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Timeline of design activities

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Christine Bath edited this page Sep 10, 2021 · 7 revisions

Timeline of design activities

You can access our Figma design files and notes in Figma (read only). With a Figma account, you can duplicate it to create an editable file.

Here’s an overview of work that’s been done so far. You may also be interested in reviewing known design debt, which documents areas that need further exploration.

December 2020: User roles and needs statements

As part of our initial Path Analysis, we talked to Program Managers, Cooperators, Grants Management Specialists and Budget Analysts to understand how they currently work, their goals, needs, and pain points.

Artifacts

Did we come back to this?

Yes! This document informed our Journey Map, product roadmap, and draft RFQ. We continued to learn about needs and pain points in all the worm that followed, and move to a more comprehensive log of user needs 🔒 here.

January 2021: Journey Map

In January we drew on data from the interviews and observations that we conducted in December to create a graphical representation of the four key user groups’ experience throughout the lifecycle of a grant or agreement.

Artifacts

Did we validate this?

Yes! We walked through it with several SMEs and it was been refined based on their feedback.

February 2021: Design workshop

After our initial discovery research, we wanted to validate what we had heard and consider how the team could begin focusing their prototyping efforts. We hosted a design workshop with 11+ stakeholders, program managers, budget approvers and grants management specialists.

Goals of this work

  • Understanding the existing process: validating our shared picture of the existing, end-to-end process from users' perspectives
  • Establishing a shared understanding of priority pain points: Surfacing the existing understanding of what people need, where they struggle, how we know it, and what to tackle first
  • Setting vision: Gathering the group’s input on what problems the product should attempt to solve, value it should attempt to create
  • Co-designing solutions to priority pain points and how we'll achieve the vision

Artifacts

Did we come back to this?

  • Yes, it fed into our personalized dashboard work

March 2021: Personalized dashboards

This work came out of findings from a design workshop with program managers, budget approvers, grants management specialists, and G&A stakeholders in February. See the pain points and synthesis from

Goals of this work

  • Explore what a personalized dashboard could look like for people who use NRM G&A
  • Explore how items could be organized or routed within the system.
  • Learn more about what different status mean
  • Learn more about what kinds of information and actions people who use NRM G&A need when viewing an agreement to do their jobs.
  • Start talking as a team about how data is organized within the current system, and what is flexible (and what is not). There are a lot of comments on this page that show what we were learning and trying to figure out.

Artifacts

Did we test this?

Did we come back to this?

  • Yes, see Proposal creation.

April - May 2021: Proposal creation

During this time we formed ideas of the short and long term roadmap for G&A. We wanted to derisk creating new records in the system with our tech stack, and also refine user stories around electronic agreement creation.

Goals of this work

  • Identify what minimum data is needed to create a proposal in the current system.
  • Explore how people who do G&A work identify “their” agreements and agreements their interested in
  • Explore how people who do G&A work determine who else is working on that agreement
  • Iterate on personalized dashboards and how people who use G&A find and track “their” work.

Artifacts

Did we test this?

Did we come back to this?

  • Sort of. We revised portions of this flow when we looked at funding in proposal creation.
  • Note: There’s a lot here that needs to be revisited. We’ve continued to learn about who has the information to answer some of these questions, and have considered reordering the ways information is collected to create a more predictable, “enter once” process.

June-Aug.: 2021 G&A Workflow and storyboard

After additional stakeholder conversations, we started considering what a G&A workflow could look like in the future. We mapped out a to-be workflow, using outgoing fund participating agreements as a test case, and iterated on it in several walkthroughs with the PO and SMEs. Then we created a storyboard to explain how the experience of going through the proposed workflow might look and feel, including some of the new features on the roadmap. We also mapped out the flow of information that would be required to enable the to-be workflow.

Goals of this work

  • To visualize the impact of new features and proposed workflow changes on the end to end users experience
  • To better understand the information flow required to achieve the proposed workflow and it’s technical feasibility

Artifacts

Did we test this?

July 2021: Funding in proposal creation

One area of the proposed to-be workflow we wanted to investigate further was how funding information is provided and verified, since this step is seen as a blocker to getting an agreement number.

In this design iteration, we updated a section of the proposal creation mockups to explore if collecting a minimal amount of funding information would give GMSs the information they need to verify agreement type and budget approvers the context they need to submit funds reservations requests.

Goals of this work

  • Document our current hypotheses around what funding information program managers could provide in the future.
  • Explore how we can make language about funding more consistent across applications (moving away from “commitments” to “funding”).

Artifacts

Clickable prototype of funding section of proposal creation form

Did we test this?

  • Not really. We showed a mockup of a funding page when testing the workflow, but did not dig too deep into it.
  • More validation is needed to answer these questions:
    • Do PMs have this information easily available?
    • Does this give GMSs the information they need to check if the agreement spec and the funding are aligned or need adjusting?
    • Does this give budget approvers the context they need to submit a funds reservation request?
    • Who would provide additional funding information (like Budget Object Code)?

Did we come back to this?

  • Not yet

August 2021: Reviewing proposals

While we continue learning about proposal creation, we also want to start thinking about what happens after a proposal is created. What does a draft agreement look like? What do grants management specialists need to do to review a proposal and move it to the next stage?

This was a lightweight exploration of what proposal review could look like, and an opportunity for us to surface questions.

Goals of this work

  • Document how an agreement IA could be structured
  • Explore how proposal reviewers could be directed to their next action (in this scenario, guiding a GMS to provide an agreement number and type, or send back for adjustment).
  • Consider how to display agreement status and adjustments.
  • Explore document versioning and how to track what version a person is working on.

Artifacts

Did we test this?

  • No.
  • There are a lot of questions that came out of this work. Which include....
    • What editing permissions should exist, if any? Are there fields that should only be edited by certain roles?
    • How do we establish predictable information architecture patterns as an agreement moves through approvals? When do we

Did we come back to this?

  • Not yet

NRM-Grants-Agreements Path Analysis

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