Optimizing the workflow for Visitor Experience
Opportunity
Mia’s developers built a web application, tickets.artsmia.org, and a ticketing platform called HIVE that was integrated with Salesforce for the Visitor Experience department to use as a point-of-sale platform.
This was all built in a short amount of time (3 months!) and has been used steadily since it was rolled out 15 months ago. Mia’s developers wanted insight on the workflow, how the Visitor Experience staff was using it and how they could make improvements.
Approach
In order to gain a better understanding of how the staff was using the system I set up time over the course of 2 days to meet with 9 people on the Visitor Experience staff and I shadowed 6 employees working with the sales ticketing platform.
Methods
Contextual Inquiry
Directed Storytelling
Fly On the Wall Observations
Rapid Prototyping
Interactive Prototype
Outcomes
Data on user workflows and identified pain points were delivered to Mia stakeholders in additional to design recommendations for addressing improvements on areas that would benefit the Visitor Experience department immediately.
The Users
If you’ve ever been to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, you’ve likely encountered someone on the Visitor Experience team. The Visitor Experience department sells event tickets, manages donations and facilitates memberships. They use Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management tool which is integrated with their custom built Point of Sale platform called HIVE.
Problem
Through user interviews I heard the #1 frustration with the system was the need to refresh HIVE. And when conducting contextual inquiry, I saw this pain point arising frequently - because at any given time the Hive will switch to the public facing web version.
Can you spot the differences in these two screens below?
In the 15 months they’ve been using HIVE, the seemingly random screen switching has been a constant pain point.
And starting a new transaction on a Point Of Sale screen isn’t the only place this issue occurs - the timing seems random which can be frustrating. Because that means you have to go back over your steps to make sure any changes you were in the process of updating came through - often the users need to re-enter information and while this is happening lines are growing longer and moving slower.
The staff’s attention has been taken away from the visitor while they focus on successfully completing a sale, unable to engage fully with the visitor, and the visitor is sensing something is wrong is happening. They might change their mind about joining because they just want to get their ticket and get inside.
Challenges
A challenging part of this project was during initial research - doing a deep dive into Salesforce to get an understanding of how a CRM system works and how it was being used by MIA. Once I began conducting my contextual research, it was becoming a possibility that the workflow was potentially being disrupted by some back-end issues that would need to be addressed, possibly involving Quality Assurance to do some testing. All of this an unfamiliar territory for me with a language I was only just beginning to learn.