Client Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency

My roles on the project UX design / Product ownership / Project management

The challenge

How can we get every student in New Zealand aged 8-10 to tell us how they got to school that day?

The result

Weeks of user research and testing culminated in a 2-week sprint where we managed the build of a prototype product. The prototype was successfully trialled in real classrooms, paving the way for a larger national rollout.

The process

Agreeing on problem definition and project principles

Service design and mapping out the user journeys

• Initially, the problem definition was around alleviating traffic congestion around school gates and therefore getting less children to travel to school by car.

• However at an early stage of the project we identified there was no national comparable data set of how children traveled to school in the first place. We needed this data first before getting to the longer term goal of facilitating less journeys by car.

• This meant our problem definition was focused on how we could find out how children traveled to school in New Zealand and gather data about their mode of transport.

• We agreed on some other broad project principles to help us with the direction of a solution, such as any child or teacher in New Zealand should be able to participate no matter their classroom or school setting, and that any collection of data should be completely anonymous and unable to be traced back to any individual student.

• We mapped out the experience for 2 types of users - child and teacher, including how a teacher would sign up for to be able to participate with their class and how the child might input data into a system.

• We took a high level holistic view of the user experience first, before starting to consider any technical needs and ramifications.

Early mapping of user journeys and structure of data

User research and designing & testing a user interface for children

• We developed a set of survey questions to gather more information about the classroom settings in which our product might be used. We wanted to make sure our product could work for all teachers no matter their style of classroom.

• Another key challenge for this project was to design a digital interface that worked for children in a classroom. Students in a class may have a wide range of abilities, skills, and cultural backgrounds.

• We designed and tested several lo-fi prototypes with children younger than our target age to test whether kids could a) understand the question being asked of them and b) input the correct data. We wanted our interface to work even for students who might be behind their peers in learning abilities. We also tested within a classroom setting.

Managing the build of a prototype product

We then worked with a digital agency to build a prototype product that would enable us to test our ideas within a classroom setting.

• We created some user stories for our prototype, and collaborated with the Scrum team to prioritise the stories, and detail the functionality we were looking to achieve in the form of acceptance criteria.
• Throughout the development phase, I acted as product owner to communicate feedback on the product as it was being built, and to sign off as to whether a user story met acceptance criteria and was "done".