Organizational Readiness, Experience Design
Having a clearly documented set of users who will engage with your technology is a critical exercise in readiness preparedness. Beginning a technology implementation without this clear vision can make later decision making and testing very difficult and may lead to a less than desirable user experience for customers and staff. Personas, user experience journeys and style guides may seem like noise when your implementation team wants to 'just start building!' However, building now and fixing later can make a simple implementation plan a complex series of fixes and re-do's. Being thoughtful about what the experience goals are for your organization is a necessary precursor to diving in to a configuration and build exercise. The system is very likely to 'work' but will it work for your customers and staff?
Designing the experience includes the engagement from start to finish for each user. Why do they use the system(s)? What problem are they trying to solve? Is it intuitive? Where it's not, has system guidance been made readily accessible to guide through any complexities? Does your implementation schedule provide your business with the time it needs to build this important content that will support constituents and your team? These are all integral questions that should be answered as part of the planning exercise, and not saved as 'clean up' actions when a main build has been completed. Trust us, you are not very likely to have time for that in your schedule anyway!
This does not need to be overly complex. A list of users and their characteristics, what triggers their engagement with the system, the end to end process of that engagement, how to navigate through the interactions that deviate from the 'happy path' and consistent design standards will be enough to help any organization avoid some of the most critical experience pitfalls.
Extra hint: this is also extremely helpful when system roles, permissions sets and assignment logic are being defined.
To learn more about how VSTI-Partners can help you develop and implement a well thought out experience design, Contact Us.