Boston College City Connects

The Ask

Completely redesign the City Connects software system to be more innovative, impactful, and easy to use. The project kicked off in late February of 2019 and the new application needed to launch in June of 2019. With this requirement, all UX work had to be completed in an aggressive MVP time frame.

Solution

We started this project with an in-depth artifact review to learn the City Connects practice. To this end, I also led stakeholder interviews with key users types to learn how they work and what their hopes were for the new product. With the core project team I facilitated a Design Thinking workshop to help ideate around key problems that the new software could solve. With all of these inputs we developed a Product Brief that defined our work completed to date and future plans on how to phase work to meet the June deadline.

Following approval of the Product Brief I moved into the UX Design phase. When the first round of wireframes were approved I designed and conducted remote usability testing on a prototype built in-browser based on the wireframes. This was also an opportunity to provide mentoring to junior UX staff on developing a Moderator’s Guide and facilitating usability tests. The usability testing was with real City Connects users and featured role-playing to mimic real world usage of the software and updates from the testing were incorporated into the MVP.

Over the past year, I have had the pleasure of working with Stacie. She served as the UX lead through an engagement with Echo&Co to build MyConnects, the online system that supports the network of City Connects Coordinators and Program Managers in over 100 low-income school sites nationally. Stacie demonstrated the critical nature of UX for online system and application design by pushing our team to design features that serve our end-user’s needs. She is an excellent listener, deep and creative thinker and would be an asset to any project team. – Tina Chen-Xu, Senior Manager, Strategic Planning and Operations, Center for Optimized Student Support at Boston College, City Connects