The Supervisor Experience
Increasing Exposure to Our Supervisor Users
Background
The product team that creates our suite of tools for supervisors is under new leadership after an organizational restructuring. In the past, product enhancements have been driven by feedback from the executives with the loudest voices and the biggest titles. The team wants to shift to a user-centric approach.
Our Goals
Introduce new product team members to who our users are
Identify new user needs, pain points, and behaviors
Validate the need for the existing enhancements in the backlog and collect additional context for those opportunities
Process
Workshop
I led a fellow researcher in conducting a workshop with all stakeholders to collect existing knowledge, objectives, and constraints. Most of the group was able to meet in-person at the corporate office, and we included the remaining team members via Zoom.
We led the team through several whiteboarding exercises to prompt discussion, while running a duplicate virtual whiteboard via FigJam to foster virtual participation.
We used the information collected in the workshop to identify the right offices to visit to capture the information that we needed.
On-site work
Over the span of 2 weeks, we visited 4 different offices, observing and interviewing supervisors and other supervisor-supporting roles. We took a contextual inquiry approach, often relying on story-based questions to establish rapport, like "Tell me about the last time you..." We recorded our interviews and took plenty of screenshots and videos of our users in our product.
Outcomes
Our research report continues to serve as a resource and provide context for new enhancements
Documentation of user processes and behaviors keep the team focused on the user
Some recommendations resulted in instant re-designs and were prioritized into upcoming sprints for immediate changes
And, some discoveries were surprising, even to veteran stakeholders
However, I believe the most successful outcome of the project was a shift in how the product team viewed research. The results were valuable enough that the team is currently planning another round of site visits that will include additional product team members.