UX research

CITA NZ

Industrial partner

Year

2019

Lean UX workshop & Agile practice

A membership hub to unify and bridge Chinese IT members across New Zealand. This portal serves as a home for all members and potentially integrates with their services and upcoming programmes.

Membership hub

Chinese IT Association of New Zealand (CITANZ) was looking to develop a membership hub to centralise their members’ information and streamline their membership management process; also this portal serves as a home for all members and potentially integrate with their services and upcoming programmes. Their long-term vision is to build a reciprocal community for Chinese IT professionals across New Zealand. The management team of CITANZ is mostly developer-domains. They are aware of the importance of member-centric focus, so they did much user research such as interviews, heatmap, survey. However, they seemed to be sunk in their data and needed the involvement of UX work. Thus, we were a team of 7 with key stakeholders from CITANZ working together to establish the goals and implement the UX strategy and methodology to design a member-centric platform for Chinese IT community over New Zealand.

The big scope of work with limited time and resources: With passion and ambition, CITANZ management team expected us to implement UX design over their website while there were some functions that had not been ready yet for operating e.g. job search. It caused our scope of work to be overwhelming in a limited time. Therefore, we considered based on the initial research to suggest and include them in the Lean UX workshop to be able to connect the dots between business outcomes and users’ outcomes. From there, we were able to propose the most critical research and developing areas for both business and users to be fundamental for further development.

Challenge

We began with enhancing the users’ experience with existing support data. CITANZ did much research which centralised around their members. The data was raw thus our work was to analyse and read the patterns, learn as much as we can from users to be able to strategy the following steps

Digital platform engagement
Potential for CITANZ volunteers and mentorship
Age-appropriate design considerations
Clickstream analysis (Heatmap)

Create a picture from puzzles

All Projects

Unified membership hub vision, purpose and goals: with 100+ members in CITANZ, membership hub needs to unify the entire CITANZ community.
Understanding the members’ needs and goals: Membership Hub design should cater for members with varying needs. Build a reciprocal community for existing and new members.
Designing the experience: The vision, goals and needs of both the internal and external stakeholders will be translated into the UI design.

Our goals

After identifying the Proto personas in the workshop we continued the interviews to get more insights and validate our hypothesis of users. In the first half of the interview, people were asked questions regarding their reason for joining CITANZ, their experience as a CITANZ member as well as their obstacles. Following that, the wireframes of the Membership Hub homepage were shown to them for feedback.

Objective

Validate the assumptions about the member’s needs and obstacles.
Evaluate the composition of the home page which was conceptualized regarding the workshop outcomes

What do the members say?

Persona

This round of Usability testing focused on testing hi-fidelity mockups designed according to the style guide, so that users could have a full view of the potential website and provide deeper insights. Our participants were recruited based on defined Personas, they were given the relevant scenarios and tasks during the testing sessions.

The objective of the Usability and A/B testing was to validate the changes from the first round of interviews and guerrilla testing. This testing provided options for filtering events on the Event Listing pages based on a task scenario, so that the UX team could finalize one option for the next stage of design by A/B testing:

1. A list of six of upcoming events, or

2. Searching event by calendar.

Usability and A/B testing

Prototype link

Introduce CITANZ membership hub

Our engagement began with a series of in-depth working sessions and strategic activities focused on aligning our teams around project goals, identifying and clarifying learning objectives, exploring user needs and goals, validating user roles and types, and developing hypotheses and research methods.

After establishing research goals, methodology, and hypotheses, we coordinated and conducted defined research activities; and tie findings back to our initial goals by conducting various User Experience (UX) activities to validate the hypotheses and laying the groundwork for the future membership hub road map such as strategy, planning and User Interface (UI) design. These goals will shape our work together as we make our way through all of the project phases.

Artefacts

Lean UX workshop
Data analysis
User interviews
Concept testing, Guerrilla testing, A/B testing, Usability testing
Minimal Viable Product definition
UI design

UX strategy

Lean UX workshop was a strategic approach, in this case, to partner with the CITANZ management team in the UX process in terms of knowledge development, idea generation, and concept development on products. To be more precise, it helped us to connect the dots between business outcomes and the users’ outcomes, following that to identify our users’ portrait and the feature priorities.

Participants included 3 members of CITANZ management team, 3 developers and 2 UX designers.

Workshop objectives

Frame and define the problem statement that the team is trying to solve
Clarify and understand the business requirement, needs and goals
Frame the vision and outcomes for the membership hub
Identify and prioritise features as possible solutions to the MVP

Lean UX workshop

Business goals

Growth: Growth through increased membership sign up.
Members Happiness: Member happiness and connectedness through events and networking. Growing members and building community.
Operational Efficiency: Improving operational functionalities to decrease administrative tasks.

Feature prioritisation

Personalised Profiles: Personalised and editable profile pages for current and new members.

Job board exclusively for CITANZ members.
CITANZ Event Calendar: CITANZ calendar of upcoming events and opportunities. The possibility of customisable calendars.

Workshop outcomes

We had 2 weeks of Agile practice to develop our solutions through the collaboration of UX designers and developers. We went through planning, stand-ups, test-driven development, sprints. At the end of each sprint, we had a short presentation including the presence of the CITANZ team to share what we have got from programming or testing. Two sprints consisted the decided solutions following:

Design Sprint

Sprint 1

Initial Feature Hypothesis

CITANZ calendar of events
Member Profile page
Job board

Sprint 2

Home page & Event Feature

Event homepage
Event list page
Event detail page

Explore other design solutions

Member Introduction Page (new)
Learning hub (new)
Interests Group (new)
Onboarding page (new)
Job opportunity

With the features hypothesis, user stories were created to provide a high-level definition of the requirements, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it. The stories were written to make sense of the features of 3 main areas including Membership homepage, Even listing page, Even detail page.

The following step was to make a User flow, the focus was on the user flow from initial signup and onboarding to the website including the member homepage, event page, event detail page, job listing page and member page while including learning hub and interest group as future pages.

User stories and User flow

Due to time limitation for this project, some features that were brought up during the workshop and interviews were not implemented for as theMVP .Hence, the future product roadmap was created to give a broad overview of all aspects of the membership hub: goals, timeline, features, etc.