Redesigning RTÉ Player: Project Planning, Milestones and Team Dynamics (2/5)
This blog is the second of five posts of an academic group project. The goal of the project is to iteratively redesign and evaluate the user experience (UX) problems of the RTÉ Player mobile app. In this blog, we will be looking at how we planned our project, milestones in each phases and how we structured our team.
If you haven’t read the first post yet, you can find it here — Redesigning RTÉ Player: User Research on Watching Behaviour and Pain Points.
For a project to be successful, management and organisation should be defined. This means strategising a project plan with a timeline, estimating the work and delegating them and setting roles and responsibilities.
I. Project Plan
To ensure that design decisions are founded on research and feedback, the timeline was modelled after the design thinking process by Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) (Dam and Siang, 2021).
Whereas popular variations of the design thinking process include a sixth phase, which is called Implement, the d.school variation was chosen as it aligns closer to the project scope. The project scope focuses on understanding user pain points in using the RTÉ Player app, brainstorming for a solution and prototyping it. The Implement phase is not covered.
Timeline
Now that there is already a general idea of the project plan, an 11-week timeline was allocated to complete the project. The timeline started from 9th November 2020 to 24th January 2021.
In our timeline, the design thinking phases are overlapping with each other. This shows the iterative manner of working on the tasks for each phase. It is practice under the agile methodology.
II. Milestones per Phases
The following is a summary of our milestones in each phase:
- Empathise: Understand who the main users are. They are teenagers ranging to young adults who like to watch videos as a form of relaxation. Their pain points in using the app are being hindered by watching by issues like excessive ads and poor structuring of contents.
- Define: Concretise user goals using the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) Statements.
- Ideate: Determine what features to elaborate on based on the JTBD statements.
- Prototype: Finish our prototype in Figma. You can access the prototype here.
- Test: Realise social factors and user interface (UI) treatments that affect users watching behaviour
III. Team Dynamics
A flat structure where everyone’s ideas and opinions are equally valued was followed by our team . A leader was nominated to make decisions and give overall direction. Although this structure is rarely found in the industry, it served its purposes well in our case.
No specific roles were assigned to anyone but everyone was given the opportunity to conduct research, analysis, design and learn. It was fascinating to see everyone’s active participation. It was made clear what tasks were needed to avoid duplicated efforts.
Reference
Sam & Siang (1994) 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process. Retrieved from interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-ÉhE-design-thinking-process on 23 January 2021.
