Winning with fidelities

How to unpack a complex world

Our world isn’t very structured. There are few and far examples of the same approach to a single situation.* That means we as humans face a lot of unknowns.** As we interact with evolving technology, the mere act of using a new piece of software requires us to unlearn so that we might learn anew. As designers, our primary focus is to create friction-less adoption of new experiences for our users.

* think car radios

** known as cognitive load

Smooth sailing requires making sense of our user’s world and designing within a system. What are they trying to accomplish? What are the impacts of their success individually and systemically? As we immerse ourselves deeper and deeper in our users’ world, we become staunch advocates for them. Communicating the rich tapestry of their world becomes complex. We discovered that we needed a way to make the complex approachable.

Our framework to approachability structures a user’s context across five core levels of fidelity. The levels of fidelity map the story of our users. This map can then act as a canvas for collaboration.

This is the first article out of four on the fidelities. It’s tailored to individual product designers as well as cross-functional teams designing complex systems aspiring to make a business impact. Products that center their design, understanding and intention around a target users environment have a profound business impact (see McKinsey’s Business Value of Design).

Hard work now pays off later.

Our framework saves time in the long run by building in space for continuous insight and alignment. The rigor of mapping out the user’s context across these levels sets the stage for efficient cross-functional collaboration. By creating shared understanding, you and your team can avoid rework, churn, and fragmented value stories. This framework encourages an agile workflow built on a foundation of curiosity, empathy, and trust.

The Framework

This framework puts pen to paper, “mapping” our users to their context on a canvas.

Context breaks down into levels. You’ve heard of a 30,000-foot view (see Eames’ Powers of Ten). Think of each level as a place for thinking and understanding to ultimately build towards the desired design and experience. Individuals and teams determine the artifacts they need to create to investigate process, people, tasks and fill in the gaps. Here are the levels as we approach them:

• Environment: Once you establish this, it won’t change often. From this level, you and your team can target what you are and are not working on. What is happening in the world? What are the grand motivations and challenges of the stakeholders within a system?
• Industry: Understand a single industry, this is where you and your team can identify the core business motivations and market movement. What is unique about this industry over any other?
• Culture: Focusing on a single organization, this is where you build the world of your user. From this level you and your team can map out your decision makers and your end users, their motivations, goals and pain points. Who are the subject matter experts, and what do they know?
• Jobs-to-be-Done: Focusing on a single user group, this is where you and your team can map out the workflows and ecosystem of your end users. Build your collective understanding of the varying mindsets, tools and dynamics of your team as they work. What are the Jobs to be Done?
• Sequence of actions: Focusing on a single task, this is where you and your team can think collectively about the information and interface a user will see as they complete a task. What are the sequential consequences?

We’ve found that each level provides a space for each team member’s unique processing and creative problem solving skills. As a practice, it allows your team to have a collective focus, while keeping an eye out on what you know and don’t know about your users over time. This can turn moments of ambiguity into opportunities for you to reach out to your users, and gather valuable insights as a collective.

A cross-functional team must work together to create this shared understanding, in order to prevent arbitrary and biased work. A shared understanding of users and their context prevents teams from releasing a product that has unclear value to its target market. Since each team has unpredictable variables such as contrasting viewpoints, team synergy (or lack of), and ever-changing timelines, it is expected for this framework to be an elastic, yet, defined structure to suit the needs of each team.

Road ahead

In the series of articles we’ll be publishing, we will explore the what, why, and how of this framework and “fidelity mapping” as a systems thinking skill.

In our next article, we will introduce a new tool called The fidelity canvas. This tool will facilitate building a new set of skills and muscle memory. It places existing design thinking exercises across five levels of fidelity. It guides teams through information mining and non-linear thinking in a collaborative space.

While there is no one way for you and your team to learn and discover together, we hope this framework provides you with a foundational and thorough toolbox. This is an evolving framework that needs your input. We encourage your feedback and look forward to sharing more!

Part 2

Winning with fidelities: Exercises to stretch the connective tissue

Part 3

Winning with fidelities: Take action to unpack complexity

Meet the Authors

Jodi Cutler is a Design Principal and Practice Manager for this amazing band of designers, based in Austin, TX.

Stephanie Daher is a Design lead with IBM Watson Health Life Sciences. She loves crafting elegant, human-centered healthcare solutions and is always ready for a chat on the latest GBBO.

Ramla Ali is a Design lead with IBM Watson Health Life Sciences. Outside her career of holistic experiential design, she is a painter and heavy metal enthusiast.

Chris Rader is a UX Design Lead for Watson Health Imaging and a Registered Nurse. She’s also a mother of two little ones, a Ragnar Relay finisher, a lifelong learner, and loves to give back to the community through real and virtual hugs.

Rob Pierce is a Design Manager for Life Sciences offerings and also Content Design Lead for Watson Health. He’s been an IBMer since 2003, is a father of five, and has a goat named Maisie.

The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.