Find Out How They Really Feel
You trained them to use this system, and now your staff members are working with it every day. Did the training stick? Are people finding the value in this tool? Do they even understand why you deployed it?
If you don’t know how your people really feel about the system (and you may not, because whatever you’ve heard may represent just the tip of the iceberg), the first step is to find out. Don’t expect your intranet or enterprise system to draw the adulation that the latest Wii title might; after all, this is work. Have reasonable expectations—but have expectations. A tool shouldn’t be a constant irritant. Frustration that surfaces around a business system is a symptom of a problem, but you won’t be able to find a cure until you understand the reasons for the frustration.
Observe people using the system to do their work. If the tool has been running in your organization longer than six months, ask a few of its users to think aloud as they interact with it. Ask them to describe what they are doing and why. Some active users may be able to clearly explain how the tool suits their needs, how they wish it could be adjusted to correspond to the way they do their work at present, and the ways in which they would like to do their work. You may need to draw information out of others who have become so accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the tool that they’re unaware of how poorly it suits their needs.
If you’re running a system that was deployed less than six months ago, you won’t need to ask your people how they feel about it; just listen. Be warned: These forays into the field are not recommended for anyone who has a delicate constitution. Nurses, doctors, call-center representatives, sales reps, and most other end users can be brutally honest when they vocalize their feelings about cumbersome, counterintuitive, and ultimately counterproductive business systems foisted upon them.
Don’t be shocked if you find yourself among a user community that is simply not using the tool at all. In this situation, don’t retreat—dig in and find out why. Be prepared to listen. Don’t take it personally, and don’t defend the application or all the well-intentioned decisions that brought the system to its current form. If members of the user community are expressing dissatisfaction with how the tool works or how they are expected to interact with it, it’s obvious that the wisdom of all of the decisions to install the system has been lost on these individuals.
Don’t take one person’s word for it. Talking with and observing five or six or seven individuals will let you see patterns in the types of things that are challenging the entire population of users. Go to the desks of target users who are performing work associated with the areas of concern. Introduce yourself and ask their permission to watch as they work. Don’t be afraid to ask questions as you observe, but be careful not to ask leading questions, and don’t ask users to diagnose the problem or propose a solution. You are only interested in observing—and perhaps hearing an opinion.
It’s possible that you’ll discover a smoldering romance between your users and one of your outdated systems. Some communities of users become unreasonably attached to legacy systems that represent older, less efficient technologies and even more inefficient user interfaces. This can happen when workers become workaround wizards who have learned to master the quirks of a system and integrate it into their jobs, however uncomfortably. Efforts to revise or uproot these systems can be met with resistance, and some businesses compromise by allowing an interface to persist or even to lead the definition of a new system, all in the name of doing right by the end users.
Through direct observation you can locate and identify many of the problems that plague even the most sophisticated systems. After taking a close look at your system, it may be worthwhile to call in a usability specialist or a designer—or both—to help prioritize problem areas and to lead a process to refresh and restart the system.
— Excerpted and adapted from Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate by Harold Hambrose (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York). Order your copy of this book.
