Online Policy Collaboration Forum.
The client is a major national professional trade organization whose policy directly affects nearly every person in the country. The client’s members use an online forum application to discuss resolutions to amend or adopt new policy, before voting on the policy at their semi-annual meetings. One of the biggest complaints about the application was that it was difficult to follow message threads. The challenge was to improve the usability of the application with design enhancements that could be implemented in a single development sprint.
This project had an extremely tight timeline. Discovery consisted of a kickoff meeting with stakeholders, testimony from several SMEs, an informal heuristic evaluation of the current application, and a competitive analysis. Three concepts were created, evaluated by the client, and estimated by the development team. A design system and style guide were already in place. Given the time constraints, substantial changes to the user flows or the backend was not feasible. So instead of iterating through wireframes, existing design components were re-purposed which allowed for fast iterating of high-fidelity designs.
Once the client chose a final design direction, an interactive prototype was created and tested with users to validate our design choices. The usability testing resulted in minor adjustments. Final design assets were handed off to developers in Zeplin.