Project Management Application

The US Forest Service (a governmental agency that focuses on maintaining national forests) wanted a new application to combine the functionality of multiple existing applications into one unified flow for project management. The intention with this new application was to simplify the ability to locate project information, manage new and existing projects, and have all approvals and comments in one place for every project.

I joined the project a few months after it started, so discovery work had mostly been completed. I started from interview transcripts and the project requirements documentation to determine all the information needed and created a flow to discuss with the project owner and SMEs.

Because this application was for internal use by employees who were already very familiar with the tasks they needed to do, there was no need to break down the project entry using a one question per page approach. This was a complex application with multiple steps and collaboration by different people. We needed to design it so the steps made sense and asked all relevant questions together so the flow was cohesive and intuitive.

This flow was shared with the product owner and SMEs to confirm that the information grouped together for each section made sense. They made a few minor changes to where questions showed up in the flow, but once it was approved, we moved on to creating lo-fi wireframes of each page.

The low-fi pages were shared as a prototype with multiple SMEs as well as the product owner. There was a lot of feedback, mostly around organizing the pages into steps that made sense for the various roles accessing the application. For example, there were people who would need to read and edit the purpose and need statement, but not the rest of the project, so it made sense to move that question into its own step so it was easier to find and we could include comments and editing capabilities.

We incorporated feedback into the designs and created a testing prototype which we tested with multiple project managers and specialists who would need to use the application. We synthesized and reported out our findings, then discussed recommendations with the product owner.

We created final designs that incorporated the feedback we received from the product owner and usability testing and handed these off to engineering. We also created basic components as a simple design system so the engineers could reuse elements on multiple pages.

Once the pages were built and in a staging environment, we were able to test one more time with a new group of specialists and project planners. There were some bugs found that needed to be fixed, but testing was positive overall. Any design issues raised were written up and planned as future improvements.

We released the beta version of the application to overwhelmingly positive response and continued iterating to incorporate more advanced features.

• Four different product owners over the course of the project (up to the beta release), which slowed progress
• Engineering work done concurrently with design work, resulting in duplicative work and some compromises to the design
• Creating a new design system instead of using the US Web Design System (USWDS) with its already-built components and structure for this application