MAUI Workshop

My Account User Interface - Affectionately known to our team as “MAUI” is the keystone to the Con Edison online experience. This is where customers view and pay bills, transfer and stop service, and enroll in payment assistance.

We had been furiously working to launch new capabilities and build upon each previous release and eventually we discovered that our dashboard wasn’t scaling well to accommodate our expanding feature set.

Read the full MAUI brief.

To equip the team with the understanding and context of this work and to document and prioritize our customer’s struggles, it was a perfect opportunity to use a workshop.

Let’s Tell a Story

The workshop had one main goal: To clearly define our customers’ pain points and ideate on some solutions as a group.

I always want a workshop to be fun because that’s when participants are more engaged and creative. I created a story that cast each participant as the main character in an 8-bit themed, Choose Your Own Adventure-style video game.

Pits of Fire

To get started, we discussed the findings from the research that I had conducted up to that point and asked the team to imagine what the customer would want to see from this experience. We used Customer Challenge Statements to help facilitate with brainstorming. This is my standard version:

To make it fun, I created THEMED challenge statement cards:

The team filled out many of these and placed them on the wall. We discussed and consolidated similar or related items. A few overarching themes emerged so we broke the into teams to attack each challenge.

Power Ups!

In smaller teams we worked on similar brainstorming exercise called Hypothesis Statements. They look like this:

Keeping with the theme…

The hypothesis statements are great for documenting fresh ideas. Especially when preceded by the customer challenge exercise. It’s a useful tool to deepen empathy for your users by “listening” to their struggles and then playing the hero to save them.

Output

The workshop was really helpful for generating:

• user stories

• acceptance criteria

• brand new ideas

• success metrics

• buy-in

The team left with a clear and common understanding of what could be done to move the needle for the customer experience.