Collector Backoffice

Design sprint, conceptualizing, ideation

The following is a report that was given to the product team summarizing the artifacts and outcomes of a 5-day design sprint workshop that I planned, organized, and facilitated.

Exercise 1: Set a Long-Term Goal

Get optimistic. Ask: Why are we doing this project? What problem are we trying to solve? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?

Goals: Why Are We Doing This?

  • Currently just a mobile app used by field workers to do collecting and/or inspections
  • Both a complicated and functional app
  • About half of all users work offline
  • Focus has mainly been on the field workers
  • Make it easier for field managers to create maps for workers
  • Remove some workflow for field workers
  • Help people on backend who have to make decisions based on data coming in (Ex: Are we done with the project?)
  • Authoring is currently done in Desktop and AGOL
  • Users need to be pretty experienced to know how to set up projects
  • Field Supervisor has one-stop-shop to be successful
    • Create project
    • Build Map
    • Build Forms
    • Share Settings
    • Deploy Info/Project (new)
    • Offline Definition
    • Manage Projects (new)
  • Users struggle with data collection
  • Moving users from paper-based workflow to digital
  • Field supervisors need to ensure data is collected properly
  • Eliminate ad-hoc experiences (Ex: take map offline)
  • Product that promotes "softer" ramp into full Collector and platform
  • Almost every org needs mobile data collection of some sort
  • Friction-free bottom organizational change (Ex: Slack)

How could we fail?

  • Not an easy entry point
  • Don't think of ESRI for data collection
  • We bit off more than we could do
  • Users still have to go to AGOL to complete a workflow
  • Focused on the wrong workflows

Exercise 2: Make a Map

List customers and key players on the left. Draw the ending, with your completed goal, on the right. Finally, make a flow chart in between showing how customers interact with your product.

Exercise 3: Ask the Experts with "How Might We" notes

Interview experts on the sprint team and guests from the outside. As you hear important points reframe problems as opportunities. Stick all the HMW notes on the wall in any order. Move similar ideas to one another. Label themes as they emerge. Dot vote most important questions and then move winners to the map.

Exercise 4: Demonstrations

The group takes a look at other great product solutions and captures compelling and inspirational ideas.

Collector demonstration

Doug Mortgenthaler gave the group a detailed demonstration of what users have to deal with today in order to create a new data collection project.

Lightning demo: Square space

This site has a very frictionless on-boarding process to go from nothing to a well designed starter site in very few steps.

Users pick a template from a well designed catalog. Only after they choose to proceed with building a site are they asked to create an account. The account creation is simple and then they are asked 4 questions about the site they would like to build. Once they are done, they are give a real preview of their site.

All of the tools to edit the site and manage their account are accessible through panels on the left. They do a good job of 'just in time' tooling.

Exercise 5: Solution Sketches

Create a three-panel storyboard, sketching on three half sheets of paper. Make it self-explanatory. Keep it anonymous. Ugly is okay. Words matter.

Team A's concept

Team B's concept

Team C's concept

Team D's concept

Exercise 6: Sticky Decisions

First, hang up all the solution sketches in an 'art gallery' style. Each person reviews the sketches silently and places one to three small dots beside every part he or she likes. Speed critique of each design, then each person chooses a favorite idea and places a pink post-it next to it. The Decider gets a Supervote with three pink post-its. These ideas will go into the prototype.

Exercise 7: Storyboard

Draw out a grid of 15 squares on the whiteboard. Choose an opening scene then start filling out the storyboard. Move existing sketches from the wall to the board when you can.

Exercise 8: Prototype!