SCRUM, Storytelling and Location Based Services
It was a real pleasure to hear that the city development project Vardø Restored from Varanger Museum had been nominated to the North Norwegian Architecture Prize for 2014. It means that very hard day to day work for years have been noticed and appreciated. In the latest issue of Arkitektur N ( The Norwegian Review of Architecture) the architect Ingrid Vedeler Brekkhus writes about the methods they as architects developed when working to restore old buildings and that they define a "people first" strategy as the foundation of the success Vardø Restored has enjoyed.
The nomination and Brekkhus´ article, made me also reflect on the process and the background for the website of Vardø Restored where I had the role as Digital Project Manager and how it all came to life. As so many products, some of the concepts behind the site was actually based partly on an unfulfilled user need.
My Story
Before I even met the team behind Vardø Restored, I had for a long time been missing an app that could be used to easily give me more information about my immediate surroundings - and then mostly about older buildings I would pass in my own city. I am always so curious about the story behind buildings that seem to contain some history; "What was this building used for?", "Who were the people in there?", "What is it used for today ... ?" are questions I ask myself more often than I find information platters when I go for walks in city areas. Since data and APIs are getting more and more open I have thought that some type of history app with location based services based on open government data shown on a map interface, must be possible to develop for such a user need.
When I did my Scrum Product Owner Certification in the Podojo, Berlin we were instructed to work on a product idea the last day to apply techniques from SCRUM and Design Thinking, and I thought my needs for a history app would be the perfect product idea to work on.
Even though the session with practical product development on our own idea, only lasted a few hours, thanks to efficient techniques and tools, I quickly got the insight that my idea was way too self centered for a good product and it quickly gave me inspiration what direction to try out. Below I will talk a bit about what product changes I got inspired to do and also what I learned about the process.
The more general user story - or towards the MVP if you like
During product development we started out with presenting a product idea and then did some time-boxed iterations through the creation of personas, a vision, user stories, defining the MVP, a prototype and also user testing. All the products that were created during the phases were on display for others, which made it possible to get constant user feed back. As mentioned I got some very important product insights and I will briefly describe them below:
Relevance. My product seemed relevant for a lot less people than I had thought. I had framed the app as a history app, and it got clear that what a lot of people usually associate with "history" is not something most people are as interested in as me and I tend to easily forget this (at least the people at the course - and for the sake of simplicity I generalize) . This meant that for the product to be relevant for more people than those who label themselves as very interested in history, I had to frame it as something else or more than a "History app". Important insight!
Additional features. Users came with input such as "will it be social?", "can my grandmother submit stories about how it was like to attend school in the building?" etc. This was not something I had thought about at all, and I thought it would be interesting features to explore further in the development.
Different user groups and levels of information. Since I during the workshop understood that the product should be relevant for people who did not label themselves as very interested in history - as well as for those who did, I thought the product should easily be able to offer both the more fun easy pieces on history, and also have the longer more academic-styled resources easily available. This would require the product to be designed for different user groups. Some users also asked if the app was for a touristic purpose. I had originally not seen it as a tourist guide, but I opened up for the opportunity and started to think of it as an alternative tourist guide, or for the tourist off the track who wants to experience a place like the locals do. This also made me add a tourist - persona.
As mentioned, I also learned some things about the process; even though I had worked with personas and a lot with user involvement and testing before, I got some important insights:
Quickly made personas are a lot better than no personas. In order to understand the different user groups I thought to design for, and to not forget about their needs, I made three quick personas; one being the academic, one being the young explorer who is fond of his neighbor hood and the third being the tourist who wants to go off the track (the 2 last ones after user input). Ideally one spends a long time on constructing these personas, like my favorite resource for persona creation recommends, but this experience taught me, that having these simplified versions that each had been made in around 15 minutes, were indeed very helpful and helped remind me about the different needs of different users. So in there future, I would say that there is no such argument as having no time to create personas.
Understanding the fear of early user involvement. l am always the advocate, not only for user involvement, but also for very early user involvement, but this time I was the one to get feelings like "but this is not ready yet so it can not be tested" and "they are going to misunderstand" when I was forced to expose my ideas to users on an early stage. But, as the rational me always argue; the whole point is to expose something to users before it is ready, so that changes will not be so hard. What I learned from this was not only understanding, but also feeling what it was like to be the one close to a product idea and feel that you have it judged too early. This inspired me to get better at explaining to the sceptics what user testing is for, how it will be conducted and how the results will be used - and to be a bit more considerate about the feelings involved when user testing is mentioned.
Arctic stories and networking guarantee
A couple of months after my SCRUM course, I was working one week in the Co-Working space Husegården in Vardø for a Berlin Start Up. Vardø is located in the Arctic of Norway, as far North-East as one can possibly get in Europe and Husegården is the most charming Co-Working-space I have ever seen.
One of the first days I was sitting at my space, I all of the sudden heard someone asking very friendly, but directly “Who are you?”. I guess I had come to not only the most charming co-working space, but also a space with networking guarantee. The person asking turned out to be the project manager of the to me unknown city development project Vardø Restored. I almost could not believe my own ears when he later in the conversation briefly said ”so we kind of want a website … that shows older restored buildings in the city … possibly on a map navigation … with information about them … we want to tell the stories - about the people and the buildings … about people first strategy ... a storytelling website”. Of course, this was not a location based service, but the rest was so close to the ideas that I had worked on, and I was completely sold! In addition, they base their work on a people - first strategy when doing restoration and city development and are some of the first and very few in Norway to do so. This resembles what I know as "user centered design" which made me even more interested.
We had a longer meeting at a more fitting moment, and later decided to work together to produce the site. I got to be the digital project manager and recruited graphic designer and web developer in Berlin where I am based. I could reuse many of the ideas and insights from the Podojo, such as making it relevant for a broad target group, having different levels of information, quickly made personas are better than no personas and to ignore my own fear of user testing and involvement.
We solved everything with the client through Skype meetings and involved the client as much as possible when we iterated through activities such as persona creation, user journey and interaction design, information architecture and navigation, user stories, and graphic design of the site. As I have written previously on the blog, we also involved users both for testing the content and navigation.
The client was very satisfied with the result and so were we. Late 2014 the whole team behind Vardø Restored were nominated to the North-Norwegian Architecture Prize 2014. We did not win, but another very worthy candidate, Biotope, from the same city did.
