‘Their Story’ UX Strategy Development
UX Strategy and Research
Their Story is an online platform that collects and preserves stories of communities around the world with a focus on oral history collection, preservation, and engagement.
The purpose of this project was to center user experience in the work of the Their Story team moving forward. The team communicated in multiple meetings ahead of this project that they were missing direction and working to push feature after feature without fully seeing the purpose of them. It was unclear who Their Story users were and what their needs were.
About Their Story’s users and team
Their Story is an online platform that collects and preserves stories of communities around the world with a focus on oral history collection, preservation, and engagement.
Users of Their Story are oral historians, students, history professors, community groups, and non-profits. They are looking to collect, preserve, and engage with the stories of a community. They facilitate conversations to record history on a specific subject and share those stories in multimedia formats.
The company is a small startup with one full-time and seven part-time employees. Up until this point, they have been focused on quickly getting highly requested features into the platform, but in turn, created UX debt. Coming into this project Their Story was looking to just update the look of the site, but after some analysis, I advocated the need for a longer-term UX strategy and research before redesigning the platform.
Communicating the current user experience and aligning the team with a user-centered vision
The purpose of this project was to center user experience in the work of the Their Story team moving forward. The team communicated in multiple meetings ahead of this project that they were missing direction and working to push feature after feature without fully seeing the purpose of them. It was unclear who Their Story users were and what their needs were.
The first step of this project was to communicate to the team who Their Story users are and what their current experience is. Next, was to make the team come together by including them in the process and to center the platform’s users in the work going forward. The final step in this project was to create a long-term experience vision for the product aligning the team towards a common goal.
A major constraint was the limited budget available for this project. That limited the number of hours I was able to work on mapping the current user experience. This project extended the scope of my work with Their Story, who were initially just looking for user interface designs, but needed a larger experience strategy for their ongoing work.
The current landing page for users of Their Story.
Defining the current experience
The owner of Their Story handles all of the platform's customer support, making him a great resource for customer feedback. I worked mainly with him to identify key themes of user pain points. I also analyzed existing customer interviews to further outline the current user experience. This information was shared with the entire team. All team members then participated in a workshop to create an aspirational experience for Their Story.
Due to the budget constraints of this project, utilizing existing interviews and knowledge of customer feedback was key. I analyzed and condensed interviews with a variety of users. Each video was enhanced with detailed notes on the user’s background, needs, and goals. This information was presented to the team to give a clearer understanding of who Their Story users are.
Key themes appeared from the analysis of user interviews and customer support interactions.
Some examples of these findings include:
For many users, Their Story was a solution to remote interviewing in the time of Covid. It allowed them to continue their work and even enhance it in some ways by connecting with people farther away than ever before.
The “Prepare a Session” workflow caused confusion and sessions created this way lacked the ability to be edited or deleted.
Larger projects needed better documentation and organization of meta data.
Screenshot of the “Launch a Session” Page. This is what users see on their desktop when they begin a new interview session.
Aligning the team with an aspirational user experience
To center Their Story users in the product development, I planned and conducted a workshop to align the team with a common vision. By having everyone at Their Story participate in crafting that vision, it increases buy-in and takes all perspectives into account.
The workshop took an iterative approach to developing an experience vision. I planned and led the 2-hour workshop where everyone on the team created their own story that represents the aspirational experience for Their Story five years in the future. Then team members listened to others stories and made changes to their own. In the next round of review the team was able to offer feedback on the stories. After everyone received feedback, everyone made another round of changes.
I then consolidated all the stories into a few variations from different perspectives to direct future work of the team. For example, one is from the viewpoint of a student just discovering their interest in collecting stories from his community. Another is from a college oral history professor's perspective trying to balance her professional research and student course work. These perspectives represent the primary user groups on the platform and will be who the product is designed for moving forward. The stories focus on how Their Story fits into the user's daily lives and are absent specific features, which will further drive the focus on the overall experience.
Outcomes and Future Work
In the end, the workshop gave the team a chance to hear directly from our users and center users in our work going forward. The workshop increased buy-in from the team on the importance of user experience and aligned everyone towards a common goal in the form of an experience vision. The stories we created will likely evolve over time with future user research, however the user will remain at the center.
This project highlighted the value of working with and including a team of developers, project managers and executives, in UX work. The language discussing the product has shifted to a more user centered approach. The team also has a much clearer vision for where they are headed, and this will be reflected in the product roadmap. These stories will be broken down into manageable milestones and turned into items on our product roadmap. In a few weeks a redesign of the platform will begin. The designs will incorporate the findings of the completed research. I will be starting with the biggest pain points discovered in user interviews and feedback, including “Preparing a Session” and expanding meta data options after recordings. I will also continue to advocate for more research on specific areas of frustration in the product and to increase the exposure the development teams has with users.