Working in design sprints with my team, we were asked to focus on design patterns and usability. As I work on the work queue that orchestrates the experience across applications, I can see why usefulness has to come first. There is a lot of complexity to this part of the work. If the user is not able to do the task or they do not have the information they need to have context for the work, it will be of no use to them. Once these things are worked out and testing shows that the users are in agreement, we verify usability.
Usability is all about ease of use. Does the user understand how to use this component?
Usefulness is necessary when tasks are complex and the user has to be able to put information together in order to solve a problem. A design pattern or UI pattern may support this work, but it is not the solution for a usefulness problem.
The users working in these applications will often need to string together information to understand something that has occurred during the installation. It will be important to leave markers along the way to keep the user informed as they conduct their investigation. Leaving the right information in the right space will be crucial to increasing their situational awareness. These task patterns are different from design patterns in that they focus on how people go about solving a problem. We need to understand how to put together the primary and enabling tasks in order for the user reach their goals.
Usefulness can also be about how people work together cooperatively to work on something in an application. Again, we need markers along the way the help users understand where the boundaries of their work and another person’s is. We also need the right level of situational awareness so that the user can drop in and complete their task and not have to know the entire story.
In order to do to make the work queue as useful as possible, I am making an inventory of how each activity is done today. For the sake of the design sprints, I am doing analysis of the activity screens and bringing my questions to to the PMs who work on this application. I will be able to make an educated hypothesis of which direction this work should go. Once the design sprints are finished, I will do deeper observation of the users doing the tasks and be sure that I have not missed any details and know that this direction will still work.
Today the solution is an “activity record” in Dynamics that does not have enough information or context to understand how to complete the activity. The solution I am proposing is one that takes them from a work queue “task” directly to the application that they need to use to complete the task. It will deep link them into the appropriate page in that customer’s account or installation where they can complete that task.
