SMS Assist, a facility maintenance company, wanted to embark on building a new app for technicians. The current software is extremely outdated, with terrible app store ratings. In order for SMS Assist to gain back technician’s trust, they wanted to build a completely new app, rethinking the experience. To ensure I built the right product that technicians enjoy using, I wanted to shadow a few technicians by conducting observational research.
I went to Phoenix, Arizona and spent 3 days following technicians around, focusing on their process and current app frustrations
Preparing for PHX
Before going to PHX, I sat down with my scrum team (Product Manager and UI Designer) where we talked about the business goals and our assumptions going into the project based on working on other technician-facing products.
From there, I created a research plan detailing questions I wanted to find out answers to. I knew that a lot of the information would come from observing the technicians surroundings, but having a baseline of questions would help ensure that a lot of questions got answered throughout the process.
I coordinated with a few different affiliates that would allow me to spend all day with their technicians. Since a technician’s schedule does not get solidified until the night before, I confirmed with each technician the night before what their first stop was for the following day.
Shadowing technicians
Getting to shadow technicians was unlike anything I’ve done before. Prior to this, I talked to technicians over the phone or over zoom when doing discovery work or concept testing, but I was never able to really experience what their daily life was like.
I started by meeting the technician at their first stop, around 7:30 am. From there, I would ride with them all day in their truck, going in and out of different work orders.
To ensure I got a wide variety of experiences, I made sure to shadow a different technician every day, at a different company, tackling a completely different trade (ex. pool cleaning, plumbing, electrical).
During my shadow sessions, I took a lot of handwritten notes, specifically focusing on:
1. The environment - what were their working conditions like/typical weather?
2. Tools - what types of materials did they use beyond our current app, other apps, note-pad, Chargers, etc?
3. Their personalities - I loved getting to learn more about their story, how long they’ve been working in the industry and the things that are most important to them.
4. How they use the current app - what areas are easily understandable vs. confusing within the process?
Synthesizing the research
Title here
The process of synthesizing all of the research collected by the team started with getting those data points from our notebooks onto a shared tool. The team used a Miro board to combine notes.
From there, I read through each data point and put them into sticky notes so we could start affinity mapping our findings.