Accelerating Project Management for Devs

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My role

Contextual Inquiry
Data Synthesis
Concept Testing
Interactive Prototyping with InVision

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The Challenge

Trello.com is an easy, flexible and visual way to manage projects or organize anything. The primary organizing structure is a Trello board, which consists of lists filled with cards that teams can use to collaborate and track their work. The challenge was to evaluate how software development teams use project management tools to manage their work and recommend how to improve Trello for developers.

 
Ideating features and solutions with good old pen and paper

Ideating features and solutions with good old pen and paper

The Approach

So many questions needed to be answered to understand the complex job duties of a software developer. What do their teams look like? How do they share updates with their team? What is their biggest pain point?

Contextual inquiry observations were conducted with a variety of developers across experience levels and industries to answer these questions and identify how tools can accelerate or slow down their work.

After observation, the scope was shifted to focus on small teams of new developers who have short-term sprint projects.

From there, lo-fi concept sketches were created and tested to see if they truly fit the priority needs of the junior developer before expanding the concept into a hi-fi prototype in InVision.

 
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Key Findings

New developers are overwhelmed. They need to manage their work flow but don’t have the time or capacity to figure out complicated software. The solution needs to reduce cognitive workload.

 

 
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Recommendations

The prototype is an onboarding tool for first time users. Through this simple and valuable introduction, developers new to Trello can accelerate their understanding of its benefits and reduce the learning curve so they can jump right back into work.

The new onboarding tool features a short questionnaire to personalize the prioritized content and quickly give developers the structure they desire. Some of the featured content includes recommended power-ups and developer work flow templates.

Lindsay Trosvig