Digital SEA: Design Strategy
TL;DR
A local entrepreneur had a great concept to solve a complicated problem, but needed help creating structure to bring her vision to life. I created a user experience playbook both an entry point and a user manual for applying UX throughout the creation of her product. Part reference, part roadmap, the playbook will keep the user at the center of the product development, demonstrate the value of UX and display an ideal process for her future team.
Tools: Zoom, Figma, Miro, Google Suite
Deliverables:
Team: Brian Spindler, Anisa Osman, Chad Wahlberg, Mackenzie Leach
Role: UX Strategist / Researcher
Methods: Comparative Analysis, Journey Mapping, Stakeholder Interviews, Experience Vision, Systems Mapping, Stakeholder Mapping, SME Interviews, Strategic Planning
The Problem
On average, students with disabilities performed more than three years below their peers without disabilities. And, despite steady progress in graduation rates amongst these students, nationally only approximately 61 percent of special education students graduate high school.
The outcomes of this research are seen every day by Brittany Cross, a high school teacher and founder of the Digital SEA (SEA, an acronym for Special Education Assistant). She saw an opportunity to help students who struggled to keep up with more advanced coursework and who, due to large class sizes, weren’t able to get the 1-on-1 support they needed from their teachers or in-person special education assistants.
“My students that have disabilities usually have in-person SEA, but they weren’t always skilled in the subject area. Students were struggling, and many weren’t attending class because of it. I would go home and think about what I could do to bridge the learning gap, and that’s when I came up with Digital SEA.” ”
How might we help students with disabilities build their independence and feel confident ?
The Solution
Currently in it’s concept stage, Digital SEA assists students with disabilities like Down Syndrome or Autism with their coursework by offering personalized support based on their specific needs. Digital SEA will make it possible for students with special needs to take “mainstream coursework” without an in-person SEA by providing them individualized support within the coursework itself. This is intended to keep students on track while preventing them from feeling overwhelmed and separated from their peers, enabling them to learn on their own in a supportive environment.
As Brittany seeks seed funding for her first hire, my team was brought on to deep dive into the overall opportunity space for DSEA and help Brittany visualize her transformative product.
The Process
Defining the Opportunity Areas
Based on the initial client meeting and design brief, two focus areas emerged—product strategy and interactive prototyping. As a team, we started the project by mapping out our knowns, unknowns and assumptions, and turning them into questions for our stakeholder meeting with Brittany. Based on that call, I saw that there was opportunity to bolster her position before an upcoming investment pitch. While a rough pitch deck has been built out for potential investors, there are more opportunities to:
Bring her vision to life using storytelling and visualization
Map the stakeholders to understand the complex system
Create the infrastructure for a longer-term research plan that included definition around key UX Design metrics to measure overall effectiveness.
Bringing Her Vision to Life
I wanted to get a better understand of what a successful outcome might look for the primary users, so hosted a co-creation session with Brittany to design an Experience Vision. We chose to focus on the student’s journey and visualized how Digital SEA could help build their independence and confidence with each interaction. Specifically designed to tell a succinct story, this vision will provide a North Star for future DSEA employees.
Mapping the Stakeholders
To understand the stakeholders, I pulled insights from Brittany’s early discovery work as well as secondary research of my own. Starting with a whiteboard and Post-it Notes, I started to visualize a system that articulated the relationship between stakeholders, starting with the student at the center.
I then mapped out the stakeholders who are directly involved in designing and producing the product those that are impacted and should be consulted and informed as the team progresses, and those that will have significant influence over the success of the product. Seeing the full map of how individual players influence and impact the overall Digital SEA platform will assist Brittany in managing this complex and politically-charged landscape as future design and business decisions are made.
Building Out the Future Roadmap
To help her future team make her vision a reality, I researched organizational approaches to UX Strategy based on NN/g’s Six Levels of UX Maturity. I wanted to understand what a user-centered strategy might look like for local start-ups and what were the major pain points for their employees. I met with four designers with varying levels of seniority to discuss their experiences and learned:
Ambiguity and lack of clear communication makes things difficult. Even at a small organization, communication can be lacking due to a lack of common design language.
“[Working here is] very ambiguous. I don’t know what they want. Even though we talk on a bi-weekly basis, I’m constantly trying to figure out what the problem is.” - Current start-up UX Designer
Things go fast, so having a general design and documentation structure helps with handoffs. Methods used at more established organizations are hard to implement in start-ups due to the fast pace of product development. Creating a system after-the-fact is challenging simply due to lack of time.
“I didn’t do research decks there… There was no documentation [of my research], because it went so quick. When I left, so did all the knowledge of my research.”- UX Researcher who left a start-up
Stakeholders who have been around for a while have a hard time seeing their own assumptions. In each interview, I heard varying degrees of frustration because business and design decisions were based off of assumptions and not data, causing re-work and significant tech debt.
“People in my company think they have a solid understanding of their user base.. And that might be true, but they haven’t done research in two years. So I’m trying to figure out where the inconsistencies are between their assumptions and reality.” - Current start-up UX Designer
With this in mind, I created a playbook based off of the double diamond framework that defines a user-centered approach for future work. Knowing that resources may be scarce in the early phases of Digital SEA, I wanted to create an approach that her future team could use to efficiently move through the design process while still keeping the primary users at the center of each decision. I created a framework and phased approach for future design sprints that articulated the goals, methods, and outcomes specific to Digital SEA’s product. Utilizing this framework will allow Brittany's future team to embrace complexity while aligning and prioritizing future work.
The 1,000 Foot View
Finally, I wanted to make sure that Brittany would have a quick snapshot of the progress that her design team was making even as the organization grew to scale, so I created a one-page document for each design phase that articulates the questions that need to be answered and the metrics to follow to ensure that the product is on track for its initial launch.
The Close Up View
I broke down each method so she would have a high-level view of possible deliverables and the impact they would have on the product as a whole. Overall, twenty-two design method overviews were created broken down by each phase, giving Brittany and her future team a general description, impact statement, and what success might look like specific to Digital SEA.
The Next Steps
Throughout this project, I was inspired by how my teammates approached their research and design work through the lens of accessibility. Moving forward, I would want to capture their learnings and meet with other experience in the field to understand what considerations should be made when conducting primary research with younger folks with Down syndrome. I’d then use that research to create design principles for Brittany’s future hires, ensuring that research is conducted in the most accessible way so that student participants leave feeling confident and successful.
While this project focused specifically on the student’s needs, there is additional opportunity to better understand what successful outcomes look like for the parents, teachers, and in-person special education assistants. I’d utilize primary research to build out a journey map and experience vision to keep her future team grounded in empathy and user needs, ensuring the needs of all the primary users are considered in each step of the process.