Aug 28, 2018
Preparing For flight !!!!!!!
Preparing For flight !!!!!!!
Preparing For flight !!!!!!!
BadgeKit Status Update: Ducks Flying! Well, not quite yet...
This past week, we marked the completion of Milestone 2, affectionately coined, “Preparing for Flight" on our BadgeKit product development roadmap. The milestone preceding “Preparing for Flight” was, “Ducks in a row”. The goals we wanted to reach in Ducks in a Row are very much deducible by its name. We wanted to ensure we had everything teed up for us to move efficiently and effectively throughout the development of BadgeKit. We essentially wanted to get all our ducks in a row prior to the holidays so we could hit the ground running once we came back in the new year and pick up where we left off. As a refresher, our goals for Ducks in a Row included the following:
Product definition finalized
Software architecture conceptualized and defined
Wireframes for MVP designed
Plan for implementation drafted
** check out the amazing badges Jess designed for the team, each time we reach a milestone. This one is for Ducks in a Row.
Our work was happening in parallel between the design team, led by Jess Klein and our development team, lead by Chris McAvoy, of course with a lot of cross pollination. While the design team sketched out the user experience, the development team deep-dived into the software backbone originating from the Chicago Summer of Learning experience, namely Open Badger, Aestemia, BadgeStudio and the CSOL site. Coming back from break, we found ourselves refreshed, recharged and ready to go. And we dived into what we set out to accomplish in the next milestone, “Preparing for Flight”, for which a big driver was user testing. In previous product development roadmaps, we’ve meant to incorporate user testing early and frequently but a lot of times when corners needed to be cut and project timelines re-negotiated, user testing would often be the first thing to get compromised. But with a dedicated user researcher on the team, shout out to Emily Goligoski, we have a strong, prevailing voice, advocating for the need to layer in user testing early on in the product development cycle, not to mention, our Creative Lead, Jess Klein, strongly supporting this vision. As such, right out of the gate, the goal of milestone 2 was to get to a prototype that was testable. The following comprised the overarching goals of the Preparing for Flight milestone:
Working app: mockups / stubbed functionality for anything that isn’t ready
User testing sessions identified
User tests planned
Milestone badges, aka meta badges, aka level-up badges, experience within BadgeKit designed
Visual language study initiated
Federated city backpack requirements explored
Branding work initiated
We reached this milestone this week as initially planned. What that means is that today, we have something that looks a lot like the UX sketches designed by Matthew Willse, our lead UX designer, on a staging site that provides a solid, albeit work in progress, BadgeKit experience. There are of course a lot of things missing here. There is essentially no UI direction or touch, many pages are “stubbed out” meaning there may be links to pages but those pages are not fully functioning yet and the front end is not entirely wired up with the backend powering many of the intended experiences. But there is still enough there to get out to users who can weigh in on the initial proof of concept and provide us with a gut check on our direction.
We also got a badge for completing this milestone, courtesy of Jess Klein. :)
Emily has drafted the script for user testing and circulated it amongst our team members and the inner circle within the concentric circle of networked partners. The idea is, we want to test it, but we don’t want to freak people out who are not familiar with testing a product at a very elementary stage and are distracted by the lack of polish or UI. So we’re super stoked to have reached milestone 2, with user testing meeting us at the check point. Of course, we’re already fully in tackle mode for Milestone 3, which we’re calling Take Off. We welcome you to keep track of its progress here: https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges-badgekit/issues?milestone=6&state=open We’ll keep chugging along in the mean time!