Update: Zero to One to Two
Multi-Location and M&E and ATR Reports, oh my! Reflections on the sprint of June 8 — June 19.
Folks, I have a feeling we’re not in Phase 1 anymore.
The MOVE project roadmap is broken down into six phases. We started the first phase in early March, less than a couple weeks before the city issued an emergency order due to COVID-19, it seems like ages ago now.
When they weren’t working at their desks, Evan and Shine would regularly work in what was known as “Skybox”, a small room with a glass wall and a window on the opposite side with a skyline view of the city, yep. There they would spend time planning out the structure of Phase 1, and doing exploration on yet-to-be-released features for MOVE, all on a single giant whiteboard that was attached to the only wall that wasn’t covered by research artifacts, sticky notes, and lots of paper.
Shortly after beginning Phase 1, we all transitioned to working from home, and after months of work, we used this sprint to round out the first phase of this multi-phase marathon!
🌹Rose — What are we celebrating?
Evan released a huge update which included many changes based on the insights from our previous feedback sessions. One of these changes included showing multi-day Automatic Traffic Recorder (ATR) reports, it’s something that came up countless times from all of our users, and we’re so excited to finally have it available.
We also managed to retrieve — in a not-so Mission Impossible way — some notes from a usability testing session that were left behind at the office. These notes were helpful for Evan to build out key data that was important for users to see in the Reports page.
Maddy led the start of what will be a kick-off for the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) a.k.a Theory of Change, it will provide us with quantitative and qualitative feedback on the progress of the goals that MOVE set out to achieve. To help with that, Maddy and Evan had a productive meeting with the city’s IT department, they were given access to an easy-to-setup analytics tool that can be integrated with MOVE which will help us measure our KPIs!
Shine led design ideation sessions using Whimsical, in these sessions we all explored creative solutions to various problems surrounding Multi-Location features on MOVE.
We have been experimenting with different tools recently, last sprint we used Miro, but we found Whimsical to be a better fit for ideation and Low-Fidelity designs for us. We loved Whimsical so much that Maddy purchased a membership!
After synthesizing the design ideations, Shine led feedback sessions where we got to put the Low-Fidelity designs in front of our users. We loved seeing their reactions to the design decisions, and the feedback we received from them was extremely useful, this gives us the clarity we need to tackle the complex problem of Multi-Locations on MOVE.
🌱 Bud — What are we anticipating?
We’re looking forward to seeing the Multi-Location design ideation being translated to High-Fidelity, and dive into the details as we explore our solutions. Just like our users, we cannot wait to see Multi-Location and its surrounding features on MOVE. Users will soon be able to view volume and collision data, filter and export reports, and request counts for multiple locations at once, all from just a single page. It’s going to be a game-changer. More on that in a future blog post!
We learn a lot from what is shared in the regular Lightning Talks by the Big Data Innovation Team, and we’re looking forward to contributing more to the exchange of knowledge going forward. Which is why each of us will soon deliver Lightning Talks touching upon various subjects such as product management, development, design, and everything in between. We might also share some of our talks on this blog at some point!
📌 Thorn — What are we fixing?
While we spent a great deal of this sprint using online collaboration tools to facilitate design ideation, we felt that something was missing. In an attempt to mimic the real world whiteboarding experience, we missed having users and other stakeholders in the same room with us and co-creating with them. How can we be more engaging with the Big Data Innovation Team? How might we involve stakeholders with ideation online going forward? These were some of the questions we asked ourselves, so that we can do things differently next time.
As we mentioned in our last update, the online tools aren’t the same as jamming on the whiteboard in Skybox, but it is better than having nothing, especially given the WFH world that has become our norm now.
💭 Final Reflections
As a team, we’re making progress on many of the big ticket items such as Monitoring & Evaluation, Multi-Location features, and the process of formally launching MOVE to production. While we do have blockers around some key features such as presenting accident reports, we know we’ll make headway on them in the next couple phases.
We’ve completed Phase 1 almost entirely online, and we’ve had lots of ups and downs since we started. Although we can’t wait to return to Skybox and the office, we see this as a new opportunity to grow together in ways we couldn’t before. With our learnings in hand, we look confidently towards Phase 2 and beyond!
