Project ExFil- A retrospective on Internal Stakeholder buy in.

Introduction

Up until this project, all of the assignments have had an overlying context of a company, some specific deliverables or assessment to be completed. But in this, my fourth installment of writing UX design retrospectives, I review my process of starting with a blank slate and taking it all the way through delivery of a concept product to the Stakeholders who would either green-light or flag as needs improvement.

Discovering The Problems

About this Project

For this project, our group was to choose what “problem space” we wanted to delve into versus being handed a predetermined problem, problem space or project. By this I mean that we were to come up with a Project Proposal that was to be approved or denied.

My team went back and forth for about 20 minutes trying to find what space would have a problem we wanted to tackle. Food sector, Fin-tech, homelessness, poverty, addiction, fitness, Veterans or nature exploration? We ended up on the Veterans Sector. We knew there was a more than enough problem for us to work on, but which angle to come at it from? Upon submission of our Project Proposal, we were giving approval to begin researching the who, what, when, where and why behind the challenges in the Veterans sector.

Tasks & Goals

We were tasked with the following: create a product which would be relatable, useful and beneficial to all Veterans.

With a goal of: produce a versatile and straightforward product for our Veteran users.

User Interviews

To conduct our research we went directly to preparing to interview Veterans. We started by drafting a user Interview Discussion Guide to guide the interviews to help us understand more about the Veteran experience.

After 15 interviews with Veterans from all branches of the Military, we began to see some common threads of what Veterans face in their transition into civilian life.

Defining Our Problem To Be Solved

Affinity Mapping, Insights & I Statements

Our interviews were converted into an Affinity Mapping session from which we deduced insights and I statements that summarized all of the data in an understandable and actionable way.

Insights and I statements pertaining to negative post military experiences and the Transition to civilian life

Approaches to mental and emotional wellbeing insights and I statements

Insights and I statements about how Veterans found out about resources

Primary Persona

To embody the data we compiled, we created a Primary Persona, Matt Woods, to give build an empathetic connection and bring together the I statements and Insights.

Our Primary Persona embodies the data from the interviews, and the I statements.

Journey Map

To visualize the emotional journey that a Veteran would have from Active Service Member to acclimated Veteran Civilian we created a Journey Map.

The curvy line shows Matts emotional journey from Active Service member to civilian Veteran with positive emotions above the dotted line and negative emotions below the line. Notice that Matts emotions only just begin to become positive again at the end of his transition.

Problem Statement

Matt was the embodiment of our Interviewed Veterans and the I statements and insights gave us a clear understanding of what the problem was that we were going to address.

Matt is unsure of how to begin transitioning into civilian life. The lack of training in how to access his entitled benefits and the inability to understand what information is actually relevant discourages him from attempting.

How might we help guide Matt through the process of transitioning to civilian life?

Developing the right solution

Design Studio & Lo Fi Sketches

Our session of Design Studio and resulting Lo Fi Sketches focused more on a Mentoring and personalized recommendations to address the Veteran to Veteran connection and a way to help Veterans determine what is important to them in a personalized and customizable way versus the generic and overwhelming VA way.

It was around this time that the team began to think about what to cal our project. We wanted tp choose a name with some significance for Veterans but that would communicate our intention. With that we came to rest upon the concept of Exfiltration or in civilian terms: The process of removing personnel when it is considered imperative that they be immediately relocated out of a hostile environment and taken to an area either occupied or controlled by friendly personnel. This concept matched our intentions perfectly so we shortened it to Project ExFil.

Mid Fidelity Wireframes & Prototype

The culmination of our sketches resulted in our Mid Fi Prototype which brought together mentorship, tools such as transition planner, progress tracker, personal budgeting planner and a personalized recommendation survey. We kept the layout elements from the Lo Fi such as the strong hero banner image supported by featured content with in the body of the

The “above the fold” on the Mid Fi prototype

Pictured above is the Mentor Bio Page and scheduling feature.

Fortunately the prototype was not page heavy, and the Mid Fi mock up was ready to test quickly in order to get at the heart of what iterations would be necessary

The blue lines show the connections from each clickable page elements to each corresponding webpage.

Usability Testing & Insights

The Usability test revealed that our information architecture was causing some confusion. The Find A Mentor CTA button was over looked by some users and most users expressed that they wanted some way to sort the available mentors by branch, location or specialty.

Our First test task revealed that users wanted the ability to filter the mentors.

In our second usability task users expressed that they would have expected the scheduling feature to be higher up on the webpage as well as to provide more context about the Mentorship program. Users also mentioned that they would have expected an option for email and an option for push notifications, versus only the email reminder as we had included.

Our second task test showed that users needed more context as to the benefits of our products.

Delivering the right Solution

Hi Fi Wireframes and Prototype

We took the data and feedback from the first round of usability testing and put them together into a Hi Fi Mockup. In order to craft a meaningful color palette, we used color theory to lead us to a palette based on a self described Mentor Blue paired with a lighter and softer looking Lighthearted Blue. The blue colors would evoke trust and support. To offset the blue we chose Empathetic Orange to communicate warmth and understanding. For our Typeface we chose the professional and esteemed classic Montserrat for heading and titles in Bold 36px or 24px font. For the body we chose Open Sans regular in18px font for a softer and more caring tone.

Here our color palette is balanced against our typographical choices to see the subtleties in action

With our layout, colors, typography and features now dialed in, we moved our focus to the bigger picture of the site map. This sitemap included the changes that we found to be necessary from the first round of usability testing, specifically the modified primary navigation tabs which were reduced to keep the focus of the website on the mentoring and tools, and less on the retailer discounts. Side note: we continued to include the retailer discounts in the body of the webpage because it was the only feature that every test participant said that they wanted to click on.

This Site Map shows the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary navigation elements.

Using our site map, this would be the task flow Matt would take to find a suitable mentor and book the introductory mentorship session.

This task flow details the users steps from homepage through finding and scheduling an introductory mentor session.

With the site and tasks mapped, we now brought it all together into a working prototype in Figma.

This ‘above the fold’ portion of the homepage has a clean and professional feel with understandable language detailing what Project ExFil is and our value proposition to Veterans.

On this image of bottom half of the homepage, we included strong statistics and clear language about the benefits of joining Project ExFil with secondary links to our tools and mentors.

On the Find a Mentor page, we put the focus on our featured mentors and allowed used to begin understanding each mentors branch served, location, and specialty. We also included the requested filtering feature, which eliminated the need to click into each mentors Bio page to find information that may steer the choice to work with the mentor or not.

Users were able to understand more about the mentor, as well as filter the available mentors.

Usability Testing and Insights

This Hi Fi Prototype was then tested on 5 typical users with the same tasks of finding and scheduling a meeting with a mentor. In this second round of testing we found that Users had a much easier time navigating to the mentors, but that there was still confusion about where to click, to view the mentors Bio page. Specifically, users clicked the picture or text above the “View Profile” CTA button.

While Users were successful, some wanted more context and understanding about the story of Project ExFil.

In task two, there was also some confusion about the wording of the CTA button used to bring the scheduling feature into the webpage. Users did not always associate the “Meet with Me” button as the button to click in order to begin scheduling a session with the mentor.

The “Meet with Me” button was confusing to some users, leading us to conclude that more descriptive language such as “Schedule a Meeting” would be a better choice.

Take aways and Next Steps

The final round of usability testing revealed some next steps that would be the best value for effort. Included with these usability test result recommendations are the next steps required to take this Hi Fi to the next level of development

• Design a mobile platform
• Create member platform dashboard
• Construct self-assessments to personalize the tool and information recommendations
• Assemble a Progress Tracker to account for each Veterans priorities and goals
• Complete the design for remaining webpages including the Resources, News, and About us pages
• Test & Iterate the Information Architecture to ensure navigation elements and wording
• Determine the Mentor Verification process to ensure the quality of Mentors

Conclusion

There is a definite need amongst Veterans for support during the transition into civilian life. For many Veterans, the process of finding their path in civilian life is only made better by a one on one connection to somebody who has walked that path before. Which is why I think I found this project to be so rewarding.

It is incredibly rewarding to find that the culmination of our research concluded with a product that had a valuable offer for every Veteran that was willing share about their experiences on the outset of our research.