From Synthesized to Prioritized
The past two weeks have been packed with synthesizing, prioritizing, and prototyping. We left off with concept testing in our last post, so naturally, we’re going to kick this one off with the synthesis that followed. We gathered our notes, prepared our Mural board, and began discovering commonalities and differences across our four user interviews. In the interviews, we walked through 11 prototypes that explored different elements and interactions for an internal matchmaking tool. As we grouped the results from individual interviews, patterns emerged revealing which concepts Donor Services officers (DSO) found most useful and what overarching goals resonated the most with them.
As we synthesized, we broke down the matchmaking goals using a tree diagram for three main audiences: Donor Services, Program, and The Pittsburgh Foundation (TPF) as a whole. With a more detailed understanding of DSOs’ needs and goals, we were almost ready to prioritize our growing feature list.
But first! To help with prioritizing, we took a step back to review the months of research we conducted in the spring semester. We mapped the features and TPF goals to our insights, mission, and opportunities from the spring. This activity grounded our solution in evidence from our research and aligned our team as we moved into prioritizing the goals and features.
To continue with our goal-oriented approach, we crafted 28 job stories based on the goal tree diagram and jobs-to-be-done for Program Officers and DSOs. Once we had categorized the job stories into different phases of the matchmaking process, we used the MoSCoW method to prioritize them. As a team, we went through each job story and identified whether it was a “must have”, “should have”, or “could have”. In a matter of hours we went from a lengthy list of 28 job stories, to a much more manageable list of 13 “must have” job stories.
It was finally time to find a home for our list of features by mapping them to each job story they helped accomplish. Once again using the MoSCoW method, we prioritized the features within each job story… and *bam*… we went from a jumbled list of 43 features to an organized list of 19 “must have” features that fit into our 13 “must have” job stories. We identified where the prioritized features fit into our high-level site map and began to transform the features from post-it notes into interactive prototypes. For this round of prototyping, we chose to take a mobile-first approach to help accomplish two goals:
- Set our design up for success as a responsive web tool
- Identify what information is absolutely necessary to have on the screen and scale up from there
With prototyping underway, we took some time out to synthesize the four interviews we had with other community foundations. We were excited to learn that although each community foundation does it a little differently, most of them have some informal process for matchmaking. With a better understanding of other community foundations’ workflows, we identified challenges and design considerations as we move into the final stages of our project. One challenge is that in order to make meaningful recommendations, we need to have enough donor interest data in our system. As a result, we are considering how we might remind DSOs to capture donor data as well as the possibility of donors providing this data themselves. As we design this tool for TPF, we will keep in mind how it might fit in with other community foundations so we can set TPF up to be influential in this space.
Our immediate next steps are to create a single interactive desktop prototype and conduct usability testing. It’s hard to believe but we now have less than a month until our final project presentation. Until then we will be iteratively prototyping, testing, and refining.
“In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”
-Fred Rogers
