Project Protocol

Introduction

Project Protocol is a non-profit that provides resources and shared community for people in their reentry journeys. While conducting user testing, we noticed some quirks in the sign in process - prompting us to rethink the entire experience and rebuild the sign up and login flows with special consideration for those with lower tech literacy.

The Problem

While observing a user navigate the site, the first issue encountered was that they didn't remember their password. This normally wouldn't have been a problem, except when going through the account retrieval flow, they also didn't receive the necessary email to recover it. After some grief, they assumed that they hadn't had an account to begin with and were forced to create a new one, creating a significant amount of friction for what should have been just a quick process. Where did it all go wrong?

Upon investigation of the backend, we discovered that they actually did already have an account - however, the account was made with a typo in the email.

Team

4 people (1 designer/engineer, 2 engineers, 1 product owner)

Research

Due to the sudden prioritization of the project, we only had a week to show an initial design and prototype, so we conducted a condensed research phase. Stakeholders from different parts of the company were interviewed to pinpoint our core features revolving around 3 types of users.

User 1: The Venture Team Member

The Venture team member is the primary user of our product. They are the ones creating evaluations and bringing them through the different approvals required. At all times they need to see what stage an evaluation is in and the steps required to advance it. In the interview, they explained that most of their information was stored in google forms and spreadsheets, so we first explored if there were ways to enhance their existing workflow without creating an entirely new product. We agreed that they would benefit from a more customizable dashboard, and a workflow that was easier to share and follow.

User 2: The Approver

The evaluation needs to jump through various hoops to be approved at the company level, so certain stakeholders are responsible for signing them off at various stages. The approver should be notified when they need to take action, have a centralized place to find their assignments, submit documentation, and approve or reject an evaluation.

User 3: The Everyday Observer

Lastly, there are employees at the company who are not directly involved with the Ventures team but are curious about the status of evaluations or have evaluations they would like to recommend themselves. It’s important for them to be able to search for existing evaluations, browse the catalog of technologies, and potentially request evaluations.

Key Takeaways

The evaluation process had historically been obscured behind disparate spreadsheets, leaving many in the dark about the state of evaluations at the company. We found that transparency and clarity were the most important aspects for our users.

One of the most important takeaways from the interviews is how important it was to keep a history of the entire evaluation process. That way, they knew which key people were involved, why something was approved or rejected, and provide transparency into an otherwise inaccessible process.

Prototyping

Mockups and user flows were created using Sketch, Invision, and Capital One's internal design system.

Accounting for the quick turnaround required, we wanted to focus on the core features - an evaluation request form, a dashboard, and an evaluation timeline page.

Wireframes for our starting 3 pages:
1. The evaluation intake form where our Venture team can kick off the process by inputting the details (replacing the Google form used prior)
2. The details page for a single evaluation, including the steps the evaluation has gone through.
3. The dashboard/home page where all evaluations and their statuses can be viewed.

Designs

For the designs, we stuck to a simple interface leveraging the existing Capital One design language combined with tools our users were used to (i.e. Google Forms and Sheets). All images below are shown with test data on the development site, so please disregard any odd naming conventions.

Home/Dashboard
For the home page, we wanted hub where users could view their action items, an interactive graph overview of all evaluations, and a sortable table showing the stages and details of the evaluations. We intended this page to be modular - depending on your role you might see different items - for example, only those who need to approve evaluations would be able to see the 'Pending Approvals' section. Evaluation Details
After creating a new evaluation or clicking on one from the Dashboard's table, you can view all its attributes and a timeline of its creation. The top half gives a rundown of the attributes and also shows who's accountable for the technology. This provides the transparency and ownership required for the process to move forward. On the bottom, the Event Log tells a story of who's reviewed it in the past, what issues they had with it, and what its current status is. By surfacing the key people involved in these decisions as well as the documentation involved, it provides insights into what has made an evaluation thrive or meet its untimely end. At a glance, the light color coding of the circles indicates waiting, approval, and rejection states. Actions
Depending on your role, different prompts will appear on details page with certain action items. In the first instance below, the Approver user is prompted to either approve or reject the evaluation request. Going through this and other flows advances the evaluation - and all the documentation is centralized on this page for ease of reference. Discovery
To make content accessible, users can access the search feature to find existing evaluations. It's also a useful check to make sure duplicate evaluations are not made. For promoting discoverability, we had another modular dashboard popup to show a trending featured technology, bringing awareness to emerging intiatives.

Takeaways

The Venture team fully onboarded their portfolio onto our platform and used it to track technologies daily. A few months in, we had around 40-50 active evaluations and the team was happy with the centralized tool. Outside of the Venture team, other users expressed curiosity and interest in the company's investment and integration strategies.

Considering the very short timeline, I was proud of what our team was able to accomplish. Functionality was definitely prioritized in this MVP - given more resources I would have liked to do more user testing and iterations based on continuous feedback. Ideas for further improvements included having more ways to filter the evaluations as well as a clearer timeline with animations similar to what you might see in a live deployment / pipeline tool.