UX Research

Making My Dream Team a dream product

• Project Type: Group [5 members]
• Duration: January 2018 — April 2018
• My Role: UX Researcher, Project Manager

Summary

My Dream Team (MDT) is a platform created by the SONIC Research Group at Northwestern University that seeks to create ideal groups of people based on the characteristics and preferences of each member. With the aim of becoming the “one-­stop destination for forming teams”, the platform takes in user data via a survey and subsequent preferential rankings (in the Teaming stage) and then, with sophisticated algorithms, provides “theoretically driven” recommendations for team membership (My Dream Team, n.d., n.p.).

Our Role

Our team was recruited to perform detailed research on the platform and provided feedback on how to improve the product. We used methods such as interaction mapping, interviews, heuristic evaluations, and usability tests, to name a few, to study the platform and assess its effectiveness. Over the course of 4 months, which involved the preparation of detailed UX Research reports on a weekly basis, we were able to identify potential areas of improvement and chart a path forward for the development of the platform. We provided useful insights that were backed by solid research methods, all of which were available in the form of a concise video delivered to the client at the end of 4 months.

The Product

My Dream Team (MDT) is a web-based product available at the SONIC research group’s website. People can register as an Admin or a User. Users are defined as those looking to form teams with like-minded individuals, or individuals who have a specific talent, for a specific purpose. Admins are those who are tasked with forming teams of such individuals based on the compatibility information of said individuals provided by the MDT algorithm. Users are invited (by persons looking organize teams) to answer a survey with roughly 50 questions that address a variety of character and personal traits as well as technical expertise and leadership experience. While most of the questions are in the form of a Likert Scale, users are also given the opportunity to answer some open-ended questions. After they submit the survey, administrators get the results of the survey and are then given the task of forming the strongest (most compatible) teams from among the people who answered the survey. Invitations are then sent out to the users thus selected by admins and they may accept or reject the invitation to form a team.

Process

We first organized a kickoff meeting with our client to introduce ourselves formally and to understand their product and our client’s needs better. We were provided a run-through of the product and given access to some of the initial research our client had performed on their own while they were making the product.

Initial Stages

We then went back to the drawing board and spent a week poring over the documents provided as well as familiarizing ourselves with the product website. We went through the surveys ourselves and also spent time acting as admins forming teams with dummy users. We then charted out an interaction map to log all the interactions a potential user can carry out on the site.

We then conducted interviews with users recruited at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Seeing as the target audience for this product was going to be students and other people in academia, we found it prudent to get feedback by leveraging our positions as graduate students at the School of Information and interviewing other students and staff. Our interviews helped us in creating personas to better understand our users needs.

We then created surveys and sent them out to students and faculty/staff at the University of Michigan. While we primarily targeted those at the School of Information, we did manage to get many responses from students outside the School of Information as well. Our survey results were very important in helping us make specific recommendations to the MDT platform.

The Final Stages

Our survey results were the last step in the initial research phase of this project. The initial phase was helpful in gathering valuable information from potential users of the platform and using that to implement changes in the platform without having to conduct more expensive and intensive research procedures.

Heuristic Evaluation

This brings us to the next stages of research — heuristic evaluations and usability tests. Here we had an advantage — working in a team of 5 people meant that each of us could conduct individual heuristic evaluations and usability tests and then discuss our collated results.

We applied the Nielsen Norman Heuristic Evaluation Criteria to see how well MDT performed on the scale provided. We found five Level-4 issues (serious areas of concern) that require the product to be fixed prior to any further release.

Usability Testing

The final stage of research for our client was what is known in the world of User Experience Research as Usability Testing. In simple terms this requires having someone use the platform or system being tested to perform a set of predefined (basic or commonly performed) activities in 1–2 hour sessions. These sessions were recorded and monitored by the research team. We then sat down to debrief and analyze the feedback from users. It was important to capture not just verbal feedback provided by the user but also non-verbal feedback such as frustrations, exclamations and facial expressions such as surprise or satisfaction. The role of the researchers was to study the user, prompting only when the user went into moments of quiet reflection. Users were asked to speak their thoughts out loud and were requested to be honest in their feedback. It required some skill and tact to make sure that users were comfortable and spoke frequently. We stressed repeatedly that the users themselves were not being tested, and that the only thing being tested was the system itself.

Final Video

Our research wrapped up with the Usability tests. The project, as mentioned earlier, consisted of several steps and had weekly reports (some of these over 80 pages long including appendices) sent to our client detailing all of the work we had done. We decided to make a TL;DR version of this report in the form of a short video. This would not only help condense some of the voluminous research results we had into smaller parts but would also serve as a helpful medium for our clients to use for any future research work they conducted on the platform.