Slightly shorter weeknotes this week, due to me having a shorter week at work, and also having already gone into some things in more detail earlier in the blog.
Monday
We had our first staff and volunteer consultation today, managing to gather six people with varying degrees of experience with CABmoney but lots of enthusiasm and ideas. Thanks to everyone involved! Getting insights from the people who actually use CABmoney (either for themselves as an adviser, or assisting clients to sign in and enter their details) is invaluable.
First we went through the personas we already had for our clients, a range of six people who may need CABmoney (whether they knew it or not). The one type of user persona missing was the "adviser" group. If only I had a group of advisers at hand to help put some together.
Splitting into two groups, the team were able to define two new personas to cover different types of advisers who would use CABmoney under slightly different circumstances but still fit into our persona spectrums,
As it's quite a large part of these first few weeks, our work on personas and persona spectrums has been posted separately on the blog earlier today.
We then went through what ideas and thoughts people had about CABmoney. As people were already bringing ideas, I left it a bit more informal which was good as it let people chat about and evolve the ideas more organically. We still managed to get them all down and scored them for how much impact they would have on users (using a method that "kind of" worked, detailed here) and I'm going to do a more detailed breakdown of the ideas in a future blog post.
All in all, a great session, and thanks again to all who attended - I will no doubt be calling upon you again soon!
Tuesday
The first session was to start looking at a content strategy, with a number of personas to cater for and a lot of content on CABmoney, this will be a task for the zombie garden for now, and will definitely spill out onto a spreadsheet rather than a single slide!
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| Content by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND |
The second session focussed on finding our Minimal Lovable Product (MLP) by breaking down our "Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal" (BHAG) into more manageable chunks. Breaking it down into smaller problems and plotting on a graph was very similar to work done in the discovery phase and I think that's where a few in our cohort (self included) veered more to identifying the solutions than the underlying problems. It also meant the "big reveal" of showing the different quadrants of prioritisation was less of a revelation than it was intended!
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| BHAG by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND |
Wednesday
A bit of a catch-up day, with the personas and persona spectrums finalised (and now fully illustrated) along with the user journeys. Felt better to get a few things ticked off the list and into the final playback slidedeck, but still a lot to do.
Thursday
Last day of the working week (for me), and with full intentions to work more on our Content Strategy, the phone didn't stop ringing (apart from when the email notifications were going off), so for now it stops in the zombie garden until at least next week.
The afternoon session was a recap of the BHAG into MLP exercise to make sure everybody had their problems defined, followed by "fast fives". Again, this was a repeat of something we did in the discovery phase (only there were eight of them, not five!) and for my MLP (How might we improve the tutorials to make it easier for people to refer to and understand) seemed a little bit too narrow to find five solutions for (in five minutes), so some may have strayed into other aspects of the website.
They also didn't lend themselves very well to illustration outside of boxes and lines!
