Improving Obama Campaign Software: Learning from Users
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Add to calendarAdmit it. You’ve always wanted to know how people are actually using that product you spent so much time developing. That can be done more quickly than you’ve seen before and it can improve your product a lot. If we can include some UX activities into the kind of under-pressure operation that the Obama For America campaign ran, there is hope for any Agile project.
We traveled to Obama offices in swing states studying the campaign’s operation to help inform the redesign of campaign software. With pictures and video, we will present what we learned, and how you can apply it to your projects.
We would like to show how UX folks can work in accordance with the developers’ schedule and truly help the team make tough decisions.
The experience report will explain the Agile design research methods we used’ with lots of examples of them in action—video recordings, on-the-fly usability recordings, photos of artifacts, and more. We emphasized methods than can be used over the course of 1-3 days, since that’s how much we had in every office.
We will also present the results of our work using diagrams based on Indi Young’s very useful Mental Models framework. The audience is strongly encouraged to share their experience with the discussed stories and methods.
A preliminary presentation outline includes the following sections:
- Ask the audience—Any campaign volunteers?
- How are Agile UX activities useful for (campaign) software?
- What did we do?
- Why did we do it?
- Campaign software and websites overview
- Updating old-school design research methods to work QUICKLY
- Mental-models of our findings and suggested UX improvements:
- Recruit volunteers
- Select volunteers for canvassing or calling
- Cut and print turf and calling lists
- What would we do differently?
- What can you apply to your Agile projects?
- How UX activities can make a big difference in your project
- How UX designers can work to help developers exactly when needed
- How to update old-school UX methods for Agile projects
- Which UX activities yield the most benefit
- Which methods and activities should be avoided