User research to unpack scrum experiences within scaled organizations using Jira
The Client: Jira, Atlassian x Papergiant
The Brief:
A User Research study spanning over 3 months, across London, Australia & India involving ethnographic research with multiple team stakeholders within scaled organisations using the software
My role involved leading and conducting the research study in India on behalf of a strategic design consultancy based out of Australia
Research Objective
The study aimed to understand the experiences and value delivered by the software to individual users, teams and organisations, the product's role in helping teams run and maintain scrums, organisational perceptions and behaviors that influenced the tool's consumption
Approach
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Individual interviews with 90+ Jira users across dev, design and product roles (both leaders and ICs) across 6 scaled organisations in India
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Contextual inquiry of 5 team scrums to observe their experiences with Jira
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Diary studies with 8 participants documenting their tasks and interactions on Jira through the course of a work week
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Audio & Photo documentation of the interviews & contexts
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Sense-making, distilling insights into actionable design opportunities ('How might we's) for the in-house UX team's consideration
Sample Insights
I can only share an overview of insights here owing to the confidential nature of the project.
Business model v/s feature consumption
The business model of organizations interviewed seemed to influence how teams prioritized and consumed Jira's features. With B2C organizations the focus steered towards speed/ agility and productivity-driven use cases of the tool. With B2B organizations there was an added focus on accountability-driven features as they'd often invite clients onto the tool while working on feature requests and fixes.
Timelines and Outlook towards assigned tickets
B2C organizations tended towards bi-weekly sprints while the B2B organizations interviewed averaged tri-weekly or longer sprints. The tendency for shorter sprints caused a frequent spillover of tasks for B2C organizations. Individual contributors within teams expressed a sense of overwhelm in the accumulation of tickets. Dev leads reported that the long-term accumulation of tickets led to a sense of apathy among teams towards ticket allocation
Sometimes it gets overwhelming when tickets pile on. As a team, we love sprints with zero carry-over but it happens.
They are already working on a number of tickets from the last sprint. It can be frustrating when new ones pile up over those.
Proactive v/s Reactive tasks
The act of turning a task into a ticket occurred at various stages: from proactive, planned tasks to reactive, urgent tickets. Higher levels of team trust and alternate channels of communication resulted in hot-fix tickets for urgent tasks that were addressed first and raised later on Jira, primarily for documentation purposes
For hot-fix tickets, I usually ping them on Slack or walk up to their desk. Updating Jira usually happens after the fix mainly to keep track of what was done.
Interdependence with other tools
Jira consumption was inter-dependent with other softwares across stages of performing a task. Alternate tools (including Atlassian's Confluence) were being used to collaborate and plan tasks before creating a Jira ticket. Alternate messaging channels like Slack were used for urgent communication around a task.
Opportunities
Design opportunities focused on driving adoption of the tool as the single source of truth over competing channels. Insights from the study probed additional hypothesis around how team culture played a role in responding to tickets. Notification and messaging opportunities emerged around minimizing anxieties around ticket accumulation while celebrating ticket resolution. Team leaders from mid-tier organizations wanted additional onboarding support in driving discoverability and utilization of existing features on the tool
How might we _____________________________________________________________ ?
drive adoption of Jira over competing channels
How might we _____________________________________________________________ ?
minimize sentiments of anxiety & overwhelm around ticket allocation
How might we _____________________________________________________________________ ?
drive the discovery and adoption of Jira's secondary feature set among active users
Additional design opportunities to explore:
Contextualizing and testing brand messaging across business models (b2b v/s b2c), targeting specific pain-points around team collaboration, org culture and hierarchy