User Experience Kick-off 2019-07-03 Meeting notes

Molly Stewart  asked everyone to give a quick intro into their experiences and projects that they are working to get to know the members better.

• Molly Stewart member of the INSITE team in Indiana, working to provide smaller district reporting and visualization options managed by the state in collaboration with the University of Indiana. Spent a good amount of time and resources speaking with teachers to better understand what their needs are. Conducted 100+ interviews that can provide insights, she submitted a session for the summit to present the findings from these interviews.
• Jeremy Thigpen (Unlicensed) Working on a statewide implementation for multiple districts in Wyoming (Wy-Ed-Fi). Does not have access to teachers so must rely on district leadership to identify needs and guide implementation requirements.
• Philipp Pitchford Boston Public Schools district with 125 schools, tech team of 8-10 so challenging to reach out to teachers, identify their needs and find a tool that would provide a solution. District has tried some tools but still evaluating and looking for a better fit. Some challenges, even within a district schools measure and report in very different ways and teachers are also not always part of the conversation. They mostly interact with teacher leads and leadership roles to represent the needs of the teachers in the classroom. Strategic focus is moving more towards Early Warning Indicator Systems, but initial projects have highlighted that for what they are looking for historical records are needed.

•  The GAT will want to make sure we do take the input of teachers in the development of the use cases. It is known that projects usually do not have access to the ultimate end user and the desire is for this group to reach out and bridge that gap.
• Molly Stewart would like to use the group and some of our meeting time to dig into the interviews her team conducted with the hope of identifying patters or insights that might be useful.
• Itzel Torres proposed the experience canvas template as a way to capture initial thoughts, problem statements, stakeholders and personas to make sure we are not leaving anyone behind. 
• We don't want purely technical decisions driving the design as we know this results in low usability.

Itzel Torres

• Propose we give the experience canvas a try, you can see more Using the Experience Canvas to define your next feature. A modified version of the business model canvas that helps guide a bit the conversation and helps unlock early insights and develop a common language for what we want to achieve.
• For this week we will focus on:
  • Problem: Box #2, spend no more than 10 minutes listing the challenges you see in the discipline space. Don't edit/filter yourself, this first pass is a brain dump that we will work through and edit together.
  • Customer Personas: Box #3,  no more than 10 minutes listing who has this problem, what motivates them, what do they want to accomplish. Do not try to match one to one with the problems you listed, this is a free flow thinking exercise. Write anyone that comes to mind and try to describe as much as you can.
  • Stakeholders: Box #4, 10 min who can support the effort, who pays (usually not the end user for Education), who also has requirements?

Take 30 min to do a brain dump on these boxes with the template Experience-Canvas-Blueprint.docx