Reflection – Learning Launch  Leave Advisor

Ivan Tomac

Challenge

I am a senior UX designer for our organization and our challenge was to develop a decision  making application that helps employees pick the correct leave of absence (LOA) option which will  reduce the risk of taking an incorrect form of LOA and to help limit the time that a HR  representative would need walking an employee or manager through the decision making process.  This project would last two months and we would have an appropriate amount of budget to  support a 4 person design team with different backgrounds and skills. Our team will work to  develop the correct user experience and decision making guidance in the application so that the  overall experience would not last more than 5 minutes and the employee would be guaranteed in  taking the correct form of LOA.

Selection

We have already utilized journey mapping and empathy mapping so that we could best describe  our user personas. Based on our findings and understanding of the requirements and user needs,  we felt that a learning launch would be the method for us to test our design rapidly and give us the  opportunity to quickly refine our design.

Application

For our learning launch we set up a user experience test lab and relied on an agile design sprint  process. We conducted 2 test labs over a 3 day period. Each test had 20 users from our 3 primary  user group (Employees, Managers and HR Representatives).

As Thomas Koch stated in the training: “The key here is, is to do experiments that are  fast and cheap. Because you want to do lots of experiments. If they took a long  time you wouldn't ever get to a good idea. You would not ever get to a new  product that goes to market. If it was real expensive because you did lots of long  experiments, you'd run out of money before you found a new source of revenue.”

We tested our assumptions with each group and scored their experience with direct observations.  Using the feedback from our observations we made modifications to our prototype using rapid  prototyping. We looked for make or break assumptions. For example if the experience lasted more  than 5 minutes we considered it a fail. If the user quit and didn’t complete we considered it a fail. If

the user completed the task but had questions, we considered it a success, and used the feedback  to improve our experience.

We sorted our data by our key user group and looked for patterns and opportunities.

The prototype rapidly changed over the 3 day period and after our learning launch we were able  to demonstrate a working prototype with validation based on direct user feedback.

Insight

The learning launch gave us a number of insights and benefits. We were able to quickly adapt the  prototype with our observations. Our key stake-holders were also present and gained confidence in  the application by witnessing it firsthand. The rapid prototyping gave the team the opportunity to  see their assumptions play out right in front of them in a low risk environment.

By setting the tight parameters we were able to move the project forward quickly. Saving time and  money.

Our results changed from what we originally anticipated, but we were happy to see that our  assumed target was what we expected and that the benefits of the application would give us the  results that we wanted.

With the method we were also able to confidently hand over the application specifications to our  vendor that would be building out the production application. We were able to not only show them  the prototype, but also give them the necessary information that would validate our design  direction.

Approach

Our team had used agile methods in the past to quickly manage and refine a design, but the  learning launch gave the team the insights to move the project forward in confident manner.

Our stake holders were so pleased with the success of the learning launch that they have decided  to use this quick to win or fail approach on future projects. This will give us the opportunity to take  greater risks and have the ability to test or assumptions in a way that will show our stakeholders the  unforeseen gems in our work.

The next time with do a learning launch I think we will bring our Journey map into the test to  validate the map and to use as a tool to test out the assumptions of the journey map. We would  also want to bring in our previous insights into the next learning launch to confirm data from our  previous sample set.

