Use Tools to Support a Predictable Process
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define the UX Critique Tool.
- Understand Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping.
- Use key tools to support a predictable process.
Process Tools That Strengthen Rituals
You learned that you can create a predictable process for your team to problem solve through transparency and harnessing tension for innovation. You can also incorporate tools—the UX Critique Tool and Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping—into those rituals to support them.
The UX Critique Tool
Critique is a practice of holding productive and impactful feedback sessions with stakeholders who represent diverse perspectives to improve work. The UX Critique Tool allows cross-disciplinary design teams to interrogate work based on the relationship they want to create and strengthen with users. It helps them develop a habit of inviting stakeholders to review, offer feedback, align on what good looks like, and evaluate if the work meets functional, social, emotional, and business needs.
With the UX Critique Tool, teams set reviewers up for success by identifying user needs, clarifying the type of feedback they seek, offering relationship-oriented feedback prompts, and facilitating an inclusive conversation.
To get started using the UX Critique Tool:
- Identify the functional, emotional, and social needs of the users and others impacted by your product or service, as well as the needs of your business. Ensure you move beyond objectives and specs to examine the human outcomes you want to create.
- Prepare reviewers by setting clear expectations for the feedback needed to improve and advance work and establish the conditions for productive feedback by reminding reviewers of their responsibilities.
- Facilitate feedback, assigning key roles like a facilitator and a team member to record feedback and another to keep time.
- Debrief as a team by asking each member what they heard and tracking those key insights and decisions in a spreadsheet or Figjam board.
For a complete, step-by-step guide, check out the UX Critique Tool guide.
Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping
Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping helps cross-disciplinary design teams build a network of advocates who champion relationship-centric, inclusive, and sustainable work. It helps teams focus on the internal relationships that set their work up for success and create a plan to convert skeptics into supporters. You can reduce conflict and misunderstanding when you understand what matters to stakeholders, anticipate their concerns, and identify mutually beneficial outcomes.
To get started using the Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping tool:
- Gather your team to list the people who need to align with your work for your project to be successful.
- Write a brief statement on the priorities and motivations of each stakeholder. Interviews with stakeholders or their teams are the best way to gather insights. You can also guess based on what you know and revise as you learn more.
- Color code each stakeholder based on the team assessment of their orientation to the project.
- Map the color-coded stakeholders across a 2x2 grid that describes their stake and influence in the project and create a plan to align key stakeholders.
- Track changes by pinning your Stakeholder Ecosystem Map in your project space and check on it weekly. As the project advances, so will the map. Change color codes, add and shift stakeholders, and iteratively brainstorm ways to strengthen alignment.
For a complete, step-by-step guide, check out the Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping tool guide.
To learn more about how teams use tools to develop and enhance their predictable processes, let’s check in with our friends at Cloud Kicks.
Cloud Kicks and Stakeholder Ecosystem Mapping
To understand what matters most to the customer success team, the Cloud Kicks team creates a Stakeholder Ecosystem Map. Customer success is a key group with whom they need project buy-in. So they develop a Stakeholder Ecosystem Map to understand the customer success team’s concerns and identify mutually beneficial outcomes. Through this process, one important insight they discover is that they need to cultivate a better relationship with the director of customer success at Cloud Kicks. They invite them to their next weekly status meeting to conduct a mid-project critique using the UX Critique Tool.
As a result of this critique session, they add critical stakeholder feedback and insights to their project brief, including an understanding that:
- Trust is key to the customer success team’s mission.
- Trust is key to building fans.
They also develop more fundamental questions to guide their work and research, including:
- What kind of experiences do customers need to cultivate more trust with Cloud Kicks?
- How do you enable more trust to build brand fanatics?
To continue developing these important insights, they decide to hold weekly critiques, taking turns presenting work and key findings in each session.
As the team lead, Mary also works with the team to discuss preparing for feedback from more stakeholders as they consider other key groups from whom they need buy-in. This includes creating a practice for recovering from stakeholder feedback—proactively planning for those moments that matter.