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Online Task Analysis Workshop

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4 minute read

The chemistry team at Waters Corporation was interested in finding out how a sample of our customers ​develop methods for use with LC (liquid chromatography) instruments.

The Challenge
The chemistry team wanted to avoid making blanket assumptions about how their customers created LC methods and about which issues were most critical for them. The team had a general idea of the LC method creation tasks a typical chemist would have, but wanted to get a sense of these tasks -- and their order in the workflow -- from customers themselves.

At the time of this project we were at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, therefore I recommended to the team that we conduct an online method development workshop with a small group of customers.

The Team
I was the UX researcher on the project team, and I worked with a chemistry project manager and two additional chemists.

Research Questions
The project team wanted the online task analysis workshop to answer the following questions:

• ​What is the most efficient number of steps required to build a working method [for liquid chromatographic analysis]?
  
• Are we building the right solution to the right problem?
  
• What would customers be satisfied with in terms of an MVP (minimum viable product)?
  
• ​What functionality do they expect?
  

The Task Analysis Workshop
I recruited four Waters customers to participate in the workshop, and I used the online white-boarding tool Mural to facilitate the session.

The 1-hour online workshop had several parts:

• Session & Participant Introduction (6 min)
  
• Mural Introduction (3 min)
  
• Your Method Development Steps (15 min)
• How Many Steps is Too Many (4 min)
• How Many Steps is Just Right (5 min)
• Prioritization Matrix (15 min)
• Top 2 Elements (2 min)
• Open Discussion (10 min)

The Bottom Line
Participants felt that the current number of steps it takes them to develop a chromatographic method were too many. Participants preferred fewer steps than whatever they're doing now, the average of which was 7 steps. The project team had a feeling this was going to be what customers would say, so it was great to get confirmation in an online session with four customers.

In addition, the participants gave the project team a sense of the types of functionality they'd expect in an LC software solution for method development, and they told us what they would expect as minimum functionality.

The team then used this information to inform future development of LC instrument software.