Floyd
From September to December 2018, I contributed to a consulting project for Floyd, an e-commerce furniture startup headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, through SI 501: Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations. My team and I, the “UXperts”, conducted user interviews and undertook a full design process to provide the best possible recommendations for Floyd.
Floyd is is home to a fast-growing and dynamic workplace. As the company grows, realizing its full potential requires a file organization system that works as hard as its employees do. We, the UXperts, have performed 9 contextual inquiry interviews, hours of analysis, background research, and brainstorming to materialize recommendations that tackle Floyd’s current concerns including file naming, organization, and management. We hope our recommendations will allow the company to continue to scale and meet the needs of both its customers and employees.
Background Research.
Before performing any interviews, we need to have an idea of the problem at hand. I cannot go into specifics because this is ongoing work for a real industry client, but I created this infographic to illustrate some of the findings I synthesized through my background research.
Interview.
My favorite part of the process, we had the opportunity to interview Floyd employees at all levels. By asking carefully tailored questions and gathering stories and artifacts, we are able to piece together the problem Floyd is experiencing. With this knowledge we hope to synthesize the best possible recommendation for our client.
To have a better understanding of Floyd and their current file sharing system concerns, we adopted a semi-structured interview method called contextual inquiry. From October 23rd to 30th, we interviewed 9 employees from Floyd, including eight on-site interviews at their office and one remote video interview. The roles of our interviewees ranged from Head of Customer Experience, to User Interface designer, Head of operation, and COO. For each interview, two representatives from our team were present, one as an interviewer and the other as a notetaker. The interviews usually lasted around 45 to 60 minutes. During the interview, we asked a set of questions about how they used the file sharing system and how they communicated with other team members. During the interview, we also observed how they utilized Google Drive and their local computers to create, save and search for files.
Within 48 hours of each interview, the four of us conducted an interpretation session to reflect and synthesize our key findings from the interview and observation. During each interpretation session, we generated around fifty one-sentence notes based on our notes from the interview and the recordings. This helped us contextualize the observations and take the first step of our analysis. We also annotated our interview notes to reflect and critique our prior interviews in preparation for the following ones.
Affinity Wall.
After conducting all nine interviews, we created an affinity wall for systematic qualitative analysis. We wrote down interpretations and quotes from the interviews on about three hundred sticky notes in total. We then grouped the notes based on the problem addressed, and summarized these problems into complete sentences. We then organized these large clusters of groups based on the problem topics such as naming, searching, sharing, file management, and collaboration.
We wrote out affinity notes of important takeaways from each interview and organized them into clusters, clusters of clusters, and so on. This allowed us perform qualitative data analysis from individual pieces of qualitative data.
One major challenge at this point was the time required by the exercise! My team and I were tired and sometimes got frustrated. I learned that it is important to have team snacks, and to take breaks when necessary. Keeping the team vibe positive is imperative!
Brainstorming.
In order to generate cohesive solutions, we also brainstormed ideas for each root problem. Once we had a sizable list of brainstormed solutions, we created a criteria rubric for each solution to be assessed. on. The factors in consideration on the rubric were: Cost, Scalability, Time Required, Difficulty of Behavior change, Learning Curve, Sustainability, Culture Maintenance, Required Effort, and Technical Feasibility. From this we identified four key recommendations.
Recommendations.
For the final consulting report including recommendations, contact me at wiesliam@umich.edu.
Reflection.
Some of the greatest struggles in consulting Floyd were also the greatest opportunities. For example, in order to conduct our interviews, all four of my team members had to drive an hour together from Ann Arbor to Detroit. While this was a hassle to schedule, it provided crucial team bonding time, which I believe contributed to the success of the project in very tangible ways.
I enjoyed working with Floyd tremendously, and have high hopes for their future. I look forward to my next opportunity to conduct interviews and use design thinking to find patterns and generate solutions!