Establish a usability lab

Team participating in workshop

Role
Product designer & workshop facilitator

Project goal
Give the user’s voice a platform to drive the feature development of the product

Methods
Design thinking workshop, LDJ exercises, Creative brainstorming

Year
2022

About the company
Smartlockr is a SAAS product that focuses on people-centric cybersecurity. The platform ensures that your data has end-to-end encryption on a company’s email service and other communication platforms

  • The problem

    Smartlockr’s product growth meant that there needed to be more processes in place to ensure that the development and build were user centred. Internally, the number of employees grew double in size in just under a year, but the processes needed to be better scaled to match the growth of the company. The company’s growth highlighted the importance of the customer’s voice, and as there was not yet a sustainable and easy way to get this type of feedback in place, the challenge was there for the taking…

  • The Approach

    I wanted to disrupt the way that regular meetings were scheduled, and make them interactive, impactful, and useful in a short amount of time. After some research about learning about different user exercises, I opted to run a “Lightning Design Jam” , a method credited to Johnathan Courtney of AJ&Smart.

Lightning Design Jam

Lightning Design Jam

This workshop is designed to quickly find improvement areas and to come up with actionable solutions. There are 4 steps to this meeting: Define goals, Start positive, Capture problems, and Prioritize problems.

Step 1: Define workshop goals

I started the meeting by defining the workshop goals by stating an initial ‘problem statement’ that would help guide what we want to solve. I explained the format of the meeting, kicking-off the first workshop exercise of defining positive and improvement areas.

 

Step 2: Start on a positive note

I asked the team to write down things that were going well so we can reflect on the things that are working. This helps the meeting start off positive and sets the tone for creativity and an a safe open space to discuss ideas.

 
 

Step 4: Capture problems

To give an equal platform for everyone to share their feedback on problem areas, they were given time to write their ideas on a post-it notes, and then they would silently vote for the areas that were important to focus on. The ones with the most votes were the discussed.

 
Colleagues and a post it board with impact effort matrix

Step 5: Prioritize problems and create action plan

After the ideas were prioritised and discussed, we placed them on an effort/impact matrix so that we could have clear deliverables on what we can do after the meeting.

Deliverables & Conclusion

The first workshop was a success as it left everyone with clear action items and deliverables to follow through with. It is also a format that I continue to use, even if it’s only parts of the LDJ because it helps guide meetings to give them a clear purpose and goal. Introducing this meeting structure to the company empowered people to share their thoughts and ideas without feeling judged or criticized.