Overview

Product Design - Frontend (React) - Backend

‘Team Insight’ is a web app used to build visualisations on how your teams are performing when using agile methodology performance indicators. Using weekly data entries, it allows you to see how your teams perform over time, and provides a current snapshot that can be easily shared with team leaders.

Using feedback distilled from user surveys, I redesigned a ‘very long Google form’ into a pleasant survey experience.

History

When I joined this project, an app MVP displayed rows of data per team collected from a Google Docs form. Colours in a grid would indicate the positive and negative ‘health’ scores over time (on a weekly basis). It had the ability to display the scores of different teams on a homepage, allowing the user (Scrum Master) to easily see a snapshot of their teams ‘health score’.

Original excel prototype:

The original concept came from an excel spreadsheet, which was used to track the Agile ‘health’ of teams, by grading their performance in key Agile areas, e.g. if the team conducted weekly scrum ceremonies and retros, if the team had daily stand ups.

The main pain point was that it was difficult to view and export historical data. The spreadsheet would break where fields were entered incorrectly, and produce unusable table. It was next to impossible to easily analyse and export trends over time, and it was generally an unpleasant and bulky thing to maintain and update on the daily. However, when it was not broken, it produced highly useful data that could help ‘diagnose’ where a Scrum Master or Agile Coach could best uplift the agile practices of the team.

Brief

As Team Insights was still in the MVP stage but used real data from real scrum teams, we needed to move away from relying on Google forms for privacy and UX reasons.

We had a good number of hypothesis to improve the experience of the app:

• The Google form had approximately 90 questions. The redesign of team health form would need to provide the user a smooth and frictionless experience, with clear indication of the progress made through the form.

• The legend (colours) had to be relevant for each question.

• Annotation support - the form had to track another level of data, e.g. the reasons and observations around entering each team score.

Initial Problem Statement

Before conducting further research, documentation was provided to help the team to align on the goal of the product.

1 on 1 Interviews

I facilitated 1 on 1 interviews to test assumptions with real users of the app - scrum masters, product owners, and members of the executive team. The objective was to assess the current version of the web application and watch an agile coach using the tool.

Our intended measurements were:

• Success rates

• Completion times

• Perceived ease of use

• Value add

We asked the Scrum Masters and Agile coaches to complete a task.

User Insights

The interviews produced primarily qualitative research. The top 5 pieces of feedback were as follows:

• Since the users would need to input data daily, they wanted a clean and easy way of inputting data, that let them visualise the percentage completed of the form.

• Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches wanted to see a snapshot of their teams, how good their practices are, and how they are trending.

• Users wanted to view and compare team maturity trend insights from the data.

• Users wanted to select which data they wanted to enter before filling it in, so they could avoid having to fill out a giant form completely.

• Users wanted to easily send out an NPS survey to a few customers, and to the team.
  
  

Wireframes and Prototypes

The feedback helped us clearly define and prioritise the deliverables for Team Insight. We decided to prioritise the first piece of feedback (seeing an overview of team health), and so had to create a pleasant way of entering data. This would allow us to collect data so we could display a snapshot for scrum masters to see how well their teams were trending.

Site map:

I produced a site map to outline the user flow, how they would input data to render the team health snapshot. This also allowed our stakeholders to clearly visualise the scope of the pages we needed to build.

User flow:

I then created a user flow as a proof of concept to highlight the key components of the product. This helped us conceptualise and flesh out what the user journey of entering data might be.

First Hi-res Prototype Iteration:

I designed 3 prototypes of data capture each using different data inputs, but maintaining the use of the same legend and colours. The users also clearly expressed a desire to understand the progress they had made through the test, so I included the ‘Page 5 of 6’ progress bar feature.

User Test Script

To test my hypothesis, I organised user tests with Invision prototypes so users could actually experience the flow, and I could capture how users would actual interact with the forms.

The user test script was as follows:

From these tests, we were able to collate many pieces of feedback, which were put on a Funretro board and voted on by the team and Product Owner to prioritise scope and development.

The main takeaways and requests that were prioritised were:

• Saved history from previous day’s data

• Adding ability to annotate data entries per practice group - makes you think about what happened in the context of the section

• Form 1 with sliders was preferred, as the feedback from the colours and legend displayed while in use helped assist with answering the questions

• Ability to add team name and date for each form

Final Design

Distilling the requirements from the second round of user testing, we implemented the following deliverables:

• The feature to allow the user to input the team name and date for each form was including

• The ‘form 1’ slider design was used, with the prominent legend in the header

• The saved history from the data from the previous day was implemented, which reduced the manual input overhead (as answers did not tend to vary too much on the daily)

I also worked on the homepage snapshot views, which was a prioritised request that came from user feedback sessions. Initially we had only one view - the daily snapshot, but we ended up implementing a more verbose ‘3-5-3’ view, which had labels to helped define the key points of areas.

Other main features requested that came out of feedback sessions that were implemented included the ability to select groups of teams per company, which was imperative for the app to be used on current agile teams.

Conclusions and Learnings

It was very exciting to work on an internal project, as we were able to play with branding and different colours, without being constrained by a brand guideline. Equally, there were challenges in prioritisation of features, as the team was given a fixed time of 2 months to complete features.

This project helped familiarise me with the biases that all research participants hold. It was interesting to hear all the different priorities that stakeholders held, and how their conflicting opinions could be prioritised against real user testing. Looking back, I would run more and shorter testing sessions against the wireframes and prototypes, to quickly more receive user feedback.