See our prototype for LWCS' Service Searcher here
We came into LWC excited to help an amazing charity who are making a huge difference to women's lives. What we weren't prepared for coming in was the complexity of the challenges facing LWC. We heard stories of:
- the complex emotions of stigma and fear of judgement attached to seeking help with services
- Women feeling they are wasting people's time by seeking help with LWC
- Differing experiences for users based on who answers the phone
- The need to make sure that users are getting the services that are right for them
- How to use the LWC peer support group to its fullest extent?
- The lack of data to help guide users journeys through the cente and direct LWCs services.
We were welcomed and well introduced to the problems at hand to by our Product Owner Mandy, who gave us our problem statement to think on:
Fiona wants a way to feel confident to reach out for help so that she can get the right support at the right time.
After discussing the problem statement and focusing on four primary areas:
- Triage
- Peer Support
- Data management
- Data Analytics
After exploring these problems through storyboarding they all converged on the problem of helping women to discover the services on offer in a safe and relatable way.
LWC : Service Search
An app to help women access the right services so they can feel more in control of their lives
The aims of the solution
- To give women a safe way to see what services LWC offer
- To reassure women that they are not alone through real stories of women LWC have helped in the past
- To create a feeling of trust between the women and LWC
- To guide women to contact LWC in the way that is right for them
- To make the app sensitive, warm, and easy to use for what can be an emotional stage in our users' lives
We conveyed these in a few user stories:
- As a user I want to be able to access the correct service
- As a user I want to be able to find out information around this service
- As a user I want to know what’s available through LWC
- As a user I want to feel like i’m not on my own, feel valued & worth while
- As a user I want to have a choice of help and how to book
- As a user I want to feel listened to
Prototype
We then created static designs using an online tool called Figma. This allowed us to map the rough user journey and provide us with a chance to have rapid feedback on the designs prior to building the product with code.
Below are the designs we created (note: the final designs have changed since these)
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The user is greeted by a screen that provides them with 2 options - either to explore the app to get ideas through "Need Advide" or to jump straight to the services through "Know what you need"
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If the user has selected the "Need Advice" button, they will be guided to a page that shows them real stories of women of have been through the services. This is to allow them to see if they can relate to the stories to understand what services might suit their needs.
- If they choose to "Find out more" the user will be taken to a page that provides them with more detail about the users story and exactly what services they used
- If at the start the user selected "Know what you need" they are taken immediately to the full list of services which contain additional details within the drop down buttons.
- once the user has decided what service they feel may be of help, or feel like they need further guidance they are shown 3 ways of getting in touch with LWC.
- If the user requests LWC to contact them directly then they need to fill out a short form so that LWC have enough details to get back to them
- After filling in their details the journey ends with a simple thank you screen and information about when they will hear from LWC
User testing allows you to get feedback from your primary users to check that the product being built fits their needs. This is very important to build a successful product.
The three key points for testing are:
- Have a script which has tasks for them to complete. here is an example of a script which you can use and modify
- Ask for people to give you a commentary of what they are doing, but don't respond to them
- Document their response
Additional recommendations for your user testing:
- Ask user to complete the flow and explain what they are thinking throughout the process
- Make lots of notes. It is good to have someone guiding the user and someone note taking so nothing is missed!
- Try and gather if the user understands the purpose of the app and if the interactions are intuitive
- Try to understand further if the types, quantity and copy of the questions is appropriate for the audience.
- Does the user feel like this can help make a difference?
- Users may comment on aesthetics but unless the same comments are brought up several times these comments are usually not important. The focus should be on the users interactions and understanding of the product.
Here are some useful resources to look at when completing your user testing sessions:
If this design is move forward for a build sprint it is important to concentrate on key features that both solves the initital problem and implements feedback from user testing.
Our current recommendations for an initial sprint would be:
- Implement feedback from user testing
- To make the product useable on larger screen sizes
- Improve accessibility - Product is currently not useable for people with hearing or visual impairments
- Back end!
- Introduce a new route for people who want to sign up as a peer support worker/ volunteer
This would be formally decided following the user testing and during a sprint planning meeting 👍
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