UX Research
Håkan Nilsson
User Researcher
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Google Docs
Miro
Forsler & Stjerna Konsult AB
Laying the foundations with UX research
In the world of managing public transport, or at least in the Swedish part of that world, all public agencies rely on data from a database called Rebus, provided by Forsler & Stjerna. This comes with one downside though; it is just that, a database. A huge collection of data and numbers in rows and columns. Very hard for the less experienced users to grasp, and a slow way for the experienced ones.
The project
This project was to lay the foundations for the future development of a graphical module to be placed on top of the Rebus database. We wanted to find out how the users worked with the database, what information was important and how and if it would help them to get it drawn up for them on the screen instead of keeping the numbers in the database. The main event of this project was to lead a UX workshop with most of the potential users at a gathering in Gothenburg.
Getting the know the basic
Having worked on several projects about public transport, the field in itself was not new to me, but I still had to start the project with analysing the Rebus database and the clients using it to create a proper stakeholder mapping.
Finding some initial insights
To get more insight on the user’s perspective I gathered some initial data by sending a survey to the attendees of the Gothenburg gathering. This later was used as the corner stone in the preparation of the workshop.
The workshop
During the actual workshop the group, around 75 people, was divided into 8 groups and was given two tasks to discuss and complete during a span of one and an half hour.
The first exercise was to divide 100 points between different data points, depending on the importance of them. A preliminary list of data points, extracted from the results of the survey, was given to the groups, and they were encouraged to add more if they could.
The second exercise was to list what was important for the users when it come to displaying information directly on a map.
During the whole workshop some very interesting discussions went on, where more information than the actual tasks at hand gave us was gathered.
Final result
The end result of this project was a written UX report were the general lines of further research and studies was presented as well as recommendations about the steps to take in the immediate future.
