Why it’s important
It’s important for your team to make sure the thing you’re building forms a coherent part of a user’s wider journey. This is because what you’re working on is probably part of a bigger task that users are trying to complete. To create a successful experience, all the different parts of the journey need to join up coherently. If they don’t, the user will get stuck and their journey breaks down.
What to consider
- Do you understand what the whole problem is (e.g., secondary goal: “I need to fax paperwork with SSNs to central HR” vs. the primary goal: “I need to securely communicate paperwork with sensitive data to central HR”)?
- What are the different ways that people currently accomplish the task(s) the service is designed to help with? What are the pain points?
- How does your website/tool/project/service fit into the way users currently interact with the overall service being offered?
- Where will you start? What is the highest priority? What will make the greatest impact?
Toolkit: Principles and practices worksheet
Capture info as you work through each of the principles.
Contact us
Get in touch with the DoIT Interoperability Team to start your interoperability project.
Put this principle into action
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In the early stages:
- Identify pain points in the current way users interact with the service, and prioritize these according to user needs
- Use the “5 Whys” to get at the root of the problem and better understand the problem space
- Prioritize pain points and determine what to focus on first
- As you progress, understand how and where your users interact with your service so you can create an intuitive process, enabling your users to easily get from point A to B
- In an ongoing capacity, work in the open and use open standards so that people within and outside your organization know what you’re doing, increasing the potential for collaboration and reducing duplication of effort.
Dig deeper into this principle
The Center for User Experience can help you understand the a user need more holistically. The Project Management Office can help you define business requirements, and manage and organize the big picture.
Please send feedback to the DoIT Interoperability Team. We welcome your input!