Automated IT Usability Survey (ITUS)
My Roles: UX Research and Design Coach, Product Owner, Service Owner
Skills Applied: Interaction Design, UI Design, Usability Testing, Cognitive Walkthroughs, Surveying, Interviewing, Data Analysis, Rapid Prototyping, Balsamiq, Trello, Rally, Responsive Design, Training, Communications and Marketing
Summary
The Auto-ITUS (IT Usability Survey) is a tool used to create, distribute, and evaluate real time usability surveys. It was designed and developed out of the need to enable application product teams to gather actionable user experience feedback – quickly and easily, ensuring that enterprise applications meet usability standards. The tool is automated, customizable and includes reporting and analytics capabilities.
A little bit of background…
Enable a More Efficient Usability Metric.
The IT Usability Survey (ITUS) was originally developed by a former colleague as a statistically valid instrument to assess product usability in four questions versus the traditional ten required in the SUS (system usability scale), thus saving user survey response time and enabling a more efficient usability metric.
Finstad, K. (2010). The Usability Metric For User Experience. Interacting with Computers, 22, 323-327.
Scale Across an Enterprise Environment
Over time the survey became more popular and utilized by a variety of professionals within an enterprise environment. Manual mechanisms of survey creation, distribution, analysis, and reporting were not keeping up with organizational demand. As a result, I secured management approval and funding to develop a custom tool to best scale the need for consistent, reliable, and fast user feedback across large-scale enterprise environment.
IT Usability Tool today
The Process
Iterative and Increment Improvements
The team began with upfront user research to validate the need for the tool and gain funding and resources through surveys, interviews, and cognitive walkthroughs. Throughout the development process we employed a small, but mighty agile team to deliver incremental improvements to meet MVP (minimal viable product) through iterative releases.
Kanban board used to prioritize upcoming tasks.
Sketch and Test - and then do it All Again
The vast majority of design feedback was achieved through Balsamiq mockups and several rounds of moderated usability testing.
Mock-up created in Balsamiq
Ensure Auto-ITUS Training and Targeted Marketing
Once the Auto-ITUS tool was released, training, communications and marketing efforts were utilized to generate awareness and encourage application adoption across product owners.
Training material storyboard
Targeted communications
Wore Many Hats
Throughout the process, I served in many roles from performing the research and design deliverables myself to leading as UX research and design coach, as more junior team members practiced their UX skills. I additionally lead as the team Product Owner responsible for product sustainability and prioritizing enhancement requests against available time and resources. During the majority of tool development activities, I served as UX Service Owner for the entire IT organization balancing the Auto-ITUS tool objectives with other service tools and resource needs.
Identified Opportunities and Improvements
We identified several opportunities and improvement areas throughout our design and development process.
Customization - Ability to personalize surveys to provide incentives for survey completion where appropriate and improve application recognition.
Personalized Survey Creation
Customized communications
Self-service & Automation - Automated authentication, eliminating tool access delays and a step-by-step easy to use, wizard-based design; Enable app owners to survey their target audience in seconds by connecting with multiple enterprise data resources, automating previously manual processes.
Automation Throughout Survey Creation Process
Reporting and Analytics - Data analysis and reporting improvements replaced manual and time-consuming analytics and reporting processes, with single-click metrics reporting.
Excel-based Reporting for Earlier Version
Intuitive and Single-click Reporting for Later Version Releases
Aggregated Survey Reporting Capabilities
Results
The IT Usability Survey Enables a Common and Viable Metric Across IT Apps / Products to Drive Better User Experiences
With the roll-out of the Auto-ITUS tool, there was an 87% increase in survey completion, helping to achieve the phase 1 enterprise goal of 40% of all applicable applications achieving a satisfactory ITUS score of 70, with teams proactively working to achieve higher scores and mitigate application issues. Furthermore, the tool resulted significant time savings due to automation, so less effort and resources were spent on administering and analyzing surveys. Additionally the need for UX training and support resources significantly decreased as the tool was intuitive and easy to use.
“Brooke is the most dedicated Service Owner I’ve met. She participates actively in all Sprint Reviews, Sprint Planning, Daily Stand Ups (DSUs), user testing, and ad-hoc decision meetings. She guides the path, but enables us to interject, and I feel everyone on the team has a voice. She’s objective, fair and makes well thought out and informed decisions.”
The business group now had a common measurement across apps enabling us to see enterprise application UX health trends and further inform management with hard metrics to assist decisions on where to further invest money and resources.