dux.typepad.comDesigning the User Experience at Autodesk

Digital Library About About this Blog Twitter Updates follow me on Twitter March 2014 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Authors Alan Ho Alex Rice-Khouri Alison Kather Allen-Hongwei Bai Ananth Uggirala Carin Rogoff Caroline Dorin Cecilia Farell Chauncey Wilson Chris Yanchar Desirée Sy Douglas Look Erin Bradner Eunice Chang Ian Hooper Jason Winstanley Joe Lachoff John Schrag Joshua Ledwell Julie Schiller Karen Mason Karen Smith Kem-Laurin Kramer Kevin Dolley Kursat Ozenc Len Whitehead Lillian Smith Lira Nikolovska Lisa McCarty Lynn Miller Mark Jamieson Matt Stein Melissa D. Schmidt Peng Hong Rebecca Richkus Roxane Ouellet Ryan Arnaudin Stephen O’Connell Susan Wilhite Tom Vollaro Veronica Meuris Yan Schober March 25, 2014 How to Design Behaviorally Smart Tools by Kursat Ozenc In a previous article , I introduced 5 tools for effective behavioral design. These included motivation/ability matrix, triggers, routine/ritual mapping, rewards, and flow/challenges . In this post, I will sketch a behavioral design using these tools. Using the collaboration workflow as an example, let’s sketch a couple of concepts on "reviewing a design online" workflow. Our manager persona is used to offline meetings, annotating drawings with red pen, and arguing, negotiating, and simply hustling over a design proposal in a closed loop of his team. He is hesitant about the idea of online collaboration and opening the floor to the whole company. How might we introduce a design tool that helps him change his reviewing habits and make them more fruitful and effective? Figure 1. Manager Persona likes his traditional ways of collaboration We can start with our persona. What are the motivation and ability issues for him? We might assume that he doesn’t have huge ability issues since reviewing online is a low barrier skill. Motivation-based design How can we increase his motivation to adapt to this new behavior? Motivation, according to Dan Pink, depends on autonomy, mastery, and purpose. How might we increase his motivation, touching one of these dimensions? Autonomy is about sense of control, whereas mastery is about sense of achievement, and purpose is about the desire to pursue meaning in a specific situation. The Motivation/Ability Matrix can be used as a mapping tool to identify possible collaboration motivators. Seeing that his suggestions are heard and implemented by co-workers will be a motivator for the user so he can feel the sense of achievement. If he is appreciated and mentioned in the final design, he is purposefully part of something bigger than his daily workflows. Finally, if he has the ability to edit and delete any of his comments in the collaboration platform, he would feel in control. Figure 2. Being heard and complimented helps him to feel a sense of purpose and being part of a community Motivation provides intrinsic dimensions to influence our behavior design, but how about external motivators? We can think of triggers and rewards that might address one of the three dimensions. For instance, use of points, levels, and completion rates might be good rewards and keep the user invested in the product. We might then introduce a collaboration mastery path and a collaboration currency within the product, where the user gets more points and levels as he collaborates more. We also need to be careful about rewards. The user can easily fall into boredom once he has routinized the rewards. Rewards in the long term should lead to a flow experience, where the user gets challenges that balance ability and motivation. Trigger Design How do we situate triggers and challenges in our personas’ daily workflows? This brings us to our routine/ritual mapping tools. Based on user engagement, the designer can organize participatory design sessions with the user, map their daily routines, and dive into any rituals. Using a white board, post-its, and big sketch-pads are useful for mapping activities. You can easily dig into routines as they have lower barriers. They tell us when he works solo, collaborates, takes breaks, etc. Once we know more about these, we can then decide on the type of the triggers, their frequency, and their interval. For example, the designer realizes that our persona uses his commute time to check what others are doing in the company via his smart phone. Such an insight is valuable to consider when and how to nudge our user with triggers such as push notifications or embedded posts within their feed. Figure 3. Collaboration currency and mastery path increases the engagement Rituals are a bit different; the designer needs to dig deeper with why” questions, and identify where the user invests his precious time and attention. It helps understand what he really cares and values. We may find that he really values one-to-one interactions in collaboration over online encounters. For him, design reviews are ritualistic: how he uses his red pen, the way people listen, and the way he passes back and forth comments blended with both seriousness and humor. This might be a strong insight for the designer to inform his design. He may come up with the option to have real-time collaboration meetings within the suggested tool and even suggest a virtual red pen be passed between the participants to annotate things over the screen. As illustrated here, behavior change tools bring more fruitful and deeper insights ers and why they may or may not be adapting to certain behaviors we have designed into products. These tools are complimentary to each other and in certain contexts one tool needs more priority than others. Reference Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books (April 5, 2011) Posted at 03:00 AM in Kursat Ozenc , Methods & Practices , Tools | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us | | | March 18, 2014 Socialize Your Learning Content by Kevin Dolley Social media makes it easy for people to post news, discuss ideas, ask questions, and share links. Seen through the eyes of learning content development (LCD) teams, social media is a great way to make connections with the consumers of our learning videos and help topics. We can discover how well our content is working for our audience, discuss ideas to improve it, respond to questions, and boost information discovery by sharing links to new content. We even have the potential of expanding our sphere of influence and reaching a new audience. So, when we were preparing to launch a new online help site, my LCD team embraced social media…and helped our customers make the shift from content you find” to content that finds you.” Here’s what we did…and what we think you can do, too: 1. Choose an outlet We chose Twitter to acclimate our social-media-savvy customers to our new help platform and learning content offerings. Through our Revit Help Twitter account, we pointed people to the content they needed, answered questions as they came up, and evangelized potentially unknown tips and tricks. With its compact messaging, Twitter worked well for us. Other microblogging outlets, such as Facebook , would also be suitable for communicating in short bursts with a user community. 2. Tune in We began by tuning into the helpful tips that advanced users of Revit were posting on their blogs and in user forums. When posts revealed shortcomings in our online help content, we improved our help topics, and then pointed people to the new material through our Twitter account. When posts shared fun Revit-related news, ideas, and project results, we pointed our followers to the posts with tweets. When a new version of Revit was released, we began tweeting help topics for new features, while continuing to share our users’ content. Using this blended approach, we were able to provide a variety of useful information to our customers, from entry level users to advanced users. And, as the...