As the team watched it happen, we almost couldn’t believe it. After months of differing opinions and, at times, very heated discussions, we were finally getting consensus. When we completed this session, we know what the layout of the dashboard and user experience of the design would be.
We didn’t stop there with the research, we then did low-fidelity prototypes based on ‘paste up’ round of user research and when we encountered dissent, we showed people the video footage we had of the user interviews where the members created such similar mock-ups. After a short period of time the prototypes took on a life of their own and became the standard expectation for the dashboard, as if that had been the plan all along. The research brought everything together beautifully.
While we were doing this research, the development team was working simultaneously to code, with the expectation that user interface and user experience design decisions would be forthcoming. About the time we received final sign-off on our prototypes, and after some paper prototype usability testing, we were able to begin bringing the design and development work together.
We hit a snag here, as we had been planning on using a WordPress frontend that would act as an interface with the C# code, but the teams just couldn’t make that work. A decision was made to fork the WordPress theme, which stakeholders had gotten used to seeing, and connect the functionality using Bootstrap elements. Fortunately, this was more of a change in perspective rather than something that ended in rework and best of all it allowed for the overall user experience design to be smoother and less clunky than it might have been if we had forced things to work together.