Foundational|Explore
Understanding Security Customers, Their workflows, and their needs
Our client wanted to develop personas for a variety of different security customers. After initial stakeholder discussions, we realized that there was untapped and under shared internal knowledge, a lack of experience with UX research, and a limited budget. Instead of pursuing a large persona project that would likely exceed budget and timeline expectations, we recommended a more general exploratory project with the goal of identifying similar values, attitudes, and environmental factors shared by all security professionals independent of company size and structure.
How: Remote interviews across internal departments and with external security professionals.
“Aha” Insight: Work environments and structure look different for different security professionals, but it is an inherently demanding and reactive job that involves a lot of data and information. Security professionals need to help others, including decision makers and influencers, to understand risk and the relative costs as they relate to security as well.
What It Meant: Generally, regardless of the differences in their work environment, security professionals share the desire to be better supported by their tools and their interfaces, ideally, enabling them to be more proactive and better prepared with valuable information for decision making.
Outcome: We developed a set of principles encompassing these similarities to use when making design and messaging decisions. These principles serve as a way to evaluate potential changes with respect to the security professional’s values. We provided questions to when evaluating whether or not a particular feature or design decision is inline with the principles.
Tools and Services:
Remote Interviews
Techniques and Services:
Participant Observation
Contextual Inquiry
In-person interviews
Existing research review
Policy and document review
Exploratory research examining policy and work across complex organizations
We set out to examine and evaluate the effectiveness of Crisis Intervention training and services for the city of San Francisco and how these operations relate to the perception that there are an increasing number of people in crisis on San Francisco’s streets. The research as well as the findings and recommendations spanned many different city and county departments.
How: A large number of in-person interviews, contextual inquiry, and participant observation across several city departments, document and policy analysis, and existing research reviews.
“Aha” Insight: The San Francisco Police Department is on the front lines of a mental health crisis. Not all police are are trained in crisis intervention and while SFPD is supported by a few over extended, but very dedicated mental health professionals from DPH, awareness of and access to this support is low. Additionally, systems and record keeping systems are not designed to holistically support the police, mental health professionals, or people in crisis. State requirements often change as well hindering data collection.
What It Meant: Increased commitment, support, and collaboration is required on the part of the SF Department of Public Health to really help the city’s in-crisis population. The SFPD needs to continue training and reinforcing crisis intervention tools and techniques and increase awareness of DPH resources. Crisis Intervention data needs to be consistently recorded and tracked in order to measure progress.
Outcome: Since sharing our findings and recommendations, the SFPD issued a new bulletin outlining the mental health resources available to support SFPD officers. The Crisis Intervention Working Group developed new quantitative and qualitative measurements to monitor Crisis Intervention effectiveness over time. The SFPD has assigned an IT liaison to the Crisis Intervention Working Group to provide insight into the technology limitations and possibilities for tracking and measuring Crisis Intervention. The SFPD modified crisis intervention training schedules to enable greater attendance and completion. The SFPD and DPH have an updated and renewed Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) to ensure commitment to and collaboration for Crisis Intervention and mandatory cross-department meetings to stream line communication.
Identifying factors that hinder and drive adoption of an enterprise solution
I led the research effort for the launch of a new enterprise solution at Citrix. Since this was a new product, investigating adoption was strategically important. The research activities centered around identifying the necessary conditions and tools that encourage customer adoption and key perceived barriers to adoption.
What can we do to help customers transition through key adoption milestones (learn, trial, buy)?
How: A combination of Trial Experience evaluation and a Customer Adoption longitudinal study
“Aha” insights: With the launch of a new product, the focus of the messaging tends to revolve around the technology and the associated features. However, customers are looking for information that will help them understand the larger context of how the new product could impact (augment or extend) their existing roles and businesses.
In addition, the trial experience serves not only as a vehicle to promote, but also to educate new concepts in the product. It is essential that the trial instills both confidence and trust in prospective customers to proceed to the next milestone of the adoption funnel.
Outcome: The research findings not only helped improve the trial experience, but also guided and influenced the messaging content, both of which are critical aspects of the customer journey.
Services:
Remote Prototype Evaluation
Longitudinal Study
Services & Output:
In-person 1:1 interviews
Competitive analysis
Experience framework
Research that guides Product direction
The technology landscape was changing rapidly – more and more devices were touch-enabled, and we were quickly entering into an era where direct manipulation was becoming more ubiquitous and prevalent. Adobe wanted to develop a mobile, touch-enabled drawing app and needed to decide between one that supports free-form sketching vs. precise/exact drawing (aka Illustrator).
How: I conducted a series of in-person 1:1 interviews with young creatives, where they were asked to “think aloud” their sketching process using both a competitive stylus (the Jot) and their own analog drawing tool, the pencil. This method has given the team rich insights into the intricacies of sketching, as well as the natural affordances that paper and pencil provide.
“Aha” insight: To creatives, “sketching is thinking”. Designers expect a frictionless sketching experience where they do not need to think about the tool (extension of self), and there is no perceived separation between the ideas in their heads and what transfers to paper. The good, old pencil still won over the digital stylus experience in the ideation phase.
What It Meant: Given the constraints of the stylus technology at the time (e.g., latency), the recommendation was for Adobe to develop a precise drawing app that also created new experience expectations.