PeopleSourced Policy App
PeopleSourced Policy wants to bring policymaking into a clear and transparent light. Putting power into the hands of people and revealing the power that already exists for said people is a top priority for this non-profit.
Goal Planning
Goal planning is necessarily one of the most important areas within the UX space. Strong team goals incorporating both user and business goals bring a strong foundation to the project and the team as a whole.
Research
Creating and executing on accurate User Testing scenarios both begin with research. Scoping out what exists, what's already been tested, what's successful is key to not wasting your time and your client's money. Our client in this project, PSP, had an existing analog to base their wants and needs off of.
Initial Concept Creation
Based on an initial cognitive walkthrough on our own perspective with the Austin Budget Party app, we made personas and usability notes around different personas projected frustrations and objective mismatches. We tailored scenarios that tested assertions based on our initial concept creations and attempted to push additional theoretical recommendations.
Remote Testing
Our client had a small testing budget; it was necessary to rely on remote testing to reach our testing threshold. We reached out to people who did not stand out of the demographic. We did not have resources to build a test user base around a very individualized demographic, so for this client, the criteria for test users were quite broad. I used a streamlined process to build a testing environment for my remote users. I created the environment with a Chrome remote desktop and allowed users to access my computer with the software all primed and ready.
Data Synthesis
Even within our ~15 tests, we had several hundred data points. Organizing and picking apart our information we had received from our testing environments is important in creating future iterations and validating assertions based in our prototypes and existing products in the market.
Reflection
Conducting usability tests at Fathom Consulting showed the paramount nature of keeping bias away from users to get useful data. Injected bias can quickly skew data from initial human-centered design to something I like to call "designer-centered design."