NSW Department of Education
This was a waterfall project done with a team of 4 UX Designers.
The DoE have 50 websites they’re trying to bring together over time. They want a site that can be easily used by teachers, parents, staff and students. This is a massive ongoing process — we were supplied with just a taste of their research, hundreds of pages, and we were one small part of a massive project.
Current challenges:
From the client brief we learned that there were problems such as broken links, duplication of content, that there was more than one true sources of information.
My past experience.
Coming from a lean background. When we were told that there was more than one true source of information, broken links and duplication of information. I was like wait a minute, so even though I might have not done this before in the digital space, but it looks like they need to do a 5S exercise to solve the problem.
For those of you reading this and wondering what 5S means: its a workplace organisation system that stands for Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. There is a 6th S for Safety. But for now, I felt that the first 2S — Sort and Set in Order would help get things in order.
I grabbed Norm who is Web developer and explained “Sort” and “Set in order” to him and asked if it made sense?
He said yes, it did and that he as a developer used the same logic, that right there gave me the confidence that some of the tools and techniques that I have been using in Manufacturing could be used in the digital space as well.
What is 5S?
5S is a workplace organisation system that has been applied to the physical work space to reduce the searching time for tools, equipments, etc and I just replaced the tools and equipments with IA and links. I have always used it to organize my files and folders and done the same with clients. but never in the case of a website. (if you would like to learn more about 5S then please leave a msg and I will write about it)
Problem Statement:
Redevelopment of the information architecture for their main corporate website.
The current structure of the information did not meet the needs of their key audiences.
Target Audience:
Parents, members of the public, service providers, DoE staff (in particular, teachers and other school staff).
Suggested Deliverables:
New site Information Architecture that reflects the journey of the child that would help parents to easily find and understand information that helps them help children.
how to best manage the content on the current DoE website with focus on Parents and Teachers
Previous Research provided.
Parents and teachers personas
NSW Corporate research report
NSW public school concepts document
IA of DoE websites of different states
Revised problem statement:
“How might parents & staff find the content they want quickly and easily, to better support children?”
Challenges:
We were given 300+ pages of research and we felt that we needed a lot more time than we originally had to read everything. We had client brief on Monday, Usability tetsing with users on thursday and client presentation on Friday.
Our Mindset:
All the 4 UX designers working on this project were parents and we felt that we needed to do our best and be able to give DoE an actionable solution to work with.
Parents vs Teachers:
Since there were 4 UX Designers, Rob our lead suggested that in the essence of time we could be looking at 2 separate user experiences and researching them separately.
We welcomed the suggestion, Norm and I decided to focus on parents, while Greg and Bom focused on teachers.
We time boxed our analysis of the research to give us enough time to conduct our own research as well.
Competitor Analysis:
We conducted Competitor analysis on the IA of the Federal, Victorian, Queensland, South Australian and Western Australian Department of Education , Ministry of Education — Singapore and Ontario Ministry of Education.
Having lived in Singapore for many years, I suggested to my team that we should look at the Ministry of Education — Singapore website during our earlier discussion and later when we saw the IA provided by DoE, Singapore was already included in it which made our work easier and saved us valuable time.
From the analysis, we learned that there were different types of information that was present at the DoE website and at the individual school level, this also gave us a hunch, that parents might have different expectations for the information they seek at the DoE level and at individual School level
Guerilla Research:
We conducted Guerilla Research through phone interviews with parents to test our hunch. We asked them about what kind of information were they seeking regarding their children, where did they look for that information and if they visited the DoE website to look for such information?
Research findings:
The Parents found all the information they needed via the schools websites and student portals that were set up at the school level.
They also trusted word of mouth information from other parents. These small set of parents did not visit the DoE website for information.
This lead us to believe that in terms of the IA for the Website, we keep it at a broad level and for information that was school specific, the parents preferred to visit the school website.
we also learned from the research provided by DoE, that the most important information with the highest score, in closed sorting exercise was curriculum.
Desktop Research:
Norm and I then viewed the DoE site and searched for information regarding curriculum. We did this to get a baseline understanding of the current state. In lean terminology we call it — Go to Gemba. (go to where the actual work/ value is added). This approach has always helped me understand the current state, identify the gaps from the user’s point of view and provided future direction.
What we learned, was that, the curriculum was divided in stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. As a parent of a kindy going child, I had no clue what these stages meant? And we assumed that may be other parents might not know them too.
We continued going through different sections of the DoE website, referred back to the research, that pointed to the outcomes of the closed sorting and slowly Norm and I could see patterns of information that the parents wanted.
IA:
We started Brainstorming a primary and secondary level IA.
From the many personas provided to us for parents, we selected 2 personas that were related to our problem statement.
From the Personas we identified objectives, created user flows, wireframes and built low fidelity prototype using Balsamiq.
Our objective for our user testing.
- Find English for yr 1 students.
- Find a school.
- Find information on arts for HSC students.
- Find the event page.
- Find information regarding transition to school.
- We also did closed sorting with Parents to co design the IA for the parents portal. (see images below)
Opportunities for improvement:
1) A lot of need for more regular up-to date content at a school level.
2) Parents want easier and more reliable communication with school and staff. i.e notes that keep getting lost.
3) Parents prefer putting newsletter, notes & forms online more at school level
4) Would like to fill enrolment forms online.
5) Parents would like to view the teaching methodologies used by teachers at school, in order to ensure that there is consistency at home when parent helps with homework.
Conclusion:
We presented our research and finding with the client, who felt that they could use our work and the next steps would be to create a roadmap to build the parents hub. Hearing that we felt that our goal of providing the client with an actionable piece of work was accomplished.
End note:
(For someone coming from a heavy process based manufacturing background, it was a great experience to build the prototype. I am so used to helping other build their solutions. But, being able to come up with our own solutions and building then building it, felt like I had crossed a huge barrier and come out of my comfort zone.
2018 was a great yr, I moved to a new country, with new culture and learned new skills, formed new friendships. Its the end of 2018 and as I am writing this case study. I am thankful for all the support I got from Alexis wood at AcademyXi and my entire cohort for helping me achieve my goals.)
Thank you for reading my case study. hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. if you would like to know more about how lean and UX Design complement each other then do get in touch via LinkedIn here or drop me an email at nazia.rahmathullah@gmail.com.
