What challenges laid ahead

With the museum’s Chief Experience Officer as a key stakeholder along with the Interaction Lab Manager and Visitor Experience Manager, we aimed to embed our work within their priorities. We also worked closely with the Digital Product Manager throughout the engagement to foster UX practices and principles in current projects.

My Role(s)

How we designed the plays

With our goals in mind, the team held coaching sessions and two workshops to establish the right skills to facilitate improved user experience skills across departments.

Structure:

• A “myth-busting” poll to test participants about preconceptions of what UX meant in the context of their work and what it is/not.

• Overview of general stages of a UX workflow as the following: Strategy, Discovery, Analysis, Design, and Production, which included two hands-on activities:

  • To discover who their users are, attendees were broken into breakout rooms and tasked to fill out an empathy map that expands on what a predetermined visitor ( at their museum likely says, thinks, does, and feels during their interactions with the museum – its galleries and digital products. 

  • To better understand what to design, participants were then tasked to brainstorm their visitors’ goals when visiting the museum based on insights from the empathy map; discussing their pain points and establishing how these goals present opportunities for the museum to design for their needs.

• Highlighting case studies to reiterate the value of implementing UX methods.

Structure:

• A quick overview of UX fundamentals to ensure that all attendees understood what UX is/not.

• An overview of User testing was provided along with the steps to plan and conduct one: Define the problem, identify participants, task creation, pilot testing, data collection and analysis, and reporting results.

  • To create common ground, the problem was defined and provided for the audience: identify how users plan their museum visit.

  • To understand how to identify participants, attendees were split into breakout groups and tasked to profile a type of museum visitor (e.g., family, site-seer, or design expert) based on five key parameters defined by our team: spiritual experience, conducts research, frequents museums, design knowledge, enjoys art & culture. Then tasked to think about how to recruit and screen for potential participants with the user profiles.

  • To demonstrate how to create tasks that are unbiased, clear, and realistic, attendees were split into the same groups and tasked to create three goals for their user when planning their visit to the museum and write a simple task for each goal.

  • To show how pilot testing assessed the clarity and quality of the tasks, attendees were broken back out into the same groups to pilot test the tasks they created. One workshop facilitator was asked to “think aloud” while completing the given tasks on the museum website while the attendees observed. This reinforced the potential issues with the tasks they had written and also allowed them to watch someone navigate the museum website to find key information about visiting the museum.

• A brief discussion of how to be a good moderator and some approaches for efficient data collection and analysis.

• A reiteration of the value of user testing and the ease of implementing a study.

Conclusion

The UXCB model effectively helped us understand the current UX maturity for the museum we worked with, tailor strategies to their needs, and evaluate the impact of the implementation on an individual and organizational level.

We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the museum throughout this experience. The Digital Product manager mentioned that their “overall strategy has improved to define the right audience in terms of who they are, what they’re thinking and what they want”.

The workshops offered a great foundation to break down initial barriers to UX for a lot of people including staff and senior management. All leaders now understand the value of UX and as a result, the digital product manager was able to create buy-in to move forward with UX Capacity Building as a priority in their product roadmaps. The workshops also gave them direct insight into what needed to be addressed on their site. As a result, their digital leaders now understand how to approach their website pages in a way they didn’t before — by building tasks and asking people the right questions while also thinking about their stakeholders and the content types on their pages.

Lessons learned

• Our primary point of contact, including the coaching, was the Digital Product Manager; which made sense given that they were responsible for the digital experiences at the museum and connected with other stakeholders across departments. This helped expand our reach when coordinating workshops, but a group of UX champions wasn’t developed during this engagement. While the results were positive in increasing the confidence to implement UX practices, this increase of skills from coaching was limited to one person. Next time we would want to include multiple stakeholders in both the coaching and planning of the workshops to ensure a more sustainable transition plan post-engagement.

• External and internal factors can potentially impact the implementation such as technology changes, demands due to the pandemic, organizational changes or strategic priorities. During our nine month engagement, significant changes in the museum’s priorities shifted the focus of the coaching sessions in terms of topics covered and support needed. More importantly, the Chief Experience Officer and the Digital Product Manager both left soon after the engagement ended. Next time we will need to account for a more flexible approach on the selected plays so there’s less risk to the efficacy of the engagement.

• Coaching sessions were mostly unstructured, which worked with our stakeholder’s learning style but may not work with others.

• In the workshop on usability testing, we identified the pilot testing activity as the most impactful in terms of creating buy-in around the value of user testing because it was the first time most workshop attendees had observed someone using their website in real-time. In future iterations of this play we plan to move the pilot testing activity earlier in the session and to also devote more time to the activity.

Limitations

Since the Digital Product Manager and Chief eXperience Office both left soon after our engagement, it will be hard to evaluate the long term impact of the project and organization cultural changes.