Journey Mapping of the Bot Building Experience

Context

One of the long-term goals for the IBM RPA team was developing an RPA product that was simple enough that your average business user could use it. Most professionals that currently use RPA are technical users, such as developers, engineers and architects. However, there was a vision to have RPA be accessible to all users.

As a first step towards this goal, I conducted a combination of two methods:

  • Cognitive Walkthough: Expert-led usability test used to evaluate flows and learnability by working through a series of tasks

  • Heuristic Evaluation: Use heuristics to measure the usability of UIs by reporting violations

The objective of the user testing was to evaluate the experience from the perspective of a business user. I ultimately delivered a journey map of the bot-building experience to provide our stakeholders an understanding of a business user’s first-time experience.

Methods Used: Cognitive Walkthrough, Heuristic Evaluation, Journey Map

Participant: 1 User Researcher

Timeframe: 2 weeks

Cognitive Walkthrough

The scenario chosen for the cognitive walkthrough was to: build an RPA bot to open a URL, download a file on the browser, and then close the URL. The scenario was chosen based on it being a commonly performed automation task.

  • Step 1

    Open the Google Chrome browser.

  • Step 2

    Open the URL.

  • Step 3

    Enter the username and password credentials on the website.

  • Step 4

    Download the Excel file on the website.

  • Step 5

    Log out of the credentials on the website.

  • Step 6

    Close the Google Chrome browser.

Heuristic Evaluation

The 10 General Principles for Interaction Design were followed to conduct the evaluation.

*These principles were developed based on experience in the field of usability engineering and they’ve became rules of thumb for human-computer interaction.

Journey Map

As a result of the cognitive walkthrough and the heuristic evaluation, a journey map was created detailing the experience of “Elisa the Business User”’s first time building a bot. In the journey map, we highlighted bright spots with the experience, pain-points, and instances were Elisa was stuck and had to contact support.

Ultimately, 17 UX issues were discovered and recommendations were made for each.

Readout

In the readout to the team, the journey map was presented to the team along with a detailed user story following Elisa’s experience with building a bot.

Design recommendations were presented to the RPA team and put on the UX roadmap to consider in the future.

By walking through of the journey map… (1/2)

 

…I was able to point out specific aspects of the design that violated one of Nielsen’s 10 principles for interaction design. (2/2)