GTO department manages clients' IT infrastructure, monitors assets, and troubleshoots. Recently, they adopted a new software whose use required the collaboration of employees from different disciplines. However, they faced challenges with low adoption of the tool among the teams.
Through the research, I identified and addressed underlying tensions between the executives and end users regarding the software selection decision. Thus, I focused my design efforts on finding a way to integrate a more participatory decision-making process into GTO.
Through a collaborative efforts, I developed a design artifact aimed at promoting participatory decision-making, whose target users are managers. This artifact visually and quantitatively illustrates power dynamics among stakeholders, encouraging managers to reflect on their decision-making processes and take initiatives to make decisions more inclusive and sustainable.
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My role was to discover the blockage that prevented members from using the software and find a solution for it. I conducted comprehensive user research by interviewing multiple colleagues and attempted answering the following questions.
By synthesizing the interview insights in the User Journey Mapping, I outlined that the cause of the problem lies the users' pre-service journey, when the software was being selected.
The key insight was that in the pre-service period, the potential users of the tool, GTO members, felt that their thoughts were not considered when the decision was made regarding selecting the tool.
The Root Cause analysis led me to conclude that the underlying cause stemmed more from organizational factors, from which subsequent issues like poor collaboration and the software's lack of user-friendliness derive.
The literature review revealed that power imbalance among stakeholders makes participatory practices in decision-making challenging in organizations. Based on these findings, I set design goals which are articulated in the following questions. Through my design outcome, I aimed to answer the questions.
I gained many ideas from the creative workshops and selected ideas were conceptualized in four prototypes. They were tested with the stakeholders and one last design was optimized as the final design.
The final design, Power-full Reflexivity, has been made into a design artifact containing several questions carefully selected whose target users are managers. The managers’ subjective responses are translated into visual and quantitative formats, showing their decision-making patterns and degree of inclusiveness during the decision-making process.
1. On the “Understanding” page, knowledge of the three forms of power is illustrated. It shows power can be shared and developed with each other.
2. On a “Reflexivity Exercise” page, there are four closed-ended questions and six open-ended questions.
3. After the user going through the "Reflexivity exercise", their subjective answers are translated into visual and quantitative formats.
After the user going through the "Reflexivity exercise", their subjective answers are translated into visual and quantitative formats.
A survey was conducted to substantiate four aspects of the final design: usability, the impact of the design on the target audience, the user’s resonance with the design in terms of the relatability to their experience in the organization, the design’s effectiveness in recognizing power dynamics among the stakeholders.
The interview with participants brought deeper discussion regarding the following points.
"I see it is giving an interesting viewpoint and feedback on how we decide on things. So the solution is important enough to spend the time on."
"It is relevant to GTO, and thought-provoking.
It can be used in a workshop and would be useful for the managers to restructure our decision-making process."