A case for TRR 2020-2021Book a meeting
The very short story is that we made it possible for people who lost their job to schedule meetings with their assigned job coach at TRR.
For context
TRR is a non-profit foundation with a mission to support people who lost their job by providing financial help, coaching and education.
TRR also collaborate with about 35 000 member companies and unions to make the transition into a new profession as smooth as possible.
The team consisted of a product owner, three devs, a QA, a scrum master and me as a designer.
The problem
It was when we did research for a different project that a more important issue caught our attention. Apparently the job coaches spent lot of time trying to manage their client meetings in an already busy schedule. We talk about manual work in Microsoft Outlook.
The regular situation? A calendar crammed with preliminary meetings waiting to be confirmed or declined by clients. And if a client wanted to reschedule last minute it was simply table flip mode.
So the question was:
How might we ease the friction of scheduling meetings between clients and coaches?
The process
All excited about the problem we jumped straight into ideation. At the time we believed we had enough information since we’d done a fair amount of interviews already. So we came up with a bunch of cool ideas but soon realised they were simply too complicated and time consuming to actually implement.
This is where Jeff Patton and his user story mapping entered our work. The method was all new to us but what it did was to make room for deeper discussions around the problem and bit by bit we could map out a solution to explore.
Ideation and validation
By this time our assumptions were (1) that job coaches wanted to be able to make time slots available directly in their Outlook calendar and (2) that their clients would expect to be able to book a meeting online in a similar way to when they make an appointment at a salon online.
With a user story map in place we got to ideation again with the aim of designing the scheduling interface for the website.
Validation of our assumptions were made through additional interviews and usability testing.
Since TRR had a Design System in place it was easy to create multiple interfaces to test by using the component library. This was done in Sketch and using InVision for interactive prototypes.
Building and releasing
When building features at TRR the mindset is mobile first and the services are web only. All services are responsive for mobile, tablet and desktop and follow WCAG AA standard. The component library is used as a base for UI design but usually require some adjustments.
The design we went for was iterated over and usability tested a few times as well as run through a group of coaches to get their input. Design feedback was collected from the rest of the UX community on a regular basis.
Release!
In November 2020 we released an MVP to coaches and clients. We decided to make a smaller first release to group of 20 "ambassadors" and their clients (around 100 clients per coach) to catch potential bugs.
By the summer of 2021 the design of the Book a meeting feature has gone through som design improvements in terms of additional functionality. All coaches at TRR (about 300) are encouraged by management to use the feature which has led to coaches no longer having to spend time managing their schedules on an every day basis.
Up next
Presented here is an MVP of a feature that still needs improvement. It is amazing to see what impact a "work in progress" can still make if you prioritize and make sure every release delivers actual value to users even though it isn't a finished product yet.
Final thoughts
In the early work my biggest contribution has been to be the driving force of the process, to lead the team through user story mapping and the discovery phase. The method of user story mapping was new to everyone in the team and we have learned together along the way and adapted the method to a format that suited an organisation like TRR. A big challenge has been to find a way to get the team into flow in a setting of change and reorganisation at TRR. To learn (and teach) a new method and deliver a feature while the surrounding is somewhat chaotic due to an increased inflow of clients as a consequence of Covid-19. My most valuable learning from this phase has been to keep calm and trust the process and don't let the scope creep.
When designing, I have created multiple versions of a design with just slight variations to cover as many ideas as possible. Most of them went down the trash bin but I like having many ideas visually presented when discussing alternatives, it helps to not fall in love with one design. With that said I have been responsible for creating all mockups, prototypes and the final UI using Sketch, InVision and Abstract. I have used Adobe Xd to get a feeling for the interactions where I feel Sketch and InVision fail.
One last learning has been planning for remote work. I was not prepared for the level of planning it takes to run remote workshops when we started working form home in March. Miro has been a savior as a tool to get everyone engaged in the workshop/meeting, as well as taking that extra time to plan and set up an agenda.