Setting up for success – Project update #3

Following the learnings of our mini sprint Rich, Ben and myself co-designed and ran a workshop alongside our UX Designer, Amy Howard.
The workshop helped us create a Prototype with enough contextual content and features to test with both new and experienced project managers.

Hypothesise and sprint approach

WE BELIEVE if users think about mobilisation with the mental model effective mobilisers have, then they will make better decisions about what to do when and ultimately, mobilise better.

SO IF we organise activities according to how effective practitioners think about them and make decisions

THEN users will make decisions more closely aligned to effective practice than they would responding to existing guidance (e.g., leaders, PMOs, guilds)

Insights from our co-design workshop

We ran a card sorting exercise using current NSW Government documents to mobilise and asked a couple of experienced project managers to map their process, or ‘mental model’ using the listed documents.

We then discussed the results as a group, namely around where they differed and why, then synthesised the different perspectives

Testing a prototype using learning goals

We turned the key findings from our workshop into innovative ideas that would better reflect the way experienced practitioners approach setting up projects.
We took our basic design and turned it into a feature-based prototype, mocked up in Figma by Amy.

To test our prototype, we looked at how it can support users to:

1.work more effectively

  1. to prioritise their work better

  2. to work more efficiently

We focused on validating 3 learning goals in particular:

  1. That framing mobilisation through effective mental models changes the way people think about mobilisation for the better

  2. That “effective” framing makes it easier to understand where they’re at and what they should prioritise

  3. That effective framing of mobilisation would improve the efficiency of mobilising

What we found

We tested our prototype against 3 different learning goals based on if the content would provide users with enough context to confidently move through the mobilisation space.

Our results were mixed:

1 fail

2 partial passes

We also learned some things about the prototype itself, some markups below.

Rinse and repeat – but getting closer

We’re kicking off another full Alpha design and testing sprint which will again include our product team so that we can work together to define our hypothesise further and refine our prototype based on the learnings we synthesised in this sprint.

We have booked in some user testing participants for our next round but are keen to connect with as many people in our community as possible. If you could connect us with one project manager or one product manager, that would be amazing!

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