Effective product design always involves some amount of group therapy. As professionals, we bring a technological and ergonomic expertise to our work; but on their own, those skills can't solve the real, underlying business problems. Our most valuable talent is facilitating the decisionmaking process. And that process begins and ends with determining what outcome constitutes success.
Committing to a goal — especially in a group setting — can be politically and emotionally fraught. Distrust, insecurity, and unvalidated assumptions can render an organization nearly catatonic, or more often unwittingly enshrine the status quo. Taking a cue from mediation, the first step to breaking through these personal and professional barriers is collaborating to establish a shared understanding and context, articulated in a shared language.
That language and contextual framework would emerge from our Modes & Mindsets synthesis technique, and would form the foundation of both the Texas work and the integrated eligibility (IE) product development organization.
Deloitte built its Texas IE work out of successes managing the underlying benefits determination system, TIERS. The online benefits application and management tool, Your Texas Benefits (YTB) had been constructed in a tech centric and requirements-first mentality, eschewing user research for ‘joint application development’ sessions with user proxies.
As a result, the YTB site was neither responsive nor mobile optimized; branding and content were inconsistent; and user engagement was minimal. While hundreds of feature requests and bugs had been loaded into product backlogs, there were no clear success metrics identified, and no user research informed rubric to prioritize a path forward.
the high level goals - mention specific quant metrics?
reason we couldn’t get them more detailed?
research we did
and why?
modes, and how they categorized requirements
significance of modes in design - intuitiveness, learnability
copy, visual
mindsets in a nutshell - observed binaries, mindset shifts, relationship to metrics
derived from demographics, not driving to demographics
backlog prioritization and product concepts
roadmap
success of mindsets with client adoption
The traditional approach to this kind of sensemaking centers on the persona, a kind of quasi fictional character built to represent groups of users or attitudes observed during research. There are a number of reasons I avoid personas, but for an IE organization in particular there is a distinct concern: their teams, over time, begin to understand their users and customers in the ways their benefits determination tools segment and group them.
Put another way — the stakeholders often begin to internalize the algorithms they rely on. And when an organization approaches its users from a demographic or socioeconomic segment first, they tend to either overcomplicate with redundant insights, miss potential nuance and opportunity, or both. (This is equally relevant in the commercial world; Hertz had developed more than 30 individual customer segments. Which is a lot to pay attention to.)
I go into more detail on this here, but in brief: Modes & Mindsets is a method of synthesizing research data that focuses on what individuals were observed doing or trying to do (modes) and what behaviors they exhibited (mindsets). While this approach helps to counter bias (by practitioner or client), it also more effectively captures the nuances and behavioral shifts that cross traditional demographic lines.
The research output included insights from call center logs and support tickets, screen by screen design and content audits, and sentiment analysis of the more than 100,000 reviews in the Apple and Android app stores. In addition to our seven modes and six mindsets, 108 immediate tactical recommendations and 25 broader insights helped form the basis of our early roadmap planning.
The modes themselves were categories of requirements — this makes them relatively simple to translate into agile epics or themes — built from more specific user needs. While some were more closely related than others (Prepare and Onboard, for example), they were each distinct enough to warrant considering their components as groups. Given that many IE users only access the system once every six to 12 months (application or renewal), the user experience needed to be quickly learnable; ensuring consistency in design and content cues within each mode would help to quietly reinforce the purpose of those features.
The mindsets were constructed by means of grouping four pairs of binary behavioral attributes — a preference for analog communications versus an expectation of self-service, for example — and then separating out any results not directly observed in research. This yielded six total mindsets, which accurately illustrated user relationships to the YTB system and the customer service organization that supported it.
As noted, this client was unable to resolve their quantitative success metrics during the scope of our engagement. What we proposed (and they tacitly accepted) were two high level goals: improving customer service, and reducing organizational effort or cost. We would use these goals in concert with the mindsets as they applied to modes in order to identify opportunities to achieve one or both; when sketched into concept, we would further hone in on quantitative metrics based on the measurement or analytics tools available.
An example: a preference for self-service in the context of YTB onboarding creates an opportunity to create more in depth instructional tools, thereby reducing call center volume (cost) and better meeting user expectations (customer service). We could then set metrics such as call center volume reduction, or onboarding error / abandonment reduction, for which we had analytics in place to measure. In some cases, we could even design the system specifically with those measurements in mind — breaking up a specific flow in order to determine where the most time on site was occurring, or pinpointing application questions that spurred abandonment.
Both my team and the client were new to this approach, and a considerable amount of time and effort went into educating both on the merits and application. By project’s end, the client had adopted our mindset terminology and began to request further research and work specifically in that context. Word traveled through Deloitte, and I ended up the ‘face of Modes & Mindsets’, teaching and lecturing on it for the remainder of my tenure there. It has since been adopted across nearly all Deloitte studios. (If only it were mine to take credit for!)
This is the first in a three part series on my work in the integrated eligibility space. The second can be found here, the third here, and the introduction and overview for the series here.
