Design Studios

Nivi Singh

DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIOS

I have led research and design projects with diverse teams bringing them together to design mobile and web experiences intended for use in domains such as digital images, higher education, insurance, and consumer electronics.

I love to collaboratively sketch, brainstorm, talk to and co-create with users and teams, facilitate conversations, solve difficult problems, manage project details, and work closely with my team.

Following is an example of a collaborative design studio I facilitated.

DESIGN STUDIO 1: SELF SERVICE EDIT COVERAGES

OPPORTUNITY

Previous research had indicated that customers expected the ability to make simple changes to their auto insurance policies in their own convenient time and without having to make a phone call.

The business need was to be able to reduce call volumes to the call center and meet customer expectations. The opportunity came with this launch of this initiative.

CHALLANGE & APPROACH

As the UX Research resource for the team, I was tasked to lead the initiative.

Internal Interviews: After looking at the data and reading through the previous research, I decided to interview subject matter experts and listen to the service calls. These two activities helped me understand:

1. The complexity involved in auto policy coverage changes

2. Nature of most frequently received change requests

3. Gauge knowledge and understanding of customers about coverages and insurance needs

With this preliminary knowledge, I organized a design workshop session bringing stakeholders and designers together to come up with the design solution for the feature.

Workshop Participants: SMEs, Product Owner, Tech Lead, Design Leads, Business Analyst.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

Workshop Duration: Getting all the participants together for one long session was challenging. Therefore I came up with a very defined and customized format for this workshop. I divided the workshop into two sessions of 3 hours each on two consecutive days. Goals and output from each session were clearly defined.

Session 1: Facilitated 1st session to build a shared understanding of the customer, what problem were we trying to solve for the customer and what problem were we solving for the business. It was important to bring the business owners to participate and be on-board with the approach to solving this problem. Also, not lose the focus of the user needs to just design the software features. The first session was a collaborative whiteboard activity with defining:

Business Goals: Product owners to define the business goals for this feature. Defining value and effort.
Empathy Mapping: Who are we designing for, what pain areas are we addressing.
Pain-Gain-Value: What is the value proposition of the feature for customers and the business.
Value Proposition: Mapping user needs with business need and deriving the value proposition for each feature.

Session 2: The second session was directed toward bringing this shared understanding together and co-creating workflow and design.

How Might We: How might we be able to address those pain areas for our customers.
Success Metric: Define our success and measurement criteria.
User-flows and Wireframes: Arrive at the basic workflow and wireframes for the feature.

The outcome of this studio was user journey map, common understanding of workflow, and a rough wireframe. The wireframe was developed as a clickable, low fidelity prototype. The prototype was iterated, tested, and validated further for the workflow and design elements to arrive at the final design.

Three Pronged Testing and Validation Approach

Test paper prototype

Customer interviews

Design Decisions

Test prototype

Persona

LEAN UX: DESIGN SPRINTS

OPPORTUNITY

One of the music content apps was identified as a candidate for a complete revamp with the vision to have an all-in-one solution to the music needs of audio content listener.

The precursor to the success of this project was understanding user behavior and motivations involving music/content listening.

CHALLANGE & APPROACH

After a few discussions with the team and the product owner, it was clear to me that this project would be best executed in lean and iterative research and design format. However, the two main challenges for me were:

1. Need for ethnography study. However, the timeline for this project was very tight.

2. Unfamiliar format. The team had never used the lean sprint style approach.

1

2

3 Ethnographic Study

Team Buy-in

Design Sprints

user listening behavior for both out loud and private listening
users’ expectations and preferences with regards to content recommendations
barriers to entry for trying new content streaming services

introduce lean UX
workout team availability
guidelines and customize format
develop trust

1 week sprints
identify user stiry
define research questions
recruit participants
run design sessions
create protocol
moderate sessons
synthesize
decide and iterate

FORMAT

Ethnographic Study: Two weeks

Part 1: Using screenshots and written entries, participants self-described the decisions and context of individual listening sessions as they occur.

Part 2: Through a serious of video entries participants shared detailed insights into their content-discovery attitudes and issues with current streaming services.

Listening Context:

At-home listening tended to be more mood-based (e.g. wanting to relax) and facilitate another activity (e.g. cooking, cleaning, etc.)

On-the-go listening was often part of a daily routine and more typically involved intentional content choices from participants (e.g. seeking out a specific podcast or album to listen to).