Use Cases
UC1. IT Asset Variants - iPhone
- There are two separate catalogue items to search and select Red iPhone or Grey iPhone.
- Color, such as red or grey, is a variable of a single catalogue item – iPhone.
UC2. Service Request - Office Access
- To request office access, user can select or search through all offices as standalone catalogue items, e.g., Access to San Diego, Access to London etc.
- Requesting an office access is a single catalogue item with an initial mandatory field to select the office, e.g., San Diego or London.
UC3. Service Request – HR
- To request an employment verification letter, user will search or navigate to specific item with e.g., Employee Verification letter Czech Republic.
- To request employment verification, the user will navigate to a single catalog item e.g., Verification and select her location.
Hypothesis
Granular catalogue (A.) outperforms parametrized in vast majority of use cases.
- Search. Indexing form variables for search is technically feasible but requires additional development and maintenance. With granular service catalogue items, it is easier to promote specific catalogue items for keywords without forcing users to make another decision after a successful search result selection.
- Personalization. The goal of the service catalogue is to use user criteria and not display the full catalogue to all users. When there are specific items only available for a certain geography, it is possible to display it only to a selected audience, see UC3.
- Workflow. Each granular catalog item can have slightly different fulfilment workflow, e.g., for UC1., Red iPhone can be approved by a different group than grey iPhone.
- Maintenance. It is easier to update simple catalogue items with simpler scripting and conditional logic, paving the way for low-code tools like Catalog Builder.
- Virtual Agent. It is easier to define conversational flows for granular catalogue items, though the benefits of maintaining more conversation flows are not obvious.
Typical objectives promoting parametrized service catalogue over granular.
- Discovery and UI Patterns. A larger catalogue can introduce new challenges e.g., scrolling behavior on small screens, leading to tough decisions about pagination or categories. Introducing additional hierarchy levels of categories assumes a validated taxonomy understood by the users.
- Cognitive load. Sometimes it is assumed that navigating through a larger granular catalogue can make the discovery scenarios e.g., where user can’t precisely spell out the target service name, harder. By following a simple key-stroke-level heuristic, the total number of clicks shall be the same regardless of user selecting the variant in the navigation or on the catalogue item form.
Usability Validation Methods
There is a range of UX Research testing methods we can use to validate the variants.
- Unmoderated usability testing – time-on-task. Present two versions of catalogue for UC2, ask users to request access to London office and measure the time on task. The task requires two fully working variants that include search and filter capability.
- Heuristics – Key Stroke Level modelling. Use a click-through screen prototype to simulate all three use cases with realistic content. Calculate keystrokes and decide on the winning variant.
- Moderated usability testing – Lostness. Observe users as they perform UC1, UC2, UC3 and calculate lostness measure to decide on winning variant.
Resources
Set Catalog Variables from URL Params
