UX Designer
The College Six
February 2023 - Present
Summary
This case study describes a Design Sprint aimed at increasing awareness and use of resources provided by the Office of Higher Education among school staff who were previously unaware of them. To achieve this goal, the sprint team conducted a competitive audit of communication strategies used by other public and private companies.
We then used the four-step sketch method to generate and refine ideas, took notes on demos, wrote down promising ideas, fleshed them out using the "crazy 8s" technique, and created solution sketches. The team used a "sticky decision" process to choose the most effective solution and created a high-fidelity prototype of a newsletter called The College Six, which was tested for usability.
Despite facing some challenges, such as incomplete storyboarding, technology issues, and a small sprint team, we were able to successfully create a solution that could increase awareness and use of the Office of Higher Education's resources.
What was the problem?
Like many governmental bodies, our agency has a ton of resources that are not very well known by the public. Using a Design Sprint methodology was our solution to changing that. After discussing the major problems facing our agency and talking to experts within our field, we landed on solving the the following:
Long term goal: Get more school staff to use Office of Higher Education resources
Sprint questions:
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How might we increase awareness and use of our resources?
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How might we lessen the work for counselors and school staff in their communications with students?
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What was my role?
I was the Design Sprint facilitator and sole UX designer on an Agile team composed of 1 visual designer, 1 content writer, and 1 DesignOps manager. I was responsible for leading the sprint while collaborating with the rest of the team on ideation, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing.
How did we arrive at the proposed solutions?
We started with the end
During the first day of the sprint, the team gathered to imagine where we wanted this project to be in 6 months, 1 year, or 5 years from now.
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What would have to be true in order for us to accomplish our goal?
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What might go wrong?
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One year in the future, what might have caused our project to fail?
From these discussions, we drafted at our long term goal, sprint questions and map.
Then, we asked the experts
We interviewed several experts in the field about their take on our drafted long term goal, sprint questions, and map. We asked them a few simple questions:
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What do you know about the challenge at hand? Tell us everything!
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Where did we get it wrong?
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What's missing?
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Would they add any sprint questions?
We converted problems into questions
While listening to the experts, the team was primed to take notes on things they found particularly interesting to our problem and then convert it into a question using the "How Might We?" methodology. Then, we stuck all our notes on the wall and organized them by theme.
We picked a target
The team gathered around the wall of organized sticky notes armed with dots, ready to vote on what they thought was the most important question that best situated us to answer our sprint question and long term goal.
Using dot voting, we chose one target customer and one target event.
We knew school staff were really, really ridiculously busy and wanted to create a communications tool that would give them quick, concise, “plug and play” information that they could easily share with students and families.
We looked at what other companies were doing
The team conducted a competitive audit on interesting ways that other companies in the private and public sector communicated important messages to their audiences. We found current products our own agency created but we thought were not getting enough traction and attention.
In the Design Sprint, this was the “remix and improve” section where each of us spent an hour researching promising practices and then presented it to the group in 3 minutes or less.
We sketched solutions
We sketched ideas based on our competitive audit using the 4-step sketch method.
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Took notes on our demos
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Wrote down promising ideas
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Fleshed out ideas using crazy 8’s
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Created solution sketches
We put our best solutions on the wall and critiqued them
[In sprint terms, this was "The Sticky Decision”]
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Art museum: we put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape
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Heat map: we looked at all the solutions in silence, and used dot stickers to mark interesting parts
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Speed critique: we quickly discussed the highlights of each solutions, and use sticky notes to capture big ideas
Why was The College Six best suited to solve our problem?
It answered the questions to our problem most effectively
During the speed critique session, our sprint team concluded that The College Six would be the most effective solution to address our problem because of its simplicity and ability to provide quick summaries about our most important programs to school staff. The clear and concise title, along with the single specific call to action and polling feature to gather continuous feedback, were especially appealing to us.
Then, we created a high-fidelity prototype
Storyboard
Our visual designer, Sarah, drafted up a storyboard to help us understand how the users would work through our product.
Chose opening scene
We selected an email inbox as our opening scene, since that would be the first place our users would encounter our product.
Created a prototype
We created a high-fidelity prototype of the newsletter The College Six using our newsletter delivery system, GovDelivery
We got ready to test our design
We recruited 5 school staff working in the Twin Cities metro, central, and northwestern Minnesota.
How did our proposed solution solve the problem?
We conducted usability testing with our new design, which demonstrated that:
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Users loved the clean, concise layout
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The newsletter was easy to navigate
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Users appreciated the ability to have the newsletter read aloud to them
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Users need more information on helping the Muslim student population with student loans
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Users might need a different title for this product
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Some users had never heard of the SELF Loan
“The clear format is easy on the eyes.”
— Ramzia, School Counselor
5 out of 5 participants reference their appreciation of the layout.
“Seems browsable and manageable; nothing anything click-baity or one-sided, paid-sponsorship type emails.”
–Audrey, Academic Dean
4 out of 5 participants were able to find all instructed pieces of information in 5 seconds or less.
“Being able to hit play and listen to it when I'm driving home or on the way to work would be great!”
–Margaret, Academic Dean
3 out of 5 participants expressed their desire to use the feature.
"I didn't know this until this year that, being a Muslim woman, her family cannot take out loans...”
— Audrey, Academic Dean
3 out of 5 participants mentioned difficulty advising Muslim students how to pay for college because Islam prohibits interest accruing loans.
“The College Six sounds like a sports headline.”
–Audrey, Academic Dean
4 out of 5 participants were able to find all instructed pieces of information in 5 seconds or less.
“I don't really know anything about the SELF Loan.”
–Joy, School Counselor
2 out of 5 participants admitted to being unfamiliar with the SELF Loan.
What challenges did we face?
During ideation, we created numerous design concepts that ultimately did not completely satisfy user needs or meet our swift time constraint. The design concept that we prototyped was successful in that it was a quick, simple source of information to school staff about our higher education resources. However we did face a few challenges with it:
Incomplete storyboarding
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Our design phase suffered from incomplete storyboarding, as we failed to map out how users would first encounter our product in a real-world setting. As a result, during the initial minutes of each interview, users were hesitant to show us their overflowing inboxes. This meant that they didn't have the opportunity to choose our newsletter over those of our competitors. Moreover, they skipped reading the subject line, which was an aspect we wanted to test.
Technology issues
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We encountered a technology issue during one of the user interviews when a participant was unable to share her screen on Microsoft Teams due to school-imposed restrictions. As a result, we had to quickly switch to Google Meet in the middle of the session to continue the interview seamlessly.
Very small sprint team
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Due to the limited staff time during the legislative session in Minnesota and the small size of our agency, our sprint team comprised only three members, all of whom worked in the communications department. Given these constraints, we recognized the need to expand our team and involve colleagues from other departments in future projects. We believe that collaborating with individuals from diverse backgrounds and skill sets will enrich the ideation process and lead to more robust solutions.
What did I learn?
Give an overview of a Design Sprint the week prior.
During the sprint, my team often seemed confused and uncertain because I had not provided them with a clear overview of what a design sprint entailed. While I had blocked off a week of time and asked them to clear their schedules, I had failed to adequately explain the process to them. As a result, I had to spend a lot of time explaining and re-explaining the process, which slowed down our progress. In the future, I will follow the advice in Jake Knapp's book Sprint and provide a thorough explanation of the design sprint process to my team with ample time for questions prior to starting the sprint.
You need to create a realistic opening scene!
We failed to create a good opening scene for our prototype, which was a significant shortcoming. As a result, when conducting interviews with potential users, the first few minutes were awkward as the counselors had to show their full inboxes and ensure that the newsletter was delivered to their inboxes. Additionally, we were unable to test our product among competition, which was a missed opportunity.
Do a test run of your usability study before it is in front of users.
Jake Knapp recommends doing a test run of the usability interviews before conducting them with actual users to ensure a smooth process. However, we were unable to conduct a test run, which meant that I had to write the interview script after everyone went home for the day. Consequently, some interview questions were skipped and not asked during the actual interviews, putting us at a disadvantage.
Make sure the team is comfortable with the interview script.
I missed the opportunity to train my team members on UX research principles, resulting in some team members not understanding the importance of asking every single question on the list during usability interviews. This led to inconsistencies in the organization of the interviews and some interviews being more structured than others.
Wear durable pants.
During the weeklong sprint, I ended up with two holes in my pants: one in the knee and another in a less conspicuous place. The latter happened right as I was about to begin the first day of the sprint. I bent over to pick up a piece of paper and...well, you can fill in the rest.
