Day 3- Improving Legacy Software: How Much Better Does It Have to Be?
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I’ve worked on legacy systems at Microsoft
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Will that change be better, worse, or the same for users?
— Legacy software is bounded technological constraints, and it’s involves working with people to change engrained habits
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People don’t want to change existing habits, even if the software is new
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We need to know legacy habit paths related to software change
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We need to know what is being measured across that change
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Can you point out where a feature change makes the experience better/worse/the same?
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People form the necessary habits using the work software to get things done
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The complexity and frequency of the software workflow determines how quickly habit forms and how cemented it becomes
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Some habit paths are non-optimal, and come from a sense of “This is what I know” and unwillingness to unlearn the existing pattern
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Think of a doctor entering patient information into an electronic system
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Or a business analyst pulling data from a data lake and creating dashboard, in a particular way
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Once a habit sets in, we get good at doing the work
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They must acquire new users
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The must move fast to get ahead of competition
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Bad product experiences need to be fixed
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This weight of cognitive overload can result in a really bad day for our users
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The proposed changes in software interrupt workflows and frustration ensues
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It’s a simple path, but great for demonstration of how a user sets up a habit path
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Imagine someone doing this every time they enter a conference room
— The same path existed for Windows 98
— And in Windows 2000
— Then came Windows XP, which had the same entrance to the start menu, but no label for settings, which broke a five year habit path
— The new habit path for Windows Vista and Windows 7 was the roughly same as the path for Windows XP
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From 1995 to 2012 there was basic pattern
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The start button and menu existed in bottom section of screen, and from there you accessed the control panel
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Windows 8 broke a 15-year habit path
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The control panel was not located where it once was
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This was different from the settings habit path, and people spent the year with new settings from the side panel
— The Windows 10 software habit path leveraged prior habit paths, but broke with Windows 8
— Windows 11, broke with the Windows 10 path, by introducing a new version of the screen. And people had to grab onto a new path
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But how to measure the impact of the habit change though?
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Did the change make the user experience better?
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Did the change change keep the experience the same?
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Or did the change make the experience worse?
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First change was for the better, with few clicks removed
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For the second set of changes, no change
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The next two changes were worse, as they broke with the habit path
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Settings in Windows 10 were better, as they had simple flow, but Windows 11 worse
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Through looking at usability and detecting time on task
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Examining cognitive load and seeing if people struggled with the change
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Reviewing adoption speed and the number of repetitions to learn the habit
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Viewing emotions to see facial expression
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Attitudinal studies
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Examining the context of use, such as having people enter conference rooms and practice setting up
— Now I will show a study to measure before/after for habit change
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In this study, we wanted to see if people could stop using the task bar at the bottom and start using tab par at the top to toggle through Microsoft applications
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But people also had to switch to the tab bar for websites
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People used the task bar and made more switches through tabs
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Explore how many people take one path or another, or how long it takes to form one habit or another
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Motivation to change and self-efficacy
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Measure impact of size or pane itself
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The more complex the work, the more ecological validity counts
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When joining events into a path, think of telemetry in systems
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If the path is not too complex, building it into prototype will be helpful
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Getting the right telemetry in place as new builds come out
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Setting up the test environment in-house can be challenging
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Hard to get data to triangulate behavior, attitude and emotion all at once, so be aware of what breaking habit path may do to people
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Measuring difference can capture quality of change
—Let’s design to respect habit paths, measure changes to capture habit paths, and monitor these changes before a new feature is released to the world
— I’m excited to see what you do regarding legacy habit paths
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Are there certain habit paths that are common among industries? And if so, have industries every collectively initiated a habit change or are habit changes usually done by a single company?
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There is the idea of interaction pattens that come out at certain time
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Users may not follow every product release? How do you do comparisons for that situation?
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New update that doesn’t have super-fast adoption rates
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Ask why and make a decision
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Knowing habit paths and how to grasp differences between version 1 and version 5, will let you see how to serve needs
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How to trade off consistency with the past, with other consistencies, such as consistence with other tools or mobile?
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Knowing which audience you are reaching out to, and the habit patterns that are most familiar with them
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Need to make sure habit carrier over to new habit content
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Know the audience, habit paths, and probabilities of someone experiencing pain
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UX research is often too late and downstream for product decisions. How can we embed iterative design/prototyping so there’s less need to figure out impact?
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Be strong, and have strong voices to get in early
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For every study team runs, have people collect habit path data
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Build reporting system to capture habit paths, and that data over time will help you
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Would you say data collection is best served via wiki or database where people can dig into?
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But depends on how you structure data, and how people want to access it
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My hunch is that teams makes changes to their design to match current affordances. What is the Bbst way to see how entrenched habit is?
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There is challenge of auto-save in Office web apps where some easily handled it, but others didn’t
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Know the population, where there pain, and understanding the worst problem
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It’s about caring for people and grasping where change will cause most pain
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I work on an enterprise team with small direct user base, and a lot of legacy software to retire. How do you think about habit formation with bespoke software?
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Know the users. If you know who 20 people are you can grasp how they use the software the way they do
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If you are making changes, can make changes in response to those habit changes
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How can we align legacy habit paths with new needs and mental models?
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Say Microsoft wants more Mac users
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We should be capturing deltas pattern in settings in Windows and Mac
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Seeing where people make mistakes
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Details will be super important to know the habit path
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