Workflow Analysis

This is a powerful technique to analyze a current customer workflow. It does several things:

It makes the workflow visible in all its detailed glory
It clearly states the trigger and goals of the workflow (why is the user doing this? what are they trying to achieve?)
It captures pain points in the current workflow, designated by the color PINK. These pain points may come from various sources: common team knowledge, usability studies, customer complains, support cases, bug reports, etc.
It captures ideas for improving the workflow, designated by the color BLUE.

This is an artifact that a team can rally around and use to all get on the same page about what the workflow is, what the problems are, and how to improve it. It can be a living artifact that is updated as the workflow evolves and is improved.

Workflow analysis

This is a workflow analysis for a user who is using complicated engineering tools (MATLAB and Simulink) to set up and run large numbers of computer simulations in a distributed computing environment (fancy talk for a lot of computers networked together to harness computing power).

This shows the "expected workflow" which means this is what the team intends and expects users to do using the current state of the tool.

It's quite a complicated workflow that I won't attempt to explain, but I will point out that it was important to me that we start at the very beginning, where the customer must discover the feature exists, learn about it, install the product, set everything up, run simulations, and view results.

This artifact was one of the first things I created when supporting this particular team, because I wanted to level-set and get everyone on the same page about "this is the user, this is what they are trying to do, and this is how we expect them to do it". And, often, how the user is actually achieving a goal is different than what the team expects. So, as a next step, one could conduct user research, find out how users are really doing it, and create an "actual workflow" analysis. The two artifacts can then be compared.

Workflow analysis

This is a continuation of the prior diagram (the "Run" box in the prior diagram explodes into this).

Workflow analysis

This is a continuation of the prior diagram (the "setup" box in the prior diagram explodes into this).

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