Boring Systems and Unexpected Ideas

Really, I’m just starting this particular post to start getting words down, as a kind of update post and also to feel a bit productive. Like everyone, I’m finding it hard to learn new things and develop skills/career-wise in the middle of pandemic times, even through there are more opportunities than ever to learn stuff.

So, where am I at with marketing, social media, digital content? What new things have I learned?

Well, I’ve definitely been putting everything I’ve learned about scheduling, spreadsheets and how often you can repeat the same piece of content. There’s simply not a lot to put out there, but in social media management, we continue posting with the usual system. On twitter, it’s:

• 3-6 retweets or quote tweets from related organisation
• One piece of new content
• Or piece of old content under a slightly different banner or new hashtag

On Instagram, we try for those aesthetic photos. Fortunately the organisation we work for has a pretty architecturally unique building, though during the current national lockdown it’s not possible to get many new ones!

(Sidenote – can’t wait to write a digital stats report where I get to tell the board that our most popular Instagram post was a Bernie meme.)

For Facebook I’m still trying to work out the best content, it’s not as popular a platform for our particular organisation and can be a bit neglected. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what works best there, so it’s a space for experimentation. Historically I’ve treated Facebook as a platform that’s more similar to Twitter, with a short message and a call-to-action link. But perhaps I should be treating it more like Instagram, leading with an image and hoping for engagement before traffic to our org’s website? (See, this is why blogging can be good, I only had that idea whilst trying to think of something to say.)

This might sound a bit jaded, or stale. It’s not intended to be. With a reduced workforce, and a lot of uncertainty making it harder for everyone to focus and be, you have to make things easy for yourself in some way. So I suppose that’s something else I’ve learned.

FutureLearn – Getting Started with Agile Part 5

On to the final set of notes for the Getting Started with Agile course that I’m doing via FutureLearn.

Today covers User Stories in a bit more depth. I’ve mentioned this in previous notes – it’s this basic layout

As a [persona]
I want to [do a thing]
so that I can [derive a benefit]”

which is the whole basic system for Agile – finding out what you want to do to improve things so that you can test, implement, repeat..

User Stories

To write a user story – we start with the persona that we built using the interviewing and detail gathering I wrote about in the last blog. We want to constantly go back to who the user is and who we’re making this product for – to ensure that what we do is consistent, actionable, testable.

To ensure your story isn’t too broad, you might need to break it down into child stories which all have their own test case – the change that you make to the product to see if it resolves the issue for the user. This gives you a system for checking and trying to resolve larger issues over a timescale. You will also need to incorporate note-taking into that system as you may discover that users try to solve an issue in multiple ways, or other information may come to light that doesn’t quite fit with your test case and resolution.

(Quite a bit of the information in the course at this point was providing specific examples of how this works, which is why I’ve got less notes about it than in previous posts!)

Drafting it Together

The course also suggests literally storyboarding though the user’s process in sketches as you would for a film – because this can be a great way of getting through communication issues with your team, and figuring out little details in the process that might otherwise be missed. This, along with breaking up a story into child stories with different test cases, also helps with not forcing your users down one path which will ‘fix things’ because they are approaching the product and problems in different ways.

In Conclusion

This was only a free, short course, so I’ve really only scratched the surface on Agile and it’s terminology and how all this works, but I do feel like I’ve absorbed quite a lot that will apply to stuff I’m doing for work – even if it’s just individual bits of techniques rather than implementing Agile in its entirety. I’m definitely glad I blogged all of this though – I’ll be trying to go back over these posts regularly to remind myself.

FutureLearn – Getting Started with Agile Part 4

Ok, we’re back!

Last week’s course notes focused on creating a persona of your user or customer, and how you need to narrow down exactly who they are, what they do and from there figure out what they want.

These are details you can only get by actually talking to users/customers. But this is very resource-intensive, and you’ll also have a lot of research done, which isn’t necessarily helpful or getting to the right people. Which means that you might be creating products or rolling out solutions which don’t actually make things better for people.

A lot of research techniques can result in users telling you what they think you want to hear – so be careful of creating questions and decisions that lead people to those places.

As mentioned in previous notes, your personas and your problem scenarios will never be 100% accurate – you are always experimenting and improving.

So what kind of questions should you be asking that will get you the results you need quickly?

The course provides an example where they first ask someone ‘Is this part of your job hard?’ which is a leading question as they’ll say yes – even if that’s not the answer you really need. Instead, you need to ask something like ‘what’s hard about your job?’. Also, people often expect that you want vague and wide-reaching answers because you’re asking them to describe what they typically do in relation to your product – so you’re probably better off asking for specific examples of them using it and what they did.

There’s a detailed guide on how to create questions for Personas here which I’m saving for future use.

http://www.futurelearn.com

I also took this screenshot from the course leader explaining how you might get to those questions from the general areas you need to be asking about.

After these establishing questions, you’ll get to the ‘Think, See, Feel Do’ section that I referenced in my notes last week. To quote the course leader:

With the see part of think, see, feel, do, we’re trying to get at what influences their point of view. Why did they think what they think? Is it discussions with peers? Things they read. So we might ask them how do you learn about what’s new, what’s happening?

The more questions you’ve asked, the more specific you should be able to become. So not ‘how do you feel about your job?’ but ‘How did you feel when you were struggling to complete this specific task you mentioned earlier?’

Obviously with this you’re going to need to take very detailed notes and you’re going to going to find significant variation in answers, which will help you to discover where the relationships are in people’s answers which help you to create the overall persona.

Once you’re got the persona together, you can start asking slightly more leading questions around the problem scenario.

It’s also important to remember that if you’re just starting out with this research method, it might not go well the first couple of times. So you’ll probably need to iterate and refine the questions over time to get clearer, more detailed answers. Some of the questions may look and feel a bit repetitive, but you don’t need to ask all of them if you feel you’re getting the right level of detail.

Examples of more leading questions below in another video screenshot from the course.

The more questions you have and the more info you have, the more you can be leading in your questions to pin down more details.

The next part of the course is also the final part, so I’ll be getting started on that very soon.

FutureLearn – Getting Started with Agile – Part 3

Alright, ploughing forward with my latest FutureLearn course ‘Getting Started with Agile’ (having already done notes for Part One and Part Two) – we’re filling in more about ‘personas’ – creating a user/customer profile that’s real and realistic, that you can communicate to your team and can work off.

A lot of organisations start with demographics like ‘women aged 35-45’, which doesn’t work because it’s a huge group and potentially a very varied group. Instead, you could start with something like ‘women who like to take their toddlers out to the park’. That’s still a wide group, but it’s less varied in interest, in who they are as a person.

When writing a persona, avoid short descriptions, cliches, bullet points. Describe a complete person. They should be identifiable rather than demographic specific. To make sure you’re on the right lines, create the persona then see whether you know a small number of people in the real world who match it.

Use the framework Think, See, Feel, Do

Problem Scenarios

These are the fundamental needs, jobs to be done, desires that our user has that we’re going to deliver on with our software.

Basically, if a user has a problem, either something that’s missing from your product right now or something that’s missing from their lives that you would like to create a product for. So rather than having an idea on how to solve it and putting it out there, look first at how the user is trying to solve the problem themselves. Then design from there. Break the scenario down into smaller ‘child’ scenarios.

Thoughts this week

Quite a few of the sections this week were going back over some of the stuff I made quite a lot of notes on in the previous two posts. However, the persona details could be really useful for my current job and in better defining audiences etc. I’ll be trying to work through the rest of the course very soon.