2 to 16 November: legal agreement goes live
The ambitious achievement of this sprint has been going live with the legal agreement stage for grants of over £250,000. It allows grantees to review, accept the grant and start their project. In this sprint, Kasturi our Interaction Designer, and Rosa, our Service Designer share how the deployment process went, and some other explorative and updating works carried out by the team. In this sprint, we also welcomed Junior Content Designer, Abbie Foxton.
Pre-deployment Legal Agreement testing
We have been working so hard to push this new feature for a couple of sprints now. Obviously, it is not as easy as just pushing it. It could be irresponsible of us to deploy this without knowing it works for both external users and internal users.
As part of deployments, we always do accessibility testing; making sure our new feature is accessible to all. One thing that was different this sprint was we tried doing user acceptability testing as a group with different disciplines being in one room (as in one call in Teams). This has worked wonders for us.
We manually tested the Legal Agreement process, checking the page flow and data that users enter to the frontend of our service connects to the right entity in the backend of the service, Salesforce.
We tested various scenarios that users will be going through and made sure the internal users will have everything that is needed, and they know what they need to do to process any agreement. By doing the testing collaboratively we are able to tackle any user needs and business needs at the same time. This has proven to be an efficient way of working for us. We are planning to use this same method for our next deployment and if that works for us too, we are thinking of making it a business-as-usual practice.
Legal Agreement going live
We are happy to announce, after working diligently for several sprints, we have successfully deployed a new feature. Now users can submit their legal agreements digitally. This is a massive improvement to the user experience.
We are not going to pretend that everything was a smooth sail. We found a handful of last-minute bugs that needed our immediate attention. We made a checklist and ensured all bugs were cleared before the BIG DAY.
Going through this process has highlighted how important it is to check and do testing vigorously to avoid any last-minute hiccups. Nevertheless, we are proud that we have successfully deployed. All thanks to our collaborative work and our amazing team.
Exploring new ways for users to get access to the service through our sign-in page
Part of this sprint we have done an explorative work about the sign in page to access the service by our users. The main reason for doing this work is because, in the short future, we will move from a temporary solution (with two systems where users have access to the service) to a “business as usual” system.
We started analysing how users are signing in and using the service and what instructions are we giving to help them achieve their outcomes. Creating some heatmaps in Hotjar helped us to understand user patterns: where they click, how far they scroll, what they look at or ignore. We analysed the content and instructions that users find on the website when they are searching for funding programs or when they want to sign in to manage their awarded projects. These instructions have helped users to navigate while we have been building the beta system, but we don’t need them anymore.
Our next step was grabbing a pen, paper, and starting quick prototyping. Despite more user research and problem refinement that might be needed to continue this job, here are some of the first ideas we came across through this explorative work:
- Design two different journeys. A journey for new users, giving them clear instructions about what the service is for and how can they access the service by creating an account. And a journey for those that have created an account and want to sign in straight away.
- Change the instructions given on the website to access the sign-in page by simple actions such as “Sign in” or “Apply online”.
- Remove the current step on the website where we link users to the “new” and “old” system. This adds an extra effort for most of them and it’s confusing.
- The link to the “old application portal” might appear only on the sign-in page as a hint text that will disappear once all the cases are migrated to the new system.
Finally, we considered future explorations about the sign in page and upcoming services that might need to have an account to access them, such as:
- Sign in to get access to more services: attend an event, training, and courses, book a 1:1 with Ross consultants, book 1:1 with engagement before applying, … etc.
- Build an interface where they can manage and update information that The Fund has about the organisation (profile).
Updating our application form by introducing new environmental sustainability language
Part of the mission of the Fund is “providing leadership and support across the heritage sector and advocating for the value of heritage.” Considering that the United Nations Conference for the Climate Change (COP26) was taking place during this sprint, we took the opportunity to review some of the parts of the service that encourage the heritage projects to do better for the environment.
We expect all projects to demonstrate that they are building long-term environmental sustainability into their plans to:
- limit any potential damage to the environment.
- make a positive impact on the environment and particularly for nature.
For that, we provide additional guidance on our Environmental Sustainability requirement and on the Outcomes webpage.
However, and following some goals we have for simplifying the application process for the users as much as we can, we designed a general question where users are prompted to explain the impact of the project on the heritage, people, community, and environment. We launched the beta service with the next question: What difference will your project make? Tell us what impact your project will have on heritage, people, your community, and the environment. [500 words].
Our Content Designers, Kerry, Abbie together with Ellie, the Product Manager, and some other colleagues involved in this issue across the Fund, came with a new idea that encourages projects to think about their impact when they apply for funding. The result in a short-term has been designing a more directive question: ‘Tell us about your plans to minimise negative environmental impacts and maximise positive impact’. We’ll monitor responses and feedback on this content and interaction, to identify whether we need to add more detailed guidance or to explore a section/question related exclusively for environment impact of the project.
Welcomed Junior Content Designer
We said hi to our new Junior Content Designer, Abbie Foxton. Abbie has been part of the team and The Fund for several years. Abbie was already picking up and doing some amazing content reviews while doing her day-to-day job as our Business Support Manager. We are delighted and thrilled to welcome her to our team and look forward to working collaboratively.
