Audience
Stakeholders and product management for an academic institution’s website
Team
Myself along with content writer and many of the stakeholders
Challenge
With a lot of ideas about how a site is used, how do we decide what to do first? last? not at all?
techniques & tools
This is more or less a discuss-vote-discuss process. Research is done and story summaries written before a meeting in which stakeholders express their sense of priority.
outcome
A better and hopefully shared understanding of the importance of particular ‘stories’ and needs of the website, before serious development has begun.
Background
Through interviews with users of this part of the Kellogg website and assessment of other school’s websites, I uncovered needs, goals and tasks for the “Faculty and Research” pages, along with a sense of which specific audiences have those needs. (One of the surprises—although maybe I should have anticipated it—was the seemingly vain need of current faculty to have flattering descriptions of themselves: line 16 continues “…so that I will have good opportunities to advance my career.”)
The worksheet in the photo accompanying this story presented all the discovered needs, goals and tasks in the form of user story summaries (in the common “as a … I want to … so that” format) in order to facilitate discussion among stakeholders.
Those summaries are also grouped by the role (based both on research and reasoned imagination). By using a voting exercise with the stakeholders, I created a shared vision/understanding for what tasks and needs are the most important for the site to accommodate. When I say “voting exercise” I mean any one of several methods of collecting feedback from a group of people that bypasses the problem of only hearing from the loudest, most articulate or most persistent voice. (By the way, see Kathy Sierra’s blog post “When only the glib win, we all lose.”)
- Give everyone a specific number of votes, which they can cast in any way they like.
- Some variant of ranked-choice voting, each voter can pick a first, second and third choice. Complicated math ensues.
- Simply ask each participant to cast one vote for their choice of ‘most important.’
I nearly always follow the tabulation of these votes with a ‘gut check discussion.’ This is a discussion for all participants to weigh in on whether or not they think the result is right. In some cases, a strong feeling expressed by one person might inspire a re-evaluation of the voting or—better yet—a more detailed exploration of the meaning of some of the items being considered. (A similar discussion can happen when agile development teams are assigning ‘story points’ to an item and there are wildly divergent bids.)
In the illustrated example, rather than voting on individual stories, the discussion was focusing on the importance of specific roles, as you can see. The voting thus reflected the team’s opinion of what kinds of users we would focus on in our improvement efforts. I used this shared understanding to create recommendations for which pages to redesign and in some cases which pages to ignore and/or delete.