UX CASE STUDY
PA Hunt & Fish Mobile Apps
CHARM
CASE STUDY HIGHLIGHTS
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ORG & SECTOR: Pennsylvania Interactive, PA State Portal of the NIC Division of Tyler Technologies, Governmental Support for the Commonwealth of PA
MY ROLES: UX Strategy, Research & Design; UI Design & Development; Product Design, Strategy & Leadership; Customer Liaison; and Project Management.
TEAMS: PAI Team of 6 (Fellow Director of Technology, 2 Developers, 2 QA, and I), One Outdoor Product Team of 5 (PO, PM, Dev, BA, QA), PFBC Team of 4 (Commonwealth), PGC Team of 5 (Commonwealth), and Mobile App Stores Liaison (NIC Division).
PAI = Pennsylvania Interactive
OOD = One Outdoor product team
PFBC = Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission
PGC = Pennsylvania Game Commission
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Massive change around staff leaving due to PAI portal closing, affecting staff morale, and affecting resource availability on these 2 projects.
Being Project Manager in addition to 2 other active project roles at any given time.
Two similar-looking apps, but two different framework stacks.
Numerous unplanned obstacles threatened timely project delivery.
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Brought various teams & customers back in line to an achievable project goal vision for committed releases, rather than continuing to spin, change and lose additional time.
Created comprehensive prototype designs and flows, with all transitions, scenarios, patterns, and detailed functional specifications.
Set and managed realistic project plans for both mobile apps.
Refined and managed the requirements that the development teams followed.
Became the reliable point of contact for Commonwealth LOB sponsors, NIC’s OOD Product Owner, and team members.
Engaged and strengthened internal teams to communicate quickly and press on despite any challenges that arose.
Learned Ionic Cordova (Angular) and worked in my Visual Studio branch to expedite the building and polishing of the UI according to my Figma specs.
Heavily assisted with testing (Browserstack).
Provided release highlights and visuals for Commonwealth’s communication to users (including the agencies’ law enforcement and PA citizens).
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Successfully delivered both PFBC and PGC mobile app projects to their scheduled commitments.
Both commissions very happy with progress completed and delivered to the public, prior to key season starts.
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Progression from before release work to after.
Customer Satisfaction!
Team engagement.
Time to recover from unexpected challenges.
Project Management: necessary steps planned? Appropriate timing? Ability to recovery from unexpected obstacles? Clear communication of plans? Consistent cadence of touchpoints? Involvement of the right resources at the right time?
Mobile store app downloads, rating, reviews.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Be true to your word. Where others are true to theirs, find every way to support their growth.
The State of Confusion is not one I’d recommend visiting on your next holiday.
Right before I stepped into this work effort, I was under the impression that previous discussions held outside our internal team had resulted in clear, defined goals that just needed refinement. My general manager had confirmed that the other team had been working with the customers (2 Commonwealth agencies) for the last 4+ months and our part would be to “build what they had decided we would need to build.”
However, after observing dynamics and the few who would speak up during the first session I was invited, it became clear that still nearly everything was in flux. Nothing was yet documented outside the dated and highly conceptual prototypes that my Senior UX Designer had put together about 2 years prior, who’d resigned before this work effort was resumed.
Numerous and seemingly uncaptured questions were raised around designs that no longer seemed to reflect the direction the customers wanted to pursue. The whole effort was confusing, with no signs how much longer this state of confusion would continue. I could hear frustration brewing in the tone of everyone’s voices. Yet, we were supposed to “deliver both projects in 6-8 weeks or as soon as possible.” Deliver what?
It was time for clarity. Time to leave the State of Confusion behind us.
Fully explore the people who will use what you build. Make sure the entire team understands the product’s personas and scenarios.
The quickest way to gain alignment and clarity from a state of confusion is to fully explore and capture enough context and details about the people who will use what you’re building.
In the template below, I work with the team in capturing the Who (first column), and the Goal/thing they’re trying to do (second column). This is a spin on user stories, taking them further to connecting the persona and scenario to the product and then the metrics of success. I stack the personas and scenarios in a loose order of importance and in order of most common to less common. This exercise can help to establish the work that the team takes on within the release, as well as how to build out requirements and supporting documentation.
The third column in the template is an empathy bridge between the human and their experience. As designs and requirements are finalized, I tie in the product’s UI/visual indicators (orange, fourth column) and the actual product features/components involved (gray, fifth column). As the ultimate tie to an improved experience, I list out Benefits to the Customer Experience (blue, sixth column), and lastly any golden insights to future improvements (gold, seventh column).
In its finalized format, the team has a one-page reference of their product’s users and scenarios — serving as a reminder to the product improvements made and who the product benefits.
Project Management 101:
Be realistic with what you can do with your team and the time available.
After a few tactful but honest discussions outside customer sessions, where I asked a lot of questions of each team member, I started to get the full picture of what might be going on, and that we needed to realign our project efforts to have any chance of success.
It’s a dance to bring many different personalities together, give everyone a voice to be heard and contribute in a safe space, shape what needs shaping while keeping in place the boundaries and rules we’ve agreed to follow. Empathy for others — especially in these times of shaping — sustains judgement and paves a path for understanding, even if we don’t fully see it yet.
And thus a shift began. Instead of trying to do both mobile apps at the same time (not possible with the limited resources available), I took tactful oversight of both mobile apps making sure to listen to crucial delivery times that were most important to the agencies and their customers — such as key season start dates.
This worked extremely well, as I was able to put together two project plans that could be handled sequentially, starting with the Fish and Boat mobile app (the easier of the two) which would allow us to get in better cadence and strengthen team dynamics in preparation for the more complex Game Commission mobile app that would come afterwards.
“We want to move towards digital and away from paper, but we have to trust it. We need to be able to verify it’s correct.”
— PA Fish and Boat Commission Business Sponsor
Define an MLP — Minimum Lovable Product release. What would make a noticeable improvement if we couldn’t do everything?
With each agency, we restated the topmost goals with each agency, asking them to confirm project priorities, which they happily did, following the majority of our recommendations. Documentation was officially started, gathered, and centralized, still heavily relying on prototyped designs, flows and notations — but this time accurately reflecting what we could and would build in reality. Signed Change Order agreements I created and maintained locked requirements and project schedules in place.
Overall Goal (for both mobile apps): Enhanced user functionality and access to the user’s purchases directly within their mobile app — publicly available in Mobile App Stores.
Why does it matter? Makes this mobile app more personalized and relevant to all users. First BIG step towards digital licensing being accepted statewide by licensing authorities. Traditionally, licenses have always been printed paper carried with the hunter/angler in nature.
Make sure to properly test all common mobile devices. And there are MANY.
One of the heavy lifts in both projects was the proper testing of all common mobile devices that customers may be using. To do this, we used BrowserStack — a real device simulator that enables live testing of a particular code build.
Depending on the login credentials, the location of the user, and their familiarity with BrowserStack, someone could easily get lost or not be able to find the correct repository to test. So, part of my project documentation was to make sure internal team testers and agency testers had a proper reference available to self-serve.
Allow flexibility in the project plan to apply lessons learned from similar work efforts.
Having the unique over-arching position of Director of Experience Design, I had more authority and oversight into all goings-on with the project efforts. Wearing my Project Management hat, I could predict that numerous unknown insights and lessons learned would come from our PFBC work effort we’d experience; therefore, I built in slight time buffers where I sensed we might experience challenge. Wearing my UX Strategy hat, I did my best in keeping the two prototype sets in sync, as consistent as possible, applying minor changes we experienced in PFBC to PGC as well.
While I couldn’t predict complete unknowns, the flexibility I’d built into the project plan gave me enough wiggle room to save us from project failure.
Communicate as clearly as possible. No excuses.
My motto is to always be clear in communicating what I know, what I need, and what I expect. Even more so when working with others that I haven’t yet met or those whose approval I seek. To ensure our mobile app would pass muster with Google Play and Apple App Store mobile review teams, I created, gathered and organized all artifacts the teams would need. I created demo videos highlighting the various devices and functionality they’d experience.
These artifacts and videos served a two-fold purpose — to also share with the customer agencies for communication to their internal employees and in marketing messages to customer bases.
When challenges arise, remember to breathe before considering your options.
In our second mobile app, PGC (Game Commission), I still underestimated the challenges we’d face. Every single challenge had the potential of derailing the schedule, disrupting all our hard work, and leaving us short of the finish line.
But we prevailed. Here is the list of challenges we overcame:
Additional customer request affecting the app needed to be handled before we could start. Same development resources, same app. No real choice but to handle this first.
Major content changes in all files of existing app needed updated in addition to scheduled work. There would never have been a good time to handle with resources leaving after this release was done. I found a way — working with my lead dev to get necessary mobile app versions on my laptop and then handled the changes myself within my Visual Studio branch — allowing him to focus on scheduled work.
We lost nearly a full sprint (9/10 days) of remediation and retesting due to build failure, where I was at the mercy of my devs to troubleshoot until it was repaired and running.
To bring us back, I added another dev to handle fixing functional flaws prior to release. I invested time in bringing her up to speed with what she needed.
Customer made additional changes (and felt terrible about it), which I handled again.
Timely communication and established trust with my QA lead and 2 Devs made our steps in sync, despite the complexities.
When it came time to prepare all artifacts for mobile app store reviews, my internal liaison advised me he’d be on a medical leave. I brought his backup up to speed, and due to our seamless communication and his desire to help our team, we made it work.
Out of time, I worked late to complete necessary mobile store review artifacts and instruction — the night before the last day of my contract’s finality with PAI.
Next-door Neighbor’s experience in Jefferson Township, Dauphin County, PA, September 2022
The officer asked me, ‘Do you have your fishing license?’
I said, ‘I sure do! It’s right here on my phone.’ So I got out my phone and showed him the app and my license.
He said, ‘Wow! That’s neat! I didn’t know we had that. Now I can ask, ‘Do you have your fishing license or the app?’
Add context to anything that doesn’t make the MVP release.
In this case, I recognized the Fish and Boat Commission mobile app had not been touched in a long time, and therefore was further away from modern standards seen in the PA Game Commission’s mobile app.
While exploring design possibilities, I’d plugged in the newer site colors and fonts, and challenged dated functionality on the opening screen of the app. That opened up additional areas that needed clarified and more fully explored, which were considered outside our MVP release scope and rightly so.
Nonetheless, I documented context to those additional areas for possible future consideration of whomever would be involved in such efforts. These future efforts typically compose a product’s backlog and become part of team grooming sessions.
Support a product’s evolution with a roadmap of possibilities.
It’s always desirable to have a line-up of product improvements and future growth tactics ready to go in a product strategy. I’ve found it’s also helpful to document what you’ve tried that was explored but then decided against. If and when the team is ready to pursue next steps, the prototypes have some context and design thoughts captured — with or without your presence at that time.
In the picture below, notice the two classifications of the features that went beyond our MVP release scope.