Are you in sync with your user needs?
Learn how to understand your users’ needs and expectations to unlock valuable experiences through fast innovation.
In modern business operations, internal systems and software play an integral role in driving efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. This is especially true in a post-COVID world, where businesses are 40% more likely to operate on a hybrid-working model, with employees dividing their time between home and office.
It’s unsurprising then that organisations are starting to re-evaluate their internal systems, using the principles of User Experience (UX) design to re-optimise their workflows and create a more holistic experience for their internal teams.
But how are businesses achieving this transformation? And what exactly should they be looking to change? It all comes down to how well you understand your user needs.
“100 Shapes have been the secret sauce behind the success of our product suite here at ITV”
What are user needs?
Just as with UX design for customer-focused products, the success of designing for internal systems hinges on how well they cater to the unique needs and preferences of the user.
When considering user needs, designers need to think about what it is that brings users to their interactions with that system of software. For example, it could be the need to complete a task efficiently, to simplify or organise their workflow, to gain seamless access to information, or for the purpose of collaboration.
However, user needs are not limited only to the functional aspect of the system, but also to the emotional and psychological user experience. An internal system that successfully addresses the whole spectrum of requirements, desires and expectations of the user, has the potential to significantly enhance employee satisfaction, boost productivity, and streamline organisational processes.
How to design for specific user needs
In order to build systems that feel both intuitive and comprehensive, we first need to understand the user and what they need when interacting with a system. We need to find out: What’s great? What’s annoying? What’s missing?
With the help of a recent project we completed with ITV Studios, we’ll walk you through 100 Shapes’ strategic process to show you how we use design, play and innovation to identify and design for specific user needs.
“I’ve got 8,000 things to do, and the one thing I forget will end up being the thing that was critical!”
Identifying user needs with ITV Studios
It’s impossible to design a successful product without first considering the who and the why. For ITV Studios, the ‘who’ turned out to be the internal teams working to create, deliver and optimise content for ITV’s popular streaming platform, ITV Hub.
ITV Studios create and distribute thousands of television programmes every year both through broadcast television and online streaming platforms. Behind the scenes, there are over 60 different internal labels working to create and manage this content, each of whom works in slightly different ways.
Without one unified platform, it was impossible for ITV Studios to create consistent processes across all teams. However, they understood that making their employees jobs easier would in turn impact the customer with a better product down the line. That’s where 100 Shapes stepped in.
To help ITV Studios meet their internal user needs, we first had to identify the specific problems those employees were facing.
Here’s how 100 Shapes makes sense of new audiences:
User interviews. Speak directly to your target users to understand pain points you didn’t already know about.
Surveys. Quantifying the needs, attitudes and behaviours of your users, to help identify the scale of the challenge and opportunity.
Insight gathering. Sifting through qualitative and quantitative data sets to help us find meaningful patterns.
User profiling. Characterising the behaviours, motivations and expectations users have, to better understand their needs.
Journey and service mapping. Mapping out your user journey helps us identify potential frustrations and areas of improvement as well as making sense of business processes and the interactions that exist with other parts of the business supply chain.
How did ITV Studios get user needs right?
Nailing user needs is a multi-step process and requires three key ingredients: time, communication, and creativity. If you’ve got all these at hand, you’re ready to start on your innovation journey.
Here’s how we took ITV Studios from big challenge to simple(ish!) solution:
1. Defining the challenge
ITV Studios wanted to give their end customers the best possible experience when using their streaming hub. This involved understanding their employees current pain points, mapping their user journey, and gathering data around the usability of their platform to properly understand and meet their needs. ITV understood that improving the quality of their front facing offering starts with helping their employees in their day-to-day roles.
As a huge organisation working in silos, ITV Studios first needed help aligning their different internal labels, providing an internal user journey that was easy to use and would ultimately help employees deliver the best possible product every time.
Key outcomes: defining the challenge to be solved, including identifying the user needs, the current state of the internal environment, and the competitive landscape.
2. Building the blueprint
Once the problem had been defined, we started the blueprint design process. Through a collaborative process of designing, educating and refining, 100 Shapes got to work building a blueprint for a brand new, bespoke project management system that would both meet the needs of the employees planning, creating, uploading the content, while also meeting the needs of the customer who would ultimately consume those products.
At this stage user-centred discovery research was the priority, ensuring that the journey we were creating felt intuitive and easy-to-navigate for all types of user.
Key outcomes: providing a service blueprint – a visual representation of the user journey, showing all the touchpoints from content planning and creation to customer viewing.
Get in touch with 100 Shapes for help making your UX/UI sing
3. Creating the prototype
The next step was to create a prototype. This involved building a working model of the ITV Studios Portal that could then be used to test the service concept and get feedback from users. This is our time to play!
The proof-of-concept stage is iterative. This means we gathered multiple levels of feedback from users inside ITV. The data gathered at each stage was then used to make tweaks both large and small until the prototype met the needs of all users.
Once we felt confident, the prototype was built into a fully functional portal, streamlining internal workflows, integrating creation and upload processes, and ensuring content met the quality expectations of the end user.
Key outcomes: a working prototype ready to be implemented.
4. Review and repeat
Due to the scale and complexity of ITV’s user needs, This process was delivered through in an agile environment until all internal teams had been onboarded onto a single system. By working in this way, we were able to start delivering new functionalities to the system in three-week cycles, while learning and re-optimising along the way.
Challenges of aligning design with user needs
While the concept of designing for user needs seems straightforward, the reality can often present challenges. One common obstacle is the assumption that employees' needs are universally similar or known without direct input. This assumption can lead to systems that fail to address the unique requirements of specific user groups.
Another challenge lies in striking the right balance between usability and complexity. Internal systems often need to encompass a wide array of features for different teams under a single umbrella. The challenge for designers then comes in navigating the fine line between providing comprehensive functionality and ensuring a user experience that feels intuitive and easy-to-use.
In addition, the fast-paced nature of technological advancements can make it challenging to keep up with evolving user needs. What might have been a suitable solution yesterday could become obsolete or inefficient today, requiring organisations to stay agile and open to evolving their systems with the needs of their teams.
Design Sprints are a great way to develop targeted software solutions fast.
How well do you understand your users’ needs?
If you’re struggling to paint a picture of who your users are, what they need, and how your business can deliver it to them, get in touch with 100 Shapes. Our experts can help you to understand your user needs and create highly personalised user journeys that keep them coming back.
