Brainstorm & develop a unified mobile experience for school employees.
Frontline Education
Summer 2017
Sketch, InVision, MS Office, design sprints, sticky notes, whiteboards
Project lead, user flows, interviews, prototyping, executive presentation
After
acquiring many smaller education companies, Frontline had 14
overlapping mobile experiences, each with their own branding and
navigation patterns. We set out to create a single platform for mobile
interaction that could address the needs of different personas and
business lines.
We introduced design sprints
to the company and developed four unique concepts for testing and
review. We developed and launched the final product on-time and achieved
a strong positive reception among school district employees, with over
65,000 monthly active users in the first six months. Our team won a
Pillar Award for the successful development and launch of the mobile app
on iOS & Android.
Our mobile solution had to achieve two goals:
We also had to address key technical and business concerns:
We
applied a double diamond / design loop methodology for product
discovery, iterative delivery, and validation. This allowed to us to
brainstorm and test multiple possible solutions before committing costly
engineering and operations resources.
I
hosted four week-long design sprints to rapidly explore different
problem areas before beginning development. For each, I invited 3-5
participants from design, product management, and engineering teams.
I facilitated each sprint through a series of design thinking exercises laid out in the book Design Sprint by Jake Knapp. At the start of each sprint, we defined a specific goal focused on one or more outcomes we wanted to achieve.
We identified personas and drafted any relevant journeys associated with our target outcome(s) on whiteboards.
In
the lean UX spirit of the design sprint, these exercises were
intentionally fast so that we could iterate over them after expert
feedback.
Once we had outlined our initial mental models, we performed brief interviews with real customers and product experts and used their feedback to correct and refine our assumptions from earlier.
Equipped
with a rough understanding of the problem space, each participant
researched existing solutions and sought out inspiration from other
products.
Participants performed brief 3-minute demos of the solutions they identified and how they related to our problem space.
At the mid-point of each sprint, we began sketching rough, three-panel concepts to represent different ways of solving the problem(s) defined.
We then silently voted on each idea before discussing the strengths of each.
We began translating the highest-voted sketch into a testable prototype by first storyboarding the specific flow(s) we wanted to validate.
Once our storyboard was developed, we rapidly created a high-fidelity clickable prototype and tested it with the customers and experts we interviewed on day one.
We repeated this for each idea, each sprint.
After all four sprints were completed, we presented our findings to executive leadership. Out of the four design sprints, they greenlit our proposal for a unified experience with time tracking and leave management as its MVP target area.
I was asked to lead the development team in rapidly bringing our solution to market. I worked with our engineers to establish a Kansan-based development lifecycle with a regular, three-week release cadence.
We released the first version of our mobile app on iOS on time and achieved rapid adoption, with over 68,000 monthly active users and a strong 4-star app store rating. We released our first Android version shortly thereafter and earned Frontline's Team Pillar Award for our achievement.
App Store Rating
Monthly Active Users
Featured Demo
Recipients
"I
witnessed [David] build an enterprise design organization that unified
the user experience across multiple business lines and bring a mobile
solution to market. Both accomplishments helped lead to our acquisition
in 2017."