Creating great UX…
How can you create great user experiences in meeting & teaching spaces and Microsoft Teams Rooms when users' needs vary so widely?
A great example is Higher Education. On campuses, there is a range of pedagogies (which we can regard as a form of workflows), a wide range of teaching styles. Some use blackboards, others want the whole AV tech toolkit in their teaching armoury.
In UX we think of ‘user personas’ and Higher Education is a useful example for system designers in the wider context of meeting and MTR design, because these users can be very vocal about their needs - and when they are not being met!
The difference between the specifiers in AV systems for education and those in corporate, governmental etc is that the former have good and ongoing communication with the users. Whereas, in the wider commercial domain, system designers typically have little or no contact with the daily users of their systems.
Microsoft Teams Room systems designers typically engage with the procurers and main stakeholders - not the daily users and consumers of their installed systems.
There is a difference between what clients want and what they need. No-one wanted an iPhone before they appeared. We wanted the next Blackberry or Nokia (although I do miss that one week battery life!).
There are established UX design techniques to discover user needs - and how to work with them. In Greg Jeffreys Consulting Ltd, human centric design principles lie at the heart of what we do and how we work.
But one thought is rising to the top at the moment. Rooms are going to have to be like chameleons and adapt to different users, being ready to support individual workflows, styles and required technical functionality.
Posted: 10th August 2023