AMPS Lean UX Workshop

Twenty assumptions became 19 testable hypotheses, and the room ranked them to a top ten, each with its passing bar written before any test.

One feature, start to finish Choosing the top 10 hypotheses in the workshop

  • Research found the real problem
  • Design designed the answer
  • Measurement measurement not shown here

Research and design: the workshop framed the problem, and I drew the wireframes and narrated the storyboards for two ideas. Nothing was built or measured in my part; PG&E ran the tests after it ended.

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Context

Why did this work matter?

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AMPS is PG&E's in-house list of grid equipment, and federal rules say it must be right. Updating it was so clumsy that people worked on copies elsewhere. Our job was to help its owners and users decide which fixes were worth building.

Assumptions

What did we believe going in?

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We wrote down 20 assumptions and rated each for importance and risk. One quiet one: most fixes worth building would be screen changes.

Research

How was it tested?

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The five-day online workshop had eleven people, from managers to daily users; I coached one of two teams. They mapped a user's week, wrote 19 hypotheses, each with its cheapest test and passing bar, and ranked them to ten.

Journey map for Sean, a Telecom Engineer persona, with an emotion curve crossing five numbered moments that matter. Green peaks mark verified statuses and meetings; red troughs mark repeated asset reviews and unexpected markups, each annotated with a quote and a business impact.
One team's journey map for Sean, the telecom engineer.

Discoveries

What did we learn?

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Half the top ten weren't about screens. They were about connecting AMPS to other systems, like Remedy, PG&E's trouble-ticket system. Good to learn before anyone paid for screens.

Intervention

What changed because of it?

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We handed over the ranked list in the 83-page workshop book I co-wrote. Hypothesis #2 promised to cut half an hour off an outage fix, passing if someone could explain an outage's damage in under five minutes. I drew the wireframes for two of the ideas and narrated their storyboards.

Workshop page introducing the top ten prioritized hypotheses drawn from both breakout teams, with the first three set out in full (Incident Command, Diagram, and Accuracy scores), each pairing a business outcome, a user, a feature, and the test that would settle it.
The top ten, with the first three set out in full.

Outcome

What was the impact?

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PG&E left with ten hypotheses to test, passing bars written in advance. I have no results from their testing. PG&E paid for a second phase afterward.

Also on this project

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  • Two personas, Sean the telecom engineer and Jason the outage analyst.

  • A one-sentence problem statement agreed beforehand with the paying executive and subject experts.

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