Lalich Center: Phase 1
The Lalich Center team wants to create a website to grow an online presence that complements the organization’s upcoming non-profit status. To help accomplish this goal, they partnered with Tech Fleet, a DAO that offers apprenticeships to new tech talent looking to gain experience working with real clients on Agile teams. Each Tech Fleet apprenticeship is eight weeks long and on a part-time basis of 15-20 hours/week. Throughout this project, I worked on the product strategy/ownership team to be the voice of the customer, explore the product vision with the client, and manage the project roadmap, backlog, and weekly sprints. This was the first phase of an ongoing project. In the second phase, I was a lead UX writer/content designer.
My role:
Product Strategy/Ownership
UX Writing/Content Design Team Ambassadorship
Tools:
Figma
Notion
Vowel
Timeline:
2 months, part-time
(up to 20 hours/week)
Discovery 🔍
Understanding the Kickoff Point
The Lalich Center supports survivors of cults and coercive relationships to live meaningful lives by providing educational resources. They also offer assistance to mental health professionals and family/friends of cult members. It is led by Dr. Janja Lalich, an internationally-known cult specialist, and survivor. They currently have a placeholder website that is not branded or aligned with the team’s vision for the Lalich Center. They are hoping that a design team will create a website that conveys the organization’s mission, feel, expertise, and safety so that users can feel confident and secure in seeking and utlizing resources.
The client is in the first phase of their website design project. Previously, they had a few false starts with a couple of designers who had begun the design process, but had to leave the project unexpectedly. Therefore, the Lalich Center team has had to wait longer than expected to have a website and reach a wider online audience.
Due to the client’s goals and frustrating previous experience working with designers, a full team was tasked with working on this project including:
Product Strategy/Ownership
UX Research
UX Design
UX Writing/Content Design
Compiling Goals and Setting Expectations
Client Goals
The Lalich Center team has the following requirements for their website:
Homepage
Sign-up/Contact page with Intake Questionnaire Form
Course Description page
Discussion Groups page
Donation page
Password protected/passcode entry Registration and Payments page
About Us page
Privacy Policy page
Resources page
Media page with links to podcasts, books, and documentaries
Project Goals
The goals for this project for the Tech Fleet apprentices were:
Work with the client to formally define MVP and MMP scope for the 8-week volunteer project.
Perform validation and evaluative UX research throughout the entire project.
Create Interaction and service designs for flows per the client’s needs.
Help establish or implement consistent branding and content.
Work with the client to create a consistent voice and tone.
Create high-fidelity, pixel-perfect design sets representing the client’s needs.
Potential Difficulties
The schedule of working part-time for eight weeks not being long enough to accomplish all of the client and project goals.
Aligning both the Tech Fleet and Lalich Center teams’ schedules to have meetings throughout the project.
Possible Solutions
Meeting with the Lalich Center team often, especially in the beginning of the project, to ensure that they understand the time restrictions of the Tech Fleet team.
Work with the Lalich Center team to prioritize their goals and determine which can be addressed during later phases.
Fostering an open communication environment within the Tech Fleet team so that everyone can be up-to-date on synchronous meetings and due dates for various deliverables.
Strategy 🎯
Applying Agile Methodologies
Agile methodology was utilized throughout the entire project to ensure that every team could work cross-functionally without waiting long periods of time for another team’s deliverables.
Creating Roadmap to Share Project Plan with Wider Team
Using Figjam, the product strategy/ownership team created a roadmap as a resource throughout the project. This roadmap helped all apprentices understand the timeline of each task and which teams were responsible for specific tasks.
Setting Two-Week Sprints to Prioritize Team Tasks
As a product strategist/owner, I assisted with facilitating sprints (each lasting for two weeks). Based on preferences from the wider Tech Fleet team, the product strategy/ownership team decided that sprints would be held on Mondays, and include the review of the Kanban Board so each team would have the opportunity to share any updates and concerns about their current tasks.
Hosting Weekly Retros to Check in with Team and Gain Feedback
I led the weekly retros so all the apprentices could share and understand one another’s thoughts on our progress. The insights gained through these retros helped the project lead and product strategy/ownership team understand how to boost morale and enthusiasm for the project, which was especially important towards the end of the final sprint.
Communicating Content Needs to Strategy Team
During the first sprint of this project, we decided that every product strategist/owner should be an ambassador to the other teams working on the project so that we could better understand their process and know immediately if they were experiencing any roadblocks.
As the ambassador to the UX writing/content design team, I attended weekly team meetings, answered questions about the wider Tech Fleet team’s goals and plans throughout the project, and asked questions about how the UX writers/content designers were planning to maintain the Lalich Center team’s voice principles (i.e. “expert,” “trustworthy,” “confidential,” and “safe”) throughout the website.
Implementation 👩🏾💻
Helping Other Teams Complete Their Tasks
One of the responsibilities of the product strategy/ownership team was assisting the other teams with any tasks that were time-consuming or difficult to carry out. When the UX research team needed to create multiple proto-personas as a first step to understand the primary users of the Lalich Center, I contributed to creating the proto-persona for “The Professional.”
This proto-persona was later used to help the UX research and UX design teams understand the needs of mental health and legal professionals working with survivors of cults and coercive relationships.
Emphasizing the Client’s Uniqueness
Although the Lalich Center team is not a therapy resource (and specifically does not want the website to have a therapy-like feel), the product strategy/ownership team decided that analyzing therapy websites could be useful because we could understand what design decisions not to include in the client’s website. By analyzing common design and content features of therapy websites, the UX design and UX writing/content design teams would have a resource to help them avoid specific styles and terminology. I did a competitive analysis on Betterhelp.
Defining the Cutoff Point for Phase 1
To better help current and future Tech Fleet apprentices working with the Lalich Center team understand when a user story would be complete, the product strategists/owners created specific acceptance criteria and stated which team(s) would be responsible for implementing them.
These acceptance criteria not only helped the entire Tech Fleet team understand the usability and relevance of various features, but also reduced redundancy in sharing information, better organized the site map of the website, and led to a better understanding of the primary users.
Delivery 🎁
Presenting MVP to Client
At the end of the last sprint, the entire Tech Fleet team presented the final demo to the Lalich Center team. This demo included a research analysis summary, a high-fidelity prototype of the website, a high-resolution logo, a style guide, and a list of future considerations for the second phase of the project.
Creating a Handoff Document for Phase 2
To ensure that the future product strategists/owners of the second phase have a clear starting point, we created a product requirements document and a handoff document that included links to various files, notes on what worked well, pain points, and suggested next steps.
Reflection 🤔
My main takeaway from being part of the first phase of this project is:
Understand Goals ASAP
Having a teamwide meeting early in the project (ideally before the first sprint) would have given every team member the opportunity to share their personal goals for the project and the ways they hoped to grow within their role. A solid understanding of personal goals would allow the product strategists/owners to form a plan for checking in on the progress of each team member and offer encouragement during times of doubt and burn out.
Next Steps 📝
Make sure that all files and information are clearly organized and accessible for the Tech Fleet apprentices working on the second phase.