Background.

Warning: this is not exactly a case study but this is a problem I keep running into, “How do I effectively translate user findings?” In this case I joined a project after 3 User Researchers before me had implemented interviews and synthesized the findings (in several ways).

Upon joining I learned that a MVP was about to be delivered in a month (based upon largely PM’s and SME’s ideas). When asked where translated findings existed, I was pointed to an Airtable which contained information that was hard to decipher. It was no wonder an MVP was not user-centered at this point!

While I was asked to work on Personas, I decided to feed two birds with one scone. The same data which would give me Persona information, also held insights from usability tests (current and future state). I decided to re-synthesize in a useful way.

Method (and challenges).

Over 50 interviews existed with various user groups. It would take months to go back and recode the data in a way that pulled back information tagged with meaningful codes. I did explore the idea, however, and found that many recordings were not transcribed and some recordings were missing.

So I began with the project team’s synthesized results, which had a lot of valuable information:

• paint points

• wish lists

• status of MVP

• product and product area

The issue, however, was that this information was strewn across various documents (reports, summaries) and organized by user type. While this kind of presentation is indeed human-centered and excellent for client-review/showing, I think we all can agree, this is not how Scrum teams and Engineering works.

Impact.

Translation of HCD-focus to Engineering-focus: I developed a reorganized Airtable which begins with the user insight. This is the level of observation. For each issue, Product and Engineering could see:

• the persona source

• the document source

• the type of insight (pain point, need, wish list, like)

• product

• product area

• MVP status

Using this, views could be created to reorganize by product area (for engineers) or MVP status (for product managers).