Employees are users too!
At Austrade, we do user research to help us understand and build empathy with people in businesses in Australia and across the world. This helps us to design and deliver products and services that help Australian businesses be successful internationally.
Last year, we completed discovery research on the needs of exporters, investors and overseas customers. In this research, we found opportunities to both develop new services and better equip our employees to deliver existing services, making things clearer faster and easier for everyone.
If we’re going to offer better tools for our staff, we need to take the same human-centred approach to design and delivery for our staff as we do for businesses. After all, employees are our users too.
We’ve started with a foundational piece of user research focussing on the digital, data and technology experience of Austrade staff on the frontline, who work alongside Australian businesses to help them grow and expand overseas.
For this research, our primary technique was job shadowing and observation. In total, we spent 9 days with 9 people who do a variety of work across Australia.
Shadowing a member of staff at work helped us get a more complete and detailed understanding of what exactly someone does in a day and how, why and where they do it. After shadowing, we finished with an interview, complementing our research by asking follow-up questions on what we observed during the day.
Shadowing also gave us the opportunity to learn so much more about how somebody works that may not be front of mind for them in an interview alone. For example, some tasks took a lot of time and even though people may not have thought of the time it takes, we could measure it and dig a bit deeper into why that may be.
We expected to uncover potential usability issues with our current tool set — but we found out lots more. For example, there’s a wide variety in uptake of our current tools between different Austrade teams, particularly for managing the work and sharing knowledge. There’s also more we can do to support staff who spend the majority of their time out of the office (and away from the laptop) meeting with businesses.
We learned a lot more than we expected about how important tools are to enable forming and building trusted and mutually beneficial relationships with business, both in Australia and around the world. There’s more we can do to help our people connect and work within the natural networks of businesses.
In synthesising the research, we’ve focussed on how we can best share meaningful insights with the rest of Austrade to make it easier to build empathy with our users.
We’ve done this in three ways:
- We’ve developed a detailed mental model of the tasks and findings from all the research sessions which we’d like to grow over time.
- We’ve mapped out the user journeys for four common activities (finding new clients, preparing for a meeting, running an event, and following-up a meeting), identifying the systems people use, and the pain points experienced in using them.
- We’ve identified existing in train projects in Austrade well-placed to address issues uncovered by the research, and are now helping these teams to incorporate the research findings into their work.
Next up, we’re going to work with Austrade teams doing research overseas to incorporate similar observational techniques into their research activities. Over time, this will help us build more of the picture of the frontline experience for our staff across the world, which in turn will help us deliver better tools for our staff.
Alithea Seemann is a Senior Designer at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission and was part of the Frontline Research team with Sophie Crowe, Sunethra DeMel, and Isidora Pekic.
Contact the team at digital@austrade.gov.au, or subscribe to the Austrade Digital blog to follow our progress.
