I love my job. I do! Who doesn’t love a job that makes the world a better place to live in?
When I was very little, I once wanted to be a bus driver. Not just any bus driver, I wanted to give my passengers the biggest smile as they hop onto my bus so they would have a great start in the morning. I wanted them to have the most delightful journey to work, so they will feel great for the rest of the day.
As a user experience practitioner, I don’t drive a bus, but we certainly strive for making our products more delightful for our users.
I work on a product called JazzHub (https://hub.jazz.net/). It is a task tracking and planning tool on the cloud, with coding capabilities.
We have been taking a lean approach to conduct user research. Users are invited to our studies (in the lab or remote), exploring and validating the latest designs. During the usability sessions, users are given a set of scenarios to walk through using our tool, and are asked to use the “Think Aloud” technique when going through the tasks. By observing and asking questions, we pay attention to their stumbling blocks: Did users get lost within the tool? Are users confused by a certain widget?
By being lean, we run tests more frequently (once every 3 weeks) and have a much tighter feedback cycle, communicating what we hear from the user research to the team within a week, making possible improvements that will be rolled out again for next set of design validations. The JazzHub team has made great improvements, especially its getting started experience during the past months.
What also excites us is that when we first tell users about JazzHub, many did not think they had a need for the tool. But 5 minutes into the conversation and they start learning and seeing more, most would say: “Ah! I can see a good use for JazzHub. Let me take some notes about it as well."
Even though it's still in beta, JazzHub does provide great value for a wide variety of users. Creating a public project is free. (Yes, it’s FREE!) so I encourage you to try it out by registering at https://hub.jazz.net/. Drop me a note to let me know how you feel about its usability or better yet, email me to learn more about the usability sessions, it only takes an hour and it is fun! You can also use the JazzHub itself to provide feedback. I hope we hear from you!
Corrie
