies weren’t communicating."

"Most of us probably didn’t get into this because we love procurement meetings, but because we love empathetic people talking about things that matter."

"Take a little time out of your week and ask, what is it like working for me? Where are your problems?"

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