Prioritising almost anything – UXcamp London

Editor's Notes

1. Prioritise what? Anything really Todo lists Things you want to see on your trip to Paris Business opportunities Feature lists
2. Why prioritise? Bringing things in order deciding what is important, what is less important knowing what to do first, where to start
3. And how? A simple technique to the rescue: As all things have more than one side to them,choose two parameters to rate the items by. For example: Urgency of item vs. hassle of getting it done (for the todo lists) Possible enjoyment vs. how much you can impress your friends with photos Business importance vs. Market viability Potential revenue vs. Development cost Business benefit vs. User needs
4. Possible enjoyment vs. how much you can impress your friends with photos(for your trip to Paris)
5. Business importance vs. Market viability(for business opportunities)
6. Potential revenue vs. Development cost(for for feature lists)
7. Business benefit vs. User needs(for for feature lists) I used these two axis for some of my projects and found them to work quite well for getting a first prioritisation of feature lists to define scope.
8. We need a scale to rate the things on. Keep it simple: 1 to 5 points.
9. But as we have limited resources (in time, in money, in attention, ...) we somehow need need to limit the amount of points we can give out. A simple formula:(Max. points) = (Middle value of your point scale) * (# of items) Example: If we have 5 items to rate on a scale from 1 to 5, we have 15 points maximum to dish out.
10. So when we rate, we need to stay within this limit.
11. Use it with a group and that’s where it becomes really handy! When to use it with a group? In a project with several stakeholders when defining skope when you need to build consensus
12. 1. Identify all stakeholders that need to be involved in the prioritisation. Get experts from different areas who have insights that will help to priorotise (business/financial, UX, user research, customer support)
13. 2. Gather all items that should be prioritised Write a short description for each item Fill them in the participant template
14. 3. Preparation session with all stakeholders involved Get everybody in one room. Explain the technique, how it works and and its benefits Go through all items on the list together. Make sure that everybody has the same understanding of what they mean. Gather any items that are missing from the list
15. 4. Send out the rating template to all participants Give the participants 2-3 days to send back the sheet (don’t leave them too much time, the whole process should be wrapped up within a week) Include invite to the evaluation session together with the spreadsheet. Schedule the evaluation session shortly after the deadline for sending the ratings in. Give yourself some time to merge the results.
16. 5. Collate the ratings in one spreadsheet Tip: when copying and pasting the numbers into the synthesis part of the template, paste them into a non-formated text file first to keep formatting of target cells Sort the spreadsheet descending by overall rating to get a ranked list (note that this ranking is not necessarily the order of importance as you might see on the diagram that you’ll create) Create a diagram of the first ranking export data on “csv export” tab as csv file use the ruby script to create svg file from your csv file open svg file in illustrator and format to your liking you can see the clustered areas which things to focus on, which ones to consider and which ones to neglect
17. Evaluation session Present the diagram with the first rough rating Go through each item on the spreadsheet from the highest ranked to the lowest. Discuss if the ranking makes sense. In the collated view it is easy to spot items that were ranked controversially. Discuss why people ranked it high or low. You can correct the ranking by modifying the points in the “corrected values” columns on the right to reflect the group consensus Capture comments and reasons for re-ranking in the spreadsheet Things to keep in mind The outcome of the rating is NOT gospel. First and foremost this rating tool is great to get a first stab at prioritisation (so that you don’t start from a blank slate) and to trigger a discussion and facilitate consensus amongst a group of stakeholders Wrapping up Create a new diagram based on the corrected ranking values and take it from there.
18. Who should you involve? the stakeholders on the project it’s possible to have different stakeholders rating only one aspect (their area of concern / expertise) though it might also be interesting to force all stakeholders to put themselves in the shoes of the others and rate on the other axis as well (make them think about user needs) Why does it work? people feel involved their opinion is heard easy to spot controversial items and start a discussion around these Extra Bonus: you impress the business guys with your excel skills and make them marvel at the functional AND beautiful excel file. And they’ll want to use it as well :) (yes, you talk their language and you talk it with style :) Questions?
19. http://evalottalamm.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/prioritising-almost-anything/
20. mail: evalotta@evalotta.net twitter: @evalottchen url: www.evalotta.net download this presentation and the templates here: http://evalotta.net/_stuff/prioritisation_kit.zip