Blanca Serrano  Peer review assignment

Reflection – Visualization

1 CHALLENGE

I work in the marketing department of a multinational company that sells cameras and  printers. My work is mostly in the business to business (B2B) area, we partner with  retailers and ecommerce platforms to sell products.

As a result, there is a need to train external personnel in the use of our products so they  can deliver the best solutions and give good sales pitch to consumers.

Due to this need, we developed an e-learning platform to train salespeople from partners  in the correct use of our products, since in-person training is not always possible due to  large number of salespeople to train and the fact that they are spread throughout the  country.

However, initial implementation of the platform was rocky due to lack of resources and  when it finally took off the users didn’t use it steadily, they registered, did a few courses  and then never used it again.

We are currently looking for a way to make the platform more appealing and useful to  the users, since we hope to provide good resources and value to the users.

2 SELECTION

We are going to use Visualization. This is a technique that requires participants to  make use of graphics, photography, animation or any other visual medium to express  their feelings or ideas.

Since we are dealing with a website, we have a highly visual component that would  be better served by graphical techniques.

It also allows users to see themselves to see a physical representation of a website in  progress and to add any input in a way that is accessible to anyone, not just  programmers. It enables fluid communication.

Blanca Serrano  Peer review assignment

3 APPLICATION

First, we need to assemble a sample of users, to ensure diversity, we randomly pick a  group of 15 salespeople in each province of the country.

They are informed of the experiment and we request their consent and participation.

We go to each province to meet them at their workplace afterhours, with drawing  supplies on hand, both traditional and digital, for those who want to draw with things  like Illustrator.

We apply visualization in two different ways; the first, to have people do a sketch of  their learning journey, how the come to learning something new, what they enjoy  about it, what they don’t and so forth.

Those sketches might look something like this, or they might look entirely different  and that’s what we are looking for, for the difference in users’ perceptions.

Blanca Serrano  Peer review assignment

Second, we want users to draw their favorite website, regardless of what the website  is about. We don’t want to limit people’s imagination by putting strict rules in place.  Getting to know users’ tastes will let us apply favored designs to our page, even if the  content is very different.

We then analyze both sketches for common patterns and sum up those patterns in post it  notes.

We will then have a collective brainstorming session in which we will try to come up  with solutions to apply and implement in the platform. After that, we will retire, but  only after having created a group to stay in touch with the participants.

Blanca Serrano  Peer review assignment

Once we get back from this round of contacts, we will prototype solutions and poll our  users for opinions on ongoing progress, so we can course correct on time if something is  bad.

After we settle on the ideas we want to implement, we will make a schedule and we will  develop and apply them accordingly.

4 INSIGHT

The experiment proved to be a very empathic experience, we were able to see the way  people perceived their experiences and their preferences for design. It allowed us to  tailor design going forward in a way that was more user friendly, not only  aesthetically, but also functionally.

One of the things we learned was that the learning experience could not be a hurdle  for the learning materials themselves, it had to flow more easily, instead of having 3  different pages just to deal with registration and 4 clicks to get to a certain course.

It also proved the value of design thinking techniques in providing new ways to tackle  both routine and unexpected challenges, it provides a framework and resources that  were easy to understand for our users instead of complex flows or processes that would  have impeded the daily life of our users.

5 APPROACH

While we gained a lot of insight from this experiment, next time we might do better  using ethnographic research first, since a lot more people, specially salespeople, are  more comfortable with talking than with drawing.

Even if we did stress that artistic quality was not the point, some people felt more  inhibition that if it were simply a conversation.

