For my first major project at UMSI, as part of my course on contextual inquiry which paired us all with outside clients to work on real-world projects, my team was matched with the University’s Center for Academic Innovation (AI), the department responsible for online course development. The office was experiencing issues with project handoff and documentation specifically in relation to the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and they wanted us to identify the root causes of these problems and offer up potential solutions.
Project Overview
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Client name: University of Michigan Center for Academic Innovation
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My roles: User research
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Tools/skills utilized: Contextual inquiry, user interviews, affinity mapping
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The key problems to solve: What are the current protocols regarding documentation, and are they followed? If not, how do the actual practices differ? What sorts of information do people need that they’re unable to find?
Methodology & Findings
The Research Process
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We started with an initial meeting with our contacts at AI to hear their thoughts on the problem and learn more about how the office worked, as well as obtain samples of documentation templates and forms
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Next, we looked at the employee hierarchy, created interview protocols for three different types of employees (managers, designers, and technical producers), and interviewed 7 employees in their workplaces, asking about their job responsibilities and most recent projects and in particular probing about any difficulties they’d encountered recently involving documentation, communication, or project handoff
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Throughout the interviews, we held a series of interpretation sessions wherein we would go over notes and transcripts from recently completed interviews, discuss the findings, and distill the most critical points into affinity notes
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Once we had completed all our interviews, we arranged our affinity notes (about 300 in total) on an affinity map, grouping notes based on commonalities and writing a statement summarizing each group, and then performing two additional rounds of grouping and summarizing so that we had distilled the notes into 3 levels of clusters
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Finally, we came up with a set of recommendations based on our background research and the findings from our affinity map, which you can see a text-based version of here: affinity-wall.pdf
Findings & Analysis
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Through our affinity map, we identified four key problems, and later added a fifth, all tied together by the general observation that the office valued giving its employees a high degree of freedom for how they choose to work:
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There were very few protocols or rules about documentation, and those that did exist were rarely enforced
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There was little informal consensus on what documentation should be kept, or how detailed it should be
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There was a lack of communication between people in different roles, leading to misunderstandings about each others' needs
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The office used a wide variety of tools that would rarely be interconnected
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Existing documentation had poor discoverability and could become hard or impossible to find, particularly when revisiting older projects
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Project Reflection
Outcome
We came up with two primary recommendations for how the office could change their system to facilitate better communication and collaboration without having to compromise the high degree of freedom they valued (you can read about our findings and recommendations in greater detail in our final report):
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Firstly, we created a framework to be used for kicking off new projects, wherein at the beginning of each project, all of the design managers involved would meet to discuss each of their documentation needs and create an early draft of a set of project-specific protocols, and then would each individually meet with their teams to finalize the protocol, adding things specific people might need and discussing which tools should be used
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Additionally, in order to foster a better understanding across teams and individuals of the actual needs and responsibilities of different roles, we recommended that the office hold monthly or bi-monthly lunch conferences where people could speak about their work, how they use documentation, and any pain points they experience
Challenges
The large size of the department (spanning multiple office locations) and the somewhat disorganized nature of the hierarchy (wherein an employee would describe someone else’s role in a particular way, and then after talking to that person they’d say something totally different) initially made it rather difficult for us to get a handle on the situation, until we realized that that misunderstanding was itself a big part of the problem in somewhat of a 'eureka' moment.