Journey ο»Ώmapping and relationship building
The Gaming & Payments Community at Kindred is one of the UX teams medium sized communities, made up of 3-4 Product Designers. With a business strategic pivot around short term initiatives to increase revenue. Gaming has become a key focus area here with a Casino First initiative in place and the pace of delivery here would increase.
Taking a look at the existing structure of the Community cross functionally, speaking with the team and looking at existing ways of working I noticed the following:
π Product, Tech and Design are not synced on Roadmaps
π Design and Tech need to collaborate more closely together
π Development sometimes build product features not according to Figma files created by UX
π UX under resourced compared to Tech. 3 Designers: 57 Developers, 1:14 Design/Engineering Ratio
π No clear view of the journeys within Gaming on either platform
Our areas of opportunity:
π Resync better ways of working
π Roadmap alignment
π Increase collaboration
π Visibility of user journey for Gaming experience
Taking the opportunity with the strategic pivot from the business, I spoke with the Product Engineering Lead for Gaming (PEL) and proposed a workshop. Below is what became a two day workshop:
Day 1:
Understanding each others roles and areas of expertise
Alignment on principles of how we work together
Document agreements in a shared manifesto
Day 2:
Mapping Ice breaker
Service Map overview for Gaming
Mapping Journeys
Research and Analytics playback
Where we should focus our attention
Post its
Dot Voting
Day 1: Building Cross Functional Relationships
As it was the first time a lot of people had met in person, we did a round table where everyone had to opportunity to reintroduce themselves and give a short synopsis of what their role is at Kindred.
After the round table Kristina (Gaming PEL) and myself gave an overview of the day. After which gave a short breakdown of advantages of cross functional teams in sync vs teams who aren't.
We then shifted to an interactive part of the workshop. Here we got had each role type area pinned on each wall of the meeting room; UX, Product and Tech (See example below). The team was broken down into 3 groups, each with a representation from every discipline.
The Task:
Write notes on your expectations on the role
If there are disagreements about an expectation, the notes should be moved
Either you will feel this is an expectation that should apply to everybody, in which case it ends up in 'All'
Or you disagree with it, and it ends up in the 'Discuss' area
Each group would have the time to add and discuss post it's on each role board.
Collective agreement on roles and areas of expertise
After each group had the opportunity to discuss each role type, I played back what was written and collectively we discussed everything that was in each 'Discuss' area. Once everyone was aligned around each role type and the expectations, we documented this in Confluence.
See left for a WIP version of what was documented for each discipline.
But how do we ALL work together you may ask?
Additionally we discussed as a team around how we would work on areas documented for 'All'. This required some further grouping around topics and further documentation. Below is an example of our WIP Manifesto on what we documented:
Gaming Manifesto (WIP)
In the Gaming community we:
We do iterative discovery
We involve discipline experts at an early stage
We agree that ideas can come from anyone
We all should understand user needs and pain points
We identify common goals and work on them together
Collaboration across disciplines is key
Day 1 Verdict:
π Better relationships forged cross discipline
π Collective respect and understanding of each discipline
π Collaboration during sprints defined (WIP)
π Increase collaboration
Day 2: Journey Mapping
Building off the energy from the first day. We kicked off day 2 with an ice breaker, as we had a couple of new faces to the session. As we the agenda for the day was focusing on journeys and mapping, I felt it was best to get people into the mindset of what maps allow us to do day to day.
To do this, the ice breaker was a task around Maps we used in our daily lives. People we're allowed to give as many creative examples as they wanted here.
Once the ice breaker was completed, to give the team some context on Journey Mapping I took everyone through the importance of having a journey driven mindset within a large organisation. See below:
Once this was done, to get a collective understanding on the current business priorities we had, I got the Business Owner to write down everything that he had currently being worked on and what was coming up over the next 2 Quarters on the board (See below) Surprisingly everyone across the team did not know the priorities in our Roadmap.
Casino Business Priorities Captured:
π Personalisation: Q4 + ongoing
π Free Spins Feature integration: Q4
π 32Red International: Q4 (New Product Launch)
π 32Red UK: Q1 (New Product Launch)
Once this was established, I gave a quick overview of the benefits of Journey Mapping and how this would help us as a cross functional team. This helped establish some grounding for the task ahead (See slides below).
Using Service Maps to help guide us
Next I got a member from the Service Design to help me give a quick breakdown on the service maps created for Kindreds Digital Eco-system, particularly on what had been done for the Gaming Product Area. We zoomed in further to help the team focus around what has been mapped for Casino at a high level.
Mapping
Splitting into two groups around platforms (App and Web) where the seniors in my team helped guide each team. We got the teams to break away and start to map each service journey for Casino. What wasn't surprising was that each team didn't realise how some of the journeys were broken. Additionally that the journeys didn't look the way they thought they should have. Overall pretty insightful.
Taking a somewhat old school method, we got each team to print out their journeys, map them on two walls and give the room a walk through of what they discovered.
User Research and Analytics
Next up, our product analysts and user researchers aligned to the Gaming Product area, revealed a wealth of information for the team to digest. They shared important data and valuable insights about the Unibet Casino Gaming Customer's journey, especially focusing on the βfinding a gameβ phases. These valuable insights allowed us to successfully identify several pain points and areas that can be improved upon.Some of these pain points discovered when journey mapping.
Pain points discovered:
π Navigation issues
π Search functionality needs improving
π Categorisation and filtering unclear
π Content Hierarchy needs improving
Based off the findings from the playback, as a team we decided to dot vote on where we would like to focus our attention in the coming quarters to create a better customer experience (see below).
Next Steps
To wrap up a successful two days, we agreed on regrouping to focus and plan around Q1 initiatives based on what weβve learnt, while continuing to deliver on Q4.
Additionally to gather how the team felt about the workshop here's some feedback:
βThe collaborative dynamic between Engineering, Product and UX offered a unique perspective, enabling us to uncover some bugs and identify ample opportunities for improvements across our journeysβ
Verdict of 2 day workshop:
π Holistic view of the Casino digital landscape
π Focus area on where we can drive real user and business value
π Appetite to work more together on solving problems
π Value that UX can bring to a Product area when working in sync with Tech and Product teams