User Experience Design thinking: Your questions and assumptions here

[Madalena-15]

In one stage of the UX design typical workflow, the team (including other stakeholders) usually get together to discuss questions and ideas on by placing post-its and drawings on the whiteboard.

As we are a remote team, I thought of creating these ‘digital whiteboards’ to get together everyone in the Chapter project to open up any questions and ideas that you all have. While I am aware we already have issues and user stories for this, I like to this having a digital whiteboard would be beneficial based on:

• That some may prefer the visualisation format
• It may help new contributors who have just join to gather information quickly as well as participating in the discussion.
• to get the conversation flowing!

How this works

If you have any ideas or questions to add to the board, write it in the comment, and I shall update the board with your ideas/questions on the post-it. Remember that there is no right or wrong, so please post them!

This board is where you get to post your questions. Your question can be anything from a technical viewpoint to your experience that you had. This is great if you have any assumptions, but not sure where or who to ask to validate them.

[phoenisx]

I do like the idea. Many Companies do this. Not so sure, how helpful this will be in a digital way.

Anyways, I am a bit confused, What is a digital whiteboard? Is it some kind of online page, where we display these post-its?

[allella]

I'm trying to understand where the boards can be most helpful for a project that's already in production.

My guess is these boards are typically used at the beginning of the project to get people to understand and empathize with the users to design a useful plan.

I think this group did a disorganized version of this idea sharing and such through #1, other issues captured in #84, and various other closed or MVP issues, chats, and meetings.

The user stories model was a lightweight version of user journey mapping that Madalena has shared. Right or wrong, I think many of the people who are engaged in the project feel they have some understanding of the user roles from being an attendee, organizer, or just from seeing Meetup.com as a pretty concrete target.

I'm not sure how best to apply a design thinking approach to an active project, but my best guess is for Madalena to absorb many of the features, questions, and conversations which happened early on, such as in #1 and #84 and distill that information into more visual design thinking artifacts.

I suspect that's at least a user journey map / profile for each of the current user roles and then a much more organized single place we can direct people to for understanding post-MVP ideas, and capturing any new ideas or non-MVP questions for those just coming into the project.

Again, I'm just guessing on how best to combine this pattern of thinking to an active project already using user stories. So, I'm glad to here what others think about how to apply the Design Thinking pattern at this point.

[Madalena-15]

@Shub1427

I do like the idea. Many Companies do this. Not so sure, how helpful this will be in a digital way.

Frankly, you could be right. One purpose of this was to get the design team to interact with each other since we are lacking in communication. But, as I have already mentioned, even those not on the design team are still welcome to share their ideas since user experience is not technically 'design'.

Anyways, I am a bit confused, What is a digital whiteboard? Is it some kind of online page, where we display these post-its?

No, I have created these boards and post-its via Adobe Illustrator. I was looking for an online post-it tool where it can involve a collaboration feature, more controls, and is free. But, at this moment it will do for now. I have explained it further above the process of how this will work.

[Madalena-15]

@allella I hope this will give you a better understanding.

That is the majorly part of it, yes, it can also include topics where it can be technical, but not so much related to coding (I will provide you with an example below). Once the plan is defined, we start breaking all the problems into micro problems and discuss ideas on each one.

In the UX process, it mostly goes by the agile methodology. In every iteration step, the designers start in the brainstorming stage. They apply ideas and questions on the whiteboard, rather than doing it all at the very beginning of the project. The first iteration gets all the basic concepts and hypotheses typically out on the table (which has already been done in the issues #1 and #84). The rest of the iterations are focused on each micro problems.

For example, in one iteration, we need to create an admin dashboard and settings. So, we can start having a conversation in on how we are going to develop this (we can ask questions to start). We could then go by breaking the main journey map into a smaller one. That is to ensure the experience is structured and navigable for admins (and organisers?). We go into how each step will be laid out and what features/MVPs are included and what isn’t (especially for each role if applicable). I already have questions for this on my own board, which are:

• I assume co-admins does have access to it but do they hold full control of using it?
• (If no, we may need to create a separate prototype of admin layout designed for co-admins)
• Does organisers have access to it? If yes, what control do they have?
• I assume that analytical tools will be included, but how will it be applied? (created from scratch by the development teams or implement in-built feature etc.)
• If we are using analytical tools, should we provide instructions on the page to ensure the user gets the best experience of using it. If yes, how? (Apply tooltips in the corner? Etc.)

When a question is answered, I could add another post-it note below to it with a confirmation or answer. It can often happen that these questions can get broken down into smaller problems.

That way, a designer can gather all the post-it notes focused on one problem, be more aware of what can (and can’t) be done when building a prototype layout.

[allella]

@madaleneaza-design these are questions and reactions to your "Julia" user journey PDF. julia-chapter-organizer-user-journey.pdf

• What are Julia's existing tools for organizing?
• What makes Julia's existing tools time-consuming and unproductive?
• For a post-MVP, it may be easier to offer the date of the most recent organizer login or activity than to show if they are online or offline.
• For a post-MVP, I believe Quincy mentioned during the last meeting that we could consider reminders for organizers based on a template of common tasks. For instance, automatic emails X days before the event to remind organizers to confirm venue availability, verifying food sponors, and alike.
• I'm not sure if the member satisfation and diary of finances are ideas we've seen yet. The member satisfaction is something Meetup.com does after the events with a star system and I believe a box to type in feedback.
• On the booking and research, we've had local chapters talk about the desire to promote opportunities to sponsor events and let local sponsors see a dashboard of dates and opportunities and letting them initiate a contact. I'm not sure if this is something many sponsors would use, but local recruiters are sometimes eager to sponsor events and at other times they are selective about how to use their budget and follow a more manual process with relationships they already have with organizers.
• Could we have a "classifieds" system where organizers can post "In search of (venue sponsor, food sponsor, other sponsor)" requests and sponsors can post "Willing to sponsor (food, venue, other)" to a dashboard visible to organizers and sponsors?
• Should Chapter allow organizers to enter email addresses of their sponsors and have the reminders sent to the sponsors as well? Or, would we require the sponsors to have an account in the Chapter instance before the organizer can associate a sponsor and link them to an event for email / reminder purposes?
• Rather than asking the organizer to confirm the venue and food sponsorship, should we first send a confirmation email with a unique link to the sponsors and allow them to click to confirm X days before to avoid the organizers having to manually reach out to the sponsors and then manually confirm?
• We don't have a user role for "sponsors", but that's worth noting for post-MVP.
• Can we offer a system for organizers to validate their social media account ownership to optionally post event notices directly to social media?
• What are the security, liability, and technical challenges of posting to social media from Chapter? If the account is hacked someone might be able to create a fake event that posts to more then just Chapter.
• Posting events to social media on behalf of the organizer would offer limited, or no customization, of the posts and would be limited based on character or other limitations of the social media sites. Also, popularity of social media platforms and the authentication protocols change somewhat regularly. Does all of this complexity make it more desirable for organizers to use a 3rd-party tool specifically designed for reposting to multiple social media outlets, instead of posting through Chapter? Perhaps Chapter can post events to the 3rd party tools (Buffer, Hootsuite) instead of direct to social media.
• The MVP has a feature for an administrator to track analytics for the entire Chapter, but this would not offer specific statisics to the organizer unless the admin created permissions for each organizer within the 3rd party tool. Perhaps a future feature could allow the organizer to post an additional tracking code so they can see analytics specific only to their local chapter, but the administrator can still see statistics for the entire Chapter instance?
• Would flagging a Chapter member to block them be necessary for MVP, or post-MVP? There may not be anything to flag to start since a member will only be able to join and event and not post messages or otherwise spam the local chapter.
• Do local chapter organizers need to approve all members to avoid bots joining a chapter and creating fake users and/or fake RSVPs which could be used as a way to inflate the membership, skew the RSVPs, or prevent other members from being able to RSVP?
• Are daily digest emails to organizers about certain types of emails better sent as part of a daily digest, instead of individual emails? Sending a digest would reduce the overall # of emails sent, which may help save money for the Organization paying for 3rd party mail transaction services (Sendgrid, Mailgun, SES, Mandrill)?
• What is meant by "customisable push notification service"? It seems email is the MVP communication service to keep things simple and since Quincy has said that everyone has email while not all countries have access to all 3rd party SaaS.
• We've limited the MVP to english, but allowing organizers to set a language, timezone has not been discussed. Is that information available from Google since it's managing the MVP user accounts?
• Can we have a feature that emails the co-organizers an attendee list X hours before the event, or upon the close of RSVPs?
• We don't have a way to end RSVPs short of the start date of the event. Should we add an "RSVP cut-off time" to the RSVP form and database entity for MVP, or post-MVP?
• What is the intention of the opportunity on Julia's user journey in the "Set up Venue & Host Event" column that says "Have a built-in checklist feature where a member confirmed their place to the upcoming event; they will be automatically be added to the list"?

[allella]

@madaleneaza-design for post-MVP features, if we're building a tool to make the sponsorship "match-making" process easier, then here are ideas posted from people in Greenville, SC for making that process better / easier.

[Madalena-15]

@allella These are great questions.

Some of your questions will be added to the board in due course, where everyone can see and answer them. The questions regarding the persona “Julia” will be answered here.

What are Julia's existing tools for organizing?

Well, Julia’s tools for organising an event could be:

• Trello (can be used for collaborating with co-organisers, add tasks etc.),
• Google Keep (or Evernote) - to write greater details for the event (title, descriptions), list of tags. If Google Keep does not have a collaboration feature, then it would be Evernote.
• Google Docs - to create documents, such as a checklist, which will be used in hard copy format.
• Google Sheets - to keep statistics of previous events, attendee level etc.
• Pocket or Instapaper - to save URLs of, for example, venues and services

What makes Julia's existing tools time-consuming and unproductive?

In terms of greater details, that is a good question. Unfortunately, these answers are based on the assumption at this moment. In a professional UX workflow, to get greater insight into an organiser’s existing tools that are unproductive is to carry out a 1:1 interview with the organiser and conduct a contextual inquiry. This is very similar to shadowing someone as they perform their routine of a problem space to capture their pain (and gain) points. Once you gather all that insights, this is how you create a persona. But, remember personas are never 100% accurate.

Since I wasn't able to conduct a contextual inquiry or do a 1:1 interview, once I am finished with the course (which is this week), I will be performing a heuristic markup on the competitor’s sites and tools to find these pain points.

...But, I do have one guess at its best 🙂

Having to change each message to avoid it being flagged as spam, despite an organiser writes it.

What I do know is Trello has a poor feature of reminders 'notification'. Even though it has a calendar and set time and date feature, it does not notify the user at all in anyways (email, push notification), which is pointless. In Julia's case, she and her co-organisers use this because it is for everyone to see what everyone is meant to be doing. However, if you want to set a reminder, you would have to create a reminder in Google (or any) Calendar.

For a post-MVP, it may be easier to offer the date of the most recent organizer login or activity than to show if they are online or offline.

This is a good point. I am currently doing a project (on the Designlab course) called Feature Matrix. I have to look at competitors’ sites and find their features and evaluate if they are useful based on the cost to implement it and the value to the user. Since you are a co-organiser on Meetup.com, does it contain this feature of organiser’s most recent login/activity?

Your suggestion has to lead me to ask this question:

Should a chapter member be able to see the organiser/admin’s most recent login/activity?

For a post-MVP, I believe Quincy mentioned during the last meeting that we could consider reminders for organizers based on a template of common tasks. For instance, automatic emails X days before the event to remind organizers to confirm venue availability, verifying food sponors, and alike.

If I have not added this to the post-MVP, I will add this.

I'm not sure if the member satisfation and diary of finances are ideas we've seen yet. The member satisfaction is something Meetup.com does after the events with a star system and I believe a box to type in feedback.

Yes, I just found this feature during my feature matrix project, and it does sound somewhat better as it seems less time-consuming for both organisers and members. I would like to know have you or anyone in your chapter found this to be helpful and has it made any differences?

We don't have a user role for "sponsors", but that's worth noting for post-MVP.

That is a good one. I still would add this to the other board of user roles, so if anyone got any ideas for the “sponsors” role (e.g. what are their steps in their journey using Chapter), they could be added even if it is for post-MVP.

Posting events to social media on behalf of the organizer would offer limited, or no customization, of the posts and would be limited based on character or other limitations of the social media sites. Also, popularity of social media platforms and the authentication protocols change somewhat regularly. Does all of this complexity make it more desirable for organizers to use a 3rd-party tool specifically designed for reposting to multiple social media outlets, instead of posting through Chapter? Perhaps Chapter can post events to the 3rd party tools (Buffer, Hootsuite) instead of direct to social media.

I have vaguely heard of Buffer and Hootsuite. Correct me if I am wrong, they are not free, right? If so, while I have heard they appear to be very useful, I do wonder what about organisations who are not to use 3rd-party tools due to financial cost, what would be their other options?

What is meant by "customisable push notification service"? It seems email is the MVP communication service to keep things simple and since Quincy has said that everyone has email while not all countries have access to all 3rd party SaaS.

Ah yeah, maybe I should have been clear when I uploaded this in Discord.

Not 100% everything in my Designlab course works will be accurate to the Chapter project. Also, going by the course structure, the hypotheses stage is done for user experience. The next step would be the ideate stage, where we start researching ideas for technical features for Chapter.

Now you have mentioned this; I could use this as an opportunity to say the push notification was not ideal as initially thought. That is because, during the usability testing, the user has found the customisable push notification to be complicated, or I have recently learned that the client does not want to include this feature.

What is the intention of the opportunity on Julia's user journey in the "Set up Venue & Host Event" column that says "Have a built-in checklist feature where a member confirmed their place to the upcoming event; they will be automatically be added to the list"?

So, this is a solution to the pain point that Julia is having. Julia goes through every social/event platform (she uses to host her event) to gather all list of attendees (from each platform) and merge it into one list by creating a checklist through Google Docs (which is not a productive way).

Her intention of doing this is so she can keep track of the attendees arriving at the venue and see who have (and have not) attended. But, to use it aa a future reference where she can look back and see particular members who always keep not showing up and use that figure to calculate the next event capacity size. Again, these are examples. At this stage, this is merely suggesting ideas to solve these problems.

While I believe meetup.com does this anyway, I am not sure about other platforms like Facebook.

@madaleneaza-design for post-MVP features, if we're building a tool to make the sponsorship "match-making" process easier, then here are ideas posted from people in Greenville, SC for making that process better / easier.

I will be checking this out shortly, thank you for providing this. 🙂

[allella]

@madaleneaza-design

Since you are a co-organiser on Meetup.com, does it contain this feature of organiser’s most recent login/activity?

Meetup.com does show that a member "Visited the group X (days, weeks, months) ago"

Should a chapter member be able to see the organiser/admin’s most recent login/activity?

Maybe, some of this is implied by when they last posted an event or interacted with the group through messages and such.

I would like to know have you or anyone in your chapter found this to be helpful and has it made any differences?

I haven't noticed the results and even when I look for results I can't see any. My guess is very few people rate the event so there's no results.

RE: Buffer and Hootsuite pricing

Buffer and Hootsuite both have a free tier that with limited posts, but probably enough for a monthly or weekly meetup. I don't like expecting people to use more tools, but I could see this feature being big and cumbersome to maintain if Chapter supported growing number of proprietary social media outlets.

[allella]

@madaleneaza-design another question I posted today, which is more MVP related.

https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/chapter/issues/267#issuecomment-583899690

The ability to send message to users and invite them was, wisely, part of the flow. Certainly these are useful features, but I'm not sure we have user stories for them. Also, you can imagine organizers would need to reach out to their existing members through their existing platform (Meetup.com, Facebook) because they can't get their email addresses out of these systems anyway.

So, do we see a need for either direct messaging or inviting as an MVP feature?

[Madalena-15]

Apologise for the delay on updating the board. I did most for the time being and will continue on the rest. I have added your questions to it. I hope this is easy to navigate around to read the questions. If not, let me know what I can do to improve this.

So, do we see a need for either direct messaging or inviting as an MVP feature?

I think as a future MVP, having a direct message should be recommended for many reasons. In the design course, we have to create a bunch of POV and HMW statements; one of them is related to your question.

[Sboonny]

Currently, if users logged in, they can navigate to /auth/login/, and they would be prompt to log in again, while logged in.

What is the plan when that happens, do we redirect them to a home page? Or we disable login entirely with a message telling them they shouldn't be there

[allella]

@Sboonny redirecting to the homepage or profile page seem like reasonable options to me.

[Sboonny]

Update about redirecting to homepage, I have talked to oliver, and he mentioned that this is sorted with auth0 migration. 👍🙂