How Well Does Your Product’s Workflow Work?

We’re all familiar with workflow systems that don’t work. Bad workflow systems cost employees, business partners, and customers efficiency and productivity. But with Web 2.0 principles in mind, there are many ways to create or redesign workflow tools to make them work right. Here are some guiding principles based on many years of experience in workflow design:

  • 1. Be User-Aware. Don’t just show a random table of records and force the user to find the right “needle in the haystack” record each time; design the system logic so it knows which records are relevant to each user, and serve these up first.
  • 2. Be Event-Aware. Important events, such as approvals, reviews, problems, etc, get lost in the shuffle of tabular design. Events should be bubbled up directly to users in an event/news stream, and these events can then help users perform triage and prioritize their time.
  • 3. Be Context-Persistent. Too many systems make users re-find their record-context evey time they switch business activities. Smarter systems let users set and keep a client/record context across activities. They can then clear it and shift context whenever they need to.
  • 4. Be Decision-Aware. Old workflow systems keep data separate from supporting intranet/extranet content materials such as powerpoints, how-tos, email steams, etc. Smart workflow systems create visibility from the workflow out to these “decisional” resources, which users can then easily access right at the moment users are making key decisions. 
  • 5. Be Attention-Aware. Smart workflow systems use Web 2.0 ui design principles such as staying on the page, inline interactions, expand/collapse tables, rather than forcing the users through a sea of tabs, tables, second windows, pop-ups, and page shifting. These approaches respect the user’s attention and focus, and let them work in a more efficient way.

And remember that even incremental changes in your product’s workflow can greatly improve the end-user experience.

Information Architecture has not been in fashion of late; the argument has been that it should no longer be seen as a discrete discipline. Instead, it should be seen as simply interaction design, or user experience design, or ui design. But there are many great reasons why IA is now more important than ever. Here are a few of them:

1. A Path To Domain Knowledge. Understanding complex domains and their associated work practices remains a tricky business. IA practices teams get up a ramp quickly and understand the domain.

2. Mapping Above The Page. A non-IA design approach often starts by tackling a homepage, and then looking at second-level pages. But most software design needs a higher-level of abstraction. IA help surface issues of flow, aggregation, roll-up, break-downs, variant issues and invariant patterns and get up above the page-by-page approach.

3. Matching The Solution To The Challenge. The rise of excellent canned UI code libraries, including Yahoo UI, jQuery, Moo Tools, etc, has created a mistaken industry impression that UX and usability problems are mostly pre-solved and the only challenge is code execution. But the biggest challenge, framing the underlying user task and context appropriately, and matching it to the right solution, remains. IA practices assert that you need to roll-back user issues to the underlying challenge at-hand and then identify the best UI/UX solution from either existing or custom UI elements.

4. Team Facilitation. Because IA focuses on the intersection of information and user context, IA practices often equip a team with a shared language and a shared logic for working together. This is especially important in agile practices where UX issues, if not tended to, can wind up reduced to the role of “fit and finish,” ie, UI polish. Used appropriately as part of Stage 0 sprint, IA gives the team a map and a shorthand that accelerates velocity and team-decision making.

5. Attunement to Content and Containers. With the rise of social media and issues like hashtags, permissioning, data feeds, we can see that it’s increasingly hard to separate containers from the underlying content. IA focuses on understanding the content structure, content consumption, and content workflow first; these are issues that a purely visual or purely code-driven approach are not well-suited to solve.

These are the thoughts of one IA and UX veteran; I welcome yours.

Four Views into the Transformation Room

From a conversation published by NextD Leadership Institute with Peter Jones of Redesign Research, Eric Reiss of FatDUX, and GK Van Patter of Humantific. 

My own consulting work is often downstream from these kinds of business transformation challenges, though increasingly, I find I need to help clients upstream in terms of thinking about how they lead and manage a user experience design process towards what’s been called “design from the outside in.” I’m an advocate of putting flow, design, prototyping, and user feedback first and the construction and full development process second. That can be a significant shift from the more linear, hierarchical, and siloed ways of going about things.

The Hidden History of Information Management

A Review of Glut: Maserting Information Management Through the Ages, which I wrote for Boxes and Arrows.

Close