This was a group school project with a client to get hands on practice doing Sprints.

OpenOakland is a branch of Code for America. “Code for America is a civic tech non-profit organization “to promote ‘civic hacking’, and to bring 21st century technology to government.” Code for America partners with governments to help deliver software services, particularly to low income communities and to people who have been left out.

  • We initially started with our project planning and heuristics evolution of both their site and other Code for America branches.
  • We were also able to have an hour in person to ask a staff of OpenOakland questions.

During our in person interview to kick the project off, we learned that the Business needs were for retaining a more diverse audience of volunteers; specifically to attract and retain “non-technical” volunteers to their in person meetings. Applied learnings from the interview to ask informed on-site questions a week later.

Performed Usability testing – with two users with the goal to define pain points. We already had an idea from our heuristic evaluations, but we learned that users had a difficult time finding the information they wanted to find before attending an event.

Asked permission to attend the event to observe, interview, and hand out surveys.

Survey on-site participants.

  • With the goal to better understand the current attendee’s journey between first hearing about OpenOakland to attending. Specifically: resources they had available to help, and technical experience they have.

Interview with staff.

  • With the goal to better understand the organization’s structure and processes currently in place. Identify needs and pain points.
  • With the goal to understand the flow of interactions happening at the event. Experience the on-boarding process first-hand.

Observed and tried the on-boarding process.

  • Shadowing the on-boarding process.
  • We received answers from 29 participants. There was a greater interest for civic meetups than expected. 10 of 19 participants expressed a current active interest. 
    • Our main takeaway from this initial survey was that there is a definite desire to attend these types of meetings, and the desire is not reflected in OpenOakland’s attendance.
    • Finding the relationships within the data gathered
      • We returned from the event and now had a significant amount of data to be worked with. 
      • Prior to the event we had done: {Heuristic evaluation, survey #1, contextual inquiry, comparative/competitive analysis}
      • At the event we performed: {Interviews, observing, survey#2, and shadowing the on-boarding process}
      • I noticed a large change in visibility to patterns after collecting 7 sources of research. Having these extra sources enabled us to draw a lot more inferences from the connections between the data.​​​​​​​

      • At one point during my synthesizing, I created a Venn Diagram to visualize overlaps of needs. My key learning moment in the project was while trying to list overlapping needs, I found that many of the target user needs were not currently being met. I re-framed the information I had laid out as “disconnects”, which spoke a whole new message. It felt right, and had a good flow. Discovering these disconnects drove the problem and hypothesis for the entire project.

  • We learned that the User Needs were related to accessing information.

PROBLEM STATEMENT: The organization has found itself with an overabundance of technical skill sets among its members and not retaining non-technical skilled members. Members not technically skilled are encountering friction when trying to apply effort towards the organization, which happens majority online. This is a problem because they need more members with skills in community engagement to be effective at solving community problems.

  • Design – Creating options, across multiple mediums (website, in person, slack)
    • Remove friction for new members
    • Help OpenOakland bridge a gap that has been identified
    • Viable for the organization.
    • Short sprint, so deliverables would need to be feasible within that time frame.
  • Delivery – Making decisions
    • Our Focus – OpenOakland needs to attract more non-technical attendees to participate in their weekly HackNight civic meetups. The majority of current volunteers bring strong technical skills, but most of their projects and the organization as a whole are still in need of non-technical skill sets.
    • Our Approach – By surfacing more relevant information for non-technical people and providing transparency of skills/talents needed for projects: people will feel more needed and welcome, and become more inclined to participate at the Hack Night events.
    • Website Redesign
      • Layout
      • Content (bring more relevant info forward)
      • Set expectations early
      • Provide recommended education to be able to interact with the organization online
    • Alternative options to access information (bubble up)
  • Deliverables:
    • In the end we found that the site was designed by developers, potentially accidentally targeting themselves. We delivered a set of wireframes to visually communicate our recommendations, specifically an IA restructure to include a new page specifically talking to non-developers.
    • The following are the main applicable changes that can be executed in a different manner of ways on their site and meetup events descriptions:
      • Move the (already created) FAQ to an earlier point on users’ journey. 
      • Offer assistance to those with friction joining Slack.
      • Clearly communicating the needs of each project.
      • Provide information for what to expect at the event, and what will be expected of them.

Personal Learnings:

  • I got to have practice sitting while feeling uncomfortable about not having the problem clearly defined. Which was okay to feel that way, it was not time to lock that down. There was significant research lined up and we had to do what we could with what we had in the meantime.
  • What the org saw as retention was because users onboarded were considered finished onboarding and fully capable of accessing the organization’s communications, but the users were encountering technical blocks. existing staff were technical professionals, and it was assumed everybody had proficiency with the software tool.
  • Key Takeaways
    • Initially, we had a good idea that “improvements to the website” was going to be a large portion of what we were doing. We had to spend effort and check each-other to ensure our research was not posed in a way to reflect that.
    • During this project it was realized how one angle of research can enable different angle’s research to speak new words. Research done early can provide insight to help steer the direction of other research that follows. 
    • I really enjoyed synthesizing. While research data does bring its own value, it enables patterns to be seen in different ways along the entire multi-channel research processes.
  • In hindsight, there was a missed opportunity to ask (in the general survey) what specific tasks people have performed or attempted to have performed on the existing experience before attending an event.