As part of my work as User Experience Researcher, people tell me about their journeys of learning QlikView. This includes developers creating their first applications for other people, administrators setting up large scale environments and users of business discovery applications. These journeys describe both what people struggle with and what they find easy when using QlikView. Each journey is unique and extremely valuable for us in understanding how people use QlikView and how we can support their working process in the best way possible.
A particularly interesting trend I’ve seen is that people working within business, e.g., controllers, accountants and sales managers, can also have roles as QlikView developers at their organizations. Compared to the “conventional” developer who has specific IT or software developer skills, people with a background in business face quite different challenges when learning QlikView. For example, they are often not familiar with scripting or visualization techniques and worry a lot about best practices when designing apps. On the other hand, this specific kind of developers has an in-depth understanding of their business and the needs of their company and colleagues. They might struggle with implementing technical solutions but the applications they create are often immediately valuable to the business.
By understanding our different types of users we can create solutions that help people quickly learn and effectively use QlikView regardless of how they approach it. People’s journeys with QlikView are the basis for one of our most valuable design tools for QlikView.next: personas. A persona is a fictional character that represents core characteristics of real users based on research. Our personas at QlikTech describe behaviors and attitudes that we gather from engagements with large number of existing as well as potential users. When creating these personas, we do not only ask what people want but also observe and interview them to understand how we can support their needs efficiently and effectively.
Our personas give our different kinds of users names, faces and feelings rather than merely being a “type” or a categorization. They provide presence and influence from our users at all stages of the design and development process. The personas cover novice, intermediate and expert users and our aim is to provide solutions that can support them all when learning and working with QlikView.next.
Do you have your own journey to share or seen any similar trends when working with QlikView? Let us know in the comments below!
My youngest son recently turned 10 years old. And, the sad reality is that in many ways, he doesn’t need me that much anymore.
In fact, if I wasn’t so unwilling to give up in my role as his mother, I am quite sure that he could manage to get through an entire day without my help. Thankfully there is a lot more to life than just pouring yourself a bowl of Cheerios. Somebody actually has to make sure that there are Cheerios in the house… and for that matter, milk.
What does this have to do with the business of IT?
My role as mother is to empower my boys with the tools and resources that they need to be increasingly self-sufficient and to drive toward their own personal goals. As an IT leader, my role has always been to empower the business users and to give them the tools and resources that they need to propel the business forward.
I had to stand on the step in order to appear taller than my oldest!
Just as my relationship with my boys has evolved as they have grown, business users are much more tech savvy today than ever and it is important that we adapt our methods of delivering IT solutions accordingly. One example of this is happening is Bring Your Own Device or BYOD where business users take on at least some responsibility for self-support of their own technology devices. Another great example is the move toward self-service Business Intelligence where IT departments maintain discipline around their core mission (security, data integrity, scalability, etc.) while business users are provided with tools enabling them to answer their own BI questions allowing them to move at the speed of business.
Gartner’s research note: “How to Deliver Self-Service Business Intelligence” outlines a model for the critical issues that surround delivering a self-service BI capability and includes three key recommendations for IT leaders, all of which we see in organizations using QlikView:
A point highlighted in the paper which resonated especially well with me as a mother was the idea of giving the right amount of capability to each business user. My two boys are 5 years apart in age and sometimes it is easy to forget that they need different levels of support. The same is true for our business users. Although any business user can gain valuable insight from an interactive QlikView application with only minutes of training, not all users will be able or even want to be able to develop applications of their own. It is important to provide a platform which can deliver capability to both types of users as well as those in between and to help all users grow in how they use BI for themselves.
Learn more about the Gartner research and QlikView’s self-service BI platform here.
I am personally passionate about improving the partnership between business users and IT and would love to hear from you!
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