Two letter roles but what do they do?

It’s given these three roles, but let’s analyze them through a case study to understand what they do, when they do it, and exactly how?

Intro

We received a request to assist the HR department in developing a new page/feature to collect all the information in one place. This will enable them to easily manage the periodic checkpoints and development sessions of our colleagues.

So, we took a look at their process to get an idea of what they do and how they do their jobs.

What do we have now?

As you might expect, they work with different Excel sheets, collect feedback with Google Forms, export results manually, and verify and change statuses manually.

Results

After a ‘long’ analysis, sketches, and brainstorming sessions, we have developed a clean interface that provides an overview of the upcoming sessions for the current month. It highlights each employee’s current status and next steps.

But how did we get there?

After analyzing the overall flow of HR’s daily work, we realized that actions and statuses play an important role.

Listing out these steps, we need to define which are actions and which are only statuses.

To ensure accuracy, we created another flowchart to encompass all the details contained in this flow.

Ok, but what relevance does this have in order with BA, UX, and FA?

Let’s reverse the entire process and separate it by roles.

Functional Analyst

If we acknowledge that we have actions and statuses, with conditional links between them, a Functional Analyst (FA) can gather all this information and define all possible scenarios, documenting everything. The functional analyst will describe the conditions between actions and statuses, detailing which actions trigger which statuses, and so on

If the action is “Request Feedback,” then the status is “Empty.

When the “Request Feedback” action is triggered, change the action to “Plan DS” and the status to “Pending feedback.

When the user changes the status from “Pending Feedback” to “Feedback Collected,” activate the button “Plan DS.

Business Analyst

This person in the chain comprehensively understands the business. They are the ones who have figured out, from a business perspective, what HR is doing.

He is also responsible for ensuring that the final solution aligns with the business goals and makes every effort to match the solution with both the business goals and the users’ needs.

User Experience Designer

As a user experience designer, your role is to merge all the business-related goals and user needs into a simple and usable interface. It’s crucial to thoroughly understand what users do and need. To devise an efficient solution, you also need to grasp the business logic behind the scenes, at least partially. While the UX step is where you can identify your users’ problems, it’s not the only stage where this occurs.

Conclusion?

You cannot draw an exact line between these roles; the role of the Business Analyst (BA) blends with those of the Functional Analyst (FA) and the User Experience Designer (UX). These three roles need to work hand-in-hand to complement each other. All their components are vital in building a useful product.

What are your thoughts? Leave in the comments!

Thank you!