1. MS Teams — User Research
Hi! My name is Fernanda Alves. I am a Masters’ Student at IADT (Institute of Art, Design & Technology). My study’s subject is User Experience Design. I have as objective demonstrate how we can improve users experience across a diversity of products and services.
In my project, I am exploring the Microsoft Teams and its functionalities to show a better understanding of users and their behaviours. My group (Sorcha Hogan, Josh Purcell, Samuel Cummins) and I will detail stages of User Experience Research and Methods. We aim a solution for some of the common issues that users encounter during their daily activities with MS Teams.
I structured my project content as in the 5 Stages in Design Thinking:
A brief description of each stage:
- Empathise: to gain an empathic understanding of the problem that we aim to solve;
- Define: to analyse observations and synthesise to define the core problems;
- Ideate: to identify new solutions to the problem;
- Prototype: versions of the product/features in a simplified model, to investigate the problem solutions generated;
- Test: the test stage can create insights, redefine problems, and demonstrate if what was created previously could survive in the real world.
Heuristic Evaluation
The list below is based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. In this step, I evaluated the heuristics of the application by myself, with the intent of finding points of improvement that can be considered. I presented examples of good and bad execution of these principles.
Task Analysis
“Norman advocates Activity-Centered Design (ACD), which focuses first and foremost on understanding activities. He claims humans adapt to the tools at hand and that understanding the activities people perform with a set of tools can more favourably influence the design of those tools.” (Cooper et al., 2014)
Individual Analysis
In this part, I created a task analysis. It has as objective to demonstrate the steps a user has to follow in order to complete a task. Based on that, I created a flow of how As-is and my version of To-be of how a user creates a meeting and invite participants.
Group Analysis
However, within our group, each of us brought a version of task analysis, being “Pose a question to your online class and get results in real time” the most voted. It is described below:
Considerations
One of the main challenges is to evaluate a platform present in such a variety of ways. MS Teams is available for web (browser), desktop (MAC OSX and Windows) and app (Android and iOS). At this point, it is safe to say that it is a complete range of devices and systems that are considered in regards to the user experience. Because of that, I only explored the Desktop versions.
One tutor related the pains he had been experiencing since all the classes had moved to this online platform. So, I used his description as a way of understanding better the issues he has been facing in his daily activities. I found it quite useful to reproduce a series of steps from his user perspective. To do so, I created a new account that gave me broad access to its functions without worrying about possible mistakes.
This initial research allowed me to see more clearly where the pain points are for creating a meeting and inviting participants. The heuristics evaluation was crucial to analyse Microsoft Teams critically.
However, the task analysis was more effective in bringing some light to the issues previously stated. It made clear the need for looking for ways of engagement and a more dynamic experience.
Bibliography
Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D. & Noessel, C. (2014). About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th ed.). Indianapolis, Indiana, USA: Wiley.
Gothelf, J., & Seiden, J. (2016). Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA, USA: O’Reilly Media.
Levy, J. (2015). UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. Sebastopol, CA, USA: O’Reilly Media.
Nielsen, J. (1994, April 24). 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November, 2020 from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
Preece, J., Sharp, H. and Rogers, Y. (2019). Interaction Design: Beyond Human- Computer Interaction (5th ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
Rosala, M. (2020, September) Task Analysis: Support Users in Achieving Their Goals. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/task-analysis/
