Microsoft Teams Onboarding: A Critical Appraisal
Week 1
Dalkey Group — Celine Harding, Emmett Doherty, Iwona Gonciarz & Katarina Hrgovic.
The first module of my MSc in User Experience Design required us to review Microsoft Teams and to iteratively design and evaluate an aspect of the platform. Teams is a collaboration tool, complete with document sharing, video calls and other features that allow organisations to communicate with one another. The Nielsen Group’s design-thinking method was adopted from the outset of this project so that a user-centred approach was taken from beginning to end. (Gibbons, 2016).
My group began by evaluating the platform individually before coming together to do a collective appraisal. When the group came together, it was discovered that many of the same problems were encountered. Gripes included feeling confused by the Activity feature, uncertain of how to submit an assignment, and finding it difficult to contact Support through the App. As all four of us had never used Teams before, this called into question the guidance Microsoft gives its first-time users.
Since the move towards remote working and remote learning due to Covid-19, Teams’ usage has grown from 44 million daily active users in mid-March 2020 to 115 million in October (Stewart, 2020). With this in mind, we began exploring the Microsoft Teams onboarding process. Onboarding is the process of familiarising a new user with the product, and while Teams provides onboarding, not one member of the group could remember doing it despite having signed up hardly a month earlier.
Due to time constraints and the fact that usability tests will be conducted remotely, the group decided to focus solely on the app experience. A Cognitive Task Analysis was drawn up to understand the current steps new users take when going through the Teams onboarding on app (Rosala, 2020). The task model allowed us to understand what decisions new users might make and the problems they may encounter when going through the onboarding (Rosala, 2020). It highlighted that currently users cannot skip the onboarding, nor can they find it at a later stage if they wish to do it again.
The group then used Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation to further assess the onboarding experience (Preece, Rogers & Sharp, 2015). This helped identify whether certain interface elements conformed to the ‘tried and tested’ design principles identified by Dieter Rams (Preece et al, 2015). It was found that much of the onboarding dialogue contained unhelpful and nonsensical instructions, such as the Assignment feature’s instructions, ‘Speak up. Share out. Soar on.’
Concluding that the onboarding experience on the Teams app violates multiple design principles and heuristics, the group began defining our problem statement: To design a straightforward onboarding experience that allows new Microsoft Teams users to feel confident using the platform from the moment they sign up. Throughout the design process we referred back to this to make sure that all our design decisions responded to this user need statement.
Reflections
Who did what?
Brainstorming — All members.
Task analysis — Iwona.
Heuristic evaluation — Celine & Iwona.
Challenges Encountered
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the group could not meet in person to do brainstorming exercises, and therefore opted to take an approach of working individually and using a combination of video calls and Miro to bring our work together. While this worked effectively, there is no doubt that our decision-making was slowed down by the inability to test Teams together in person.
Due to time constraints, the group could not fully explore all the different elements to potentially re-design and the onboarding process was chosen more quickly than it perhaps it would have been without time constraints. Our own assumptions had to be relied upon in conjunction with research.
What did I learn?
A heuristic evaluation is a very effective technique to measure the usability of a product or element of a product. This was particularly helpful considering it can be done remotely and by an expert.
Collaborating as a group remotely is very difficult, and going forward I think it will be necessary to designate a person to lead each call. Discussion does not flow as easily through video calls, and a person who leads a call therefore may be needed going forward.
References
- Gibbons, S. (2016), ‘Design Thinking 101’. Retrieved 5 October 2020 from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/design-thinking/.
- Preece, J., Sharp, H., and Rogers, Y. (2015), Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (4th ed.), John Wiley & Sons.
- Rosala, M. (2020), ‘Task Analysis: Support Users in Achieving Their Goals’. Retrieved 5 October 2020 from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/task-analysis/.
- Stewart, A. (2020), ‘Microsoft Teams says its Teams chat added another 40 million daily active users in just six months, up to 115 million total’. Retrieved 28 October 2020 from https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-teams-daily-active-users-2020-10
