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I am currently responsible for the enhancement of the user experience for an enterprise software in the airline industry. At the moment we are conducting fundamental user research stuff such as:

  • contextual inquiries
  • surveys to find out how the users percieve the software at the moment, how they use technology in general and to find out about their job in general
  • group discussions about the improvement of the software

The next step I am taking is to build up personas out of the research data and to sketch our first ideas of improvements via wireframes.

In 4 weeks, the company will arrange a forum where many of our clients are attending. Our team will have a timeframe of 90min with about 20 users. I am quiet undecided, how to use these 90min at its best.

The current idea is to split up into groups of five and then give the internally approved wireframes/paper-prototypes to the users and make them accomplish specific scenarios. Every group would consist of one moderator/instructor.

Since I hadn't the opportunity to make a user-workshop under these circumstances yet, I am not sure if the upcoming results will be meaningful enough.

Maybe you guys have similar experiences and have some other ideas for our workshop..What do you think about it?

Any comments appreciated, kind regards :)

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With the group sizes you have and the point you are in the project, a pluralistic walkthrough might work well. In a previous job, I had access to a group of 5-8 users at a time for about 30-45 minutes that were on site for training on a regular basis. It is good at finding areas of confusion and difficulties in navigation flow.

Some online references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_walkthrough

http://www.soberit.hut.fi/~sri/pluralistic.pdf

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  • Did you use the PW method like it is described or did it just inspire your approach? Since our software is very non-linear, I worry about the walkthrough. Every user could come up with a different approach (from which none is wrong) and thus it might be difficult to compare the users' approaches and our wireframes/scenarios (step-by-step). I'm not sure if it makes sense to show each of our improvements in one related scenario, regarding the fact that not every user would solve it in the same way. At least, we would discuss the specific improvement, but not the scenario step-by-step. Hmm..
    – Filip
    Commented May 6, 2014 at 13:37

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