Winning with fidelities: Part 2
Exercises to stretch the connective tissue
Welcome back! In our first article, we talked about making complexity approachable by leveraging context as an active tool rather than an unspoken understanding. In this article, we will cover some principles and introduce the Fidelity Canvas, its levels, and a few activities. We hope to:
- Create spaces to investigate your users’ world
- Synthesize information and foster connection finding
- Encourage a mindset shift from an individual solution to being a part of a user’s life
Before we dig into the Fidelity Canvas, here are some principles to keep in mind
Welcome non-linear thinking
Connections, inspiration, and opportunities require serendipitous moments that need fuel. Exploration of vast amounts of information is that fuel. This is sometimes known as “going down a rabbit hole”. Or when you find yourself hours later, a hundred tabs open where you started on HL7 standards and ended in David Ausubel’s Subsumption theory … These adventures in non-linear investigation usually lead to “ah-ha” moments organically as you immerse yourself deeper in the world of your users. The Fidelity Canvas is a way to organize the chaos and find comfort with ambiguity.
Continuous information collection
Observe, make, reflect, repeat! Moving through IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking Loop, we iterate towards delighting our users. As you reflect, place your insights into the canvas and study the relationships between them. By organizing your discoveries, you can prioritize what is worth further investigation, what’s not and a method to making sense of the chaos. What will also become apparent are the gaps in your knowledge. Think “oh snap!” rather than “ah-ha.”
Creating a safe space, inclusive of diverse perspectives
Cultivate a culture of curiosity. Purposefully create ground rules with the team that allow for testing ideas, developing a new perspective, openness to new challenges, and learn with abandon without mockery. Leave the notion of checking boxes behind and embrace the canvas as a set of prompts. The canvas should be reflective of you and your team’s current understanding and SHOULD evolve as your hypotheses get tested (see Carol Dweck’s refocus on growth mindset). Knowledge is powerful but should never be used as power.
Anatomy of the Fidelity Canvas
Like the many frameworks** that came before ours, we, too, are using “levels” and “layers.” We are standing on the shoulders of giants. While other frameworks helped us to define products, we needed a way to look at the product relative to its system. We needed to define the appropriate macro influences that impact the human beyond the product.
Each layer of fidelity has its own objectives, questions, and boundaries. The levels inform each other. Moving back and forth between them builds context: each an act of evaluation — interpretation and clarification… iterative understanding.
**See JJG: Elements of user experience, NNG: Why Usability Is the Foundation for Delightful Experiences
Environment
Objective: zoom way out (think 30,000-foot atmospheric perspective) to define the grand motivations and challenges of the system. Gain an intimacy with the dynamics of society. Once you establish this, it won’t change often.
Here, allow yourself to be flexible and step away from your solution. The forces impacting your industry or industries at large. A macro system that will give a greater sense of the culture, organizations, and technologies at play.
Exercises to try at this level: Questions and assumptions, Emergent technologies, Industry adjacent reviews, Market research insights, Trends, and pricing. Policy, legislation, and regulation moves.
Environment Mural Breakout template — exercises in bold are in the Mural
Industry
Objective: zoom in on a single industry to articulate and harness its motivations. What is unique about this industry over any other?
Look across the market. What are companies doing and how can you define what differentiation looks like for your solution. See this level as an opportunity to get to know your competitors as well as your potential partners. Each player has an influence, a gravitational force in the space, whether big or small. Internalizing the influential moves in the area can be a massive advantage for your team.
Exercises to try at this level: Competitive analysis. Differentiation plan. (Eco)-System maps. Innovation vs. viability vs. desirability brainstorms. Mind mapping.
Industry Mural Breakout template — exercises in bold are in the Mural
Culture
Objective: zoom in on a single organization or community to build the immediate world of your user. Map out the stakeholders, their goals, and pain points. Who are the subject matter experts, and what do they know?
Get hyper curious about the humans in the system and how they interact with one another. Ask, who are the people with the most influence? Who controls the budget? Who has the most pull or political stature? Where is the decision-making power, and how does that move across the company? Aligning on these core dynamics exposes adoption and acceptance challenges.
Exercises to try at this level: Stakeholder maps. Impact diagrams, Experience map ( journey map), Contextual inquiry, Service blueprint.
Culture Mural Breakout — exercises in bold are in the Mural Breakout
Jobs-to-be-done
Objective: zoom in on a single team or influence group to map out your end-users’ workflows and systems.
Build your collective understanding of what your users need to get done and how they work. Turn your critical players into people. What are they thinking, feeling, saying, and doing? Go beyond the caricature of their job description and stand beside them in their day-to-day work. Be a bulldog: continuously ask WHY does this job have to happen. What motivations exist behind the work. How do the company’s motivations and goals adhere to those of an individual user? This is where observation and inquiry reveal core functions. Exercises to try at this level: 5-Whys, Personas, Needs statements, As-is journey maps, To-Be, Big Idea Prioritization, Storyboards, Card sorting, KPIs, Defining Hills, RACI.
JTBD Mural Breakout — exercises in bold are in the Mural Breakout
Sequence of actions
Objective: zoom in on a single task. The context informs the interpretation of the interface a user will see as they complete a task. What are the sequential consequences?
Dig deep into the details. This is the fun bit, right? Taking all that we know about our users, making artifacts that capture how the solution will work. This is also an opportunity to define success metrics and what to learn. Define the principles and priorities of the experience. Detail the workflows the solution supports and words that they see.
Exercises to try at this level: user flows, early requirements, prototypes, information architecture, and animation studies, taxonomy documentation, metric milestones, A/B tests.
SoA Mural Breakout — exercises in bold are in the Mural Breakout
Pulling the levels into action on the Fidelity Canvas
We’ve leveraged mural to capture the Fidelity canvas in a collaborative space. As much of your information collection will be asynchronous in the Level Breakouts, the Full Fidelity canvas is a place to see it all together. Here discuss and draw connections between the learnings at different levels. Seeing the insights in aggregate is just as important as the distillation of the leanings themselves.
Zoom-in, zoom-out, zig-zag.
Explore the fidelity canvas on Mural
Tune in next time when take a deeper dive into teaming this set of activities.
Did you notice the names of our levels changed? Iteration, baby… iteration!
Part 1
Winning with fidelities: How to unpack a complex world
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.
