A Vision for Analytics
Facilitating Workshops for a Clearer Future
Context
The Analytics team had been up and running for about a year and had shipped a few big features for the rollout of Confluence Premium. It had also grown from a tight team of four, adding a few new hires and myself as embedded designer.
In the void created in the aftermath of our initial efforts, the team was now faced with a dilemma: What would we do next? It quickly became clear to me – and my counterparts in product and eng – that this was the perfect time to take a big step back.
My Contribution
I felt strongly that we needed to involve our team in this process. As a result, I organized and lead three visioning workshop sessions with the ten members of the team. Our goals were to align our team, help define our roadmap, and identify areas of overlap and dependencies with other teams.
Afterwards, I lead the process of distilling our outputs into a cohesive story, as well as the creation of conceptual designs to illustrate it. Together with my triad (PM and Eng lead), we put it all on a vision page which we shared with the wider organization.
Note: This case study is about the workshop and visioning process, so I will not be discussing the Analytics problem space. For a little more context, see the footnote.
Process
We gave ourselves three weeks to prepare and share our team vision, starting with a focus week to prepare and run the workshops.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Preparation
2 days
Workshop
3 days
Course-setting
2 days
Storyboard
4 days
Final designs
4 days
Vision page
5 days
Despite what the above chart may indicate, the process was anything but neat. We often had to push forward without full certainty, making a point to later revisit the areas we wanted to be crystal clear.
Workshop
Preparation: User feedback and Personas
Context in workshops is everything, and I was hell bent on giving my participants good customer insights to work from. The first step I took was to gather the existing feedback we had from customers to surveys, help desk tickets, in-product feedback, and user interviews.
This lead directly into the process of defining behavioral personas, which I did with my PM and Eng Manager. Personas were based on their goals for using Confluence and became shorthand for a set of needs and behaviors.
In Dovetail I segmented user feedback by source and tagged them by problem area
I created this diagram early on and it proved useful throughout the process in communicating the wildly different concerns of our personas.
Day 1: Customer Deep Dive
The first day, as in many workshops, is all about gaining shared understanding. I first had participants spend time reading and reflecting on the customer feedback I had gathered. Afterwards, we shared and discussed.
In our first exercise, the experiences of real users took center stage
Day 2: Empathy Mapping and HMWs
To guide the workshop participants, I next gave them an overview of the personas. These not only gave participants a framework for thinking, but also served as a structuring tool for the workshop.
With that context in hand, I had everyone do an empathy mapping exercise to put themselves in the user's shoes. The reflection done here allowed the team to think more broadly as they generated How Might We statements (ie. opportunity statements).
We had five personas and only a half hour to do this exercise. To achieve both depth and breadth, I had each participant examine two personas, leaving ample time to share amongst the group.
Having the empathy mapping template ready kept the workshop going smoothly
Day 3: Ideation
For the final day, I had participants generate ideas based on the How Might We statements shared the previous day. Once the ideas were all shared, I lead an affinity-mapping activity to group ideas. We then voted on our favorite ideas, providing a perfect springboard for the next phase of the project after the workshops.
Leaving a visible trace of votes makes it easy to revisit the whiteboard later
From Workshop to Vision
Course-setting
Coming out of the workshops, the team was feeling good – and so was the triad. It was now time to turn our attention to the ultimate goal: a team vision.
We approached from two directions: the concrete and the abstract. Concretely, we evaluated and prioritized the ideas from the workshop. Abstractly, we created principles for our team. The goal was not only to help explain our thinking to stakeholders, but also to guide the Analytics team into the future.
Figma files often served as a collaborative space to discuss and iterate. Pictured here are a set of working team principles.
Storyboarding
From early on in the project, we knew that we wanted the ultimate vision document to be engaging, as it would be shared with many people. At Atlassian, where information is freely shared, attention is at a premium. Our belief was that if we told a story we’d be able to encourage people to read to the end and see the value of Analytics for Confluence.
I took the lead, creating a low fidelity story broken up into key chapters. It was designed to tie in how personas at multiple levels of the product could benefit from Analytics. The story follows these personas through various tasks as they go about their day, showing how in the future Analytics would be more helpful – and even indispensable.
I created a first draft of the story and took it to design critique and our triad sync for feedback.
The original story, told across four chapters, was too dense
Polishing the Story
In my first draft, the ideas were hard for outsiders to understand and it frankly took a long time to read.
Based on this feedback, I made a few changes to our story. First, I combined two chapters, reducing the total number of ideas by a third. Secondly I shifted into higher-fidelity designs to show the details our concepts required.
Later, we changed the chapter order as well. The new order flowed better from chapter to chapter, as each left off where the next could begin.
Bringing it all Together
Concept Designs
In the context of the vision document, the final designs were crafted to:
illustrate the concepts as simply as possible
draw readers in to look closer
convey their "unfinished" nature
This case study is not intended to analyze the concepts themselves, but here are a few examples to give an idea of what they looked like. In total, there were 18 concepts:
In this example, multiple ideas formed together to create a dashboard
Other concepts showed an extra-simplified interface. Here, microcopy in the form of page metadata takes center stage.
Visualized information like graphs quickly convey user value to readers
Vision Document
The final presentation featured three chapters which followed our key personas through the story of how Analytics would be integral to Confluence’s future.
In writing, I made sure to provide context visually, color-coding personas and interspersing the chapters with persona callouts for quick context.
Our final three chapters
Persona callouts peppered the vision to help readers understand the story at a glance
Learnings
Keep an open door
Never underestimate the impact of letting others into the design headspace and process. Engineers really liked the workshops. I believe that they are often so focused on making the product work (ie. their job), they don’t have the luxury of taking a step back to think deeply about the customer. From what I’ve heard, providing them that opportunity is something they’ve longed for but didn’t even realize.
Be flexible to change
At first, the story with lo-fi mockups was too complex. After a round of feedback, it was the right call to simplify it even though I had put a lot of time into the designs. My belief: To get here we had to go there. Being flexible is a necessary element in all aspects of design. In retrospect, I’m glad the triad and I had the discipline to recognize a problem and re-route to something better.
Sharing is daring
Too often during my time at Atlassian, I saw well-executed projects collect dust on Confluence (our wiki product) because they either weren’t written well or they weren’t shared widely enough. Truth is, it’s hard to write something in a way others will find interesting. In this project, I was hell bent on creating something that would stand the test of time and actually build excitement. Sharing that ambition with my team helped us strive together towards an engaging vision.
Footnote
While I haven't intended this case study to discuss the actual problems in the Analytics space, I will be happy to provide more context on request. Some of the related topics I explored for this vision work: site admin, cross-product integrations, privacy settings, and data visualization.
Andrew Nelson ©2023
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