Yes, Decisions are for everyone

5 min readJun 1, 2021

This is the project which challenged me the most but at the same time I am most proud of. This was selected as one of the best project in our bootcamp and -the fantastic we- Manu Melo and Sofía Orellano, got a few minutes to be in limelight at Hackshow in Ironhack!

The background

For the final project we contacted one of the prestigious tech firm based in London AND Digital. They accepted us and came with a problem.

The Brief

“Recently AND Digital worked with a client in a highly regulated industry. In this industry every decision needs to be recorded and documented on their internal systems (which is a Wiki based software) so that auditors can see a trail from ideation through to delivery. Every decision is supposed to have different strategies analyzed against different criteria so it should be able to say the pros and cons against each of the categories.”

Requirements

Create some form of collaborative digital tool that allows remote teams to work on a decision, analyze different categories against different consideration criteria and store the analysis in a visual and auditable document.

Record all decisions.
every decision should show all the strategies considered.
Every strategy should have criteria against which it has been assessed.
It should be collaborative

Assumption

We assumed that, users want an external tool to help them document decisions and their main goal is to record decisions for auditions.

Discover

We started with a UX strategy plan, mapped what are we trying to achieve - challenges, aspirations method to follow etc.

Who wants to document decision and how they are doing now?

Though the requirements from the stakeholder is clear and defined, it is important to validate those with users and try to understand how they tackle this issue currently.

We managed to conduct

Survey covering 38 responses
6 user interviews

The responses were settled to:

83% users rely on ‘Confluence’ and ‘Microsoft Teams’ to record decisions.
Recording decisions are an important organizational goal and mandatory for auditing purpose.
Users has to sometimes rely on more than one tools to keep track of decisions, and this often lead to loss of data and information scattering.
Recording decisions are time consuming, there is no easy and accessible product in market.

Competitors

The major competitors are Confluence, Jira and Microsoft teams. They are page based systems, they allow collaborations and works well external integrations and plugins.

We got a demo from one of the user as how they record a decision in confluence.

The current confluence decision document look like this:

In Teams, the the way of decision recording is usually done with combining Azure devops tools.

The User

A user here who struggles with this problem is someone who is in a mid-senior level and need to keep track the organizational decisions. The significance of this process vary based on type of firms.

The main struggles of the user are, time consuming decision recording process , difficult to search for a decision document and categorization of decisions. The goals of the user are to have better templates, better visualization and easy search mechanisms.

Persona

Oliver is an a tech lead, who has to record all strategic and technical decisions for his team. He currently uses a combination of Confluence and Jira to mange this.

Oliver’s Journey

Defining the Problem

Now Oliver’s biggest problem is that is too time consuming to record decisions, they have to adapt the template every time before use and cannot see decision data on an easy manner.

Saving time, flexibility, the use of less tools and reliability are very important to Oliver. And we will deliver value by improving his current flow inside the tool he already uses with his team.

Having in mind that confluence has plugin options, we ideated on how to improve the current plugin for decisions

Prioritizing

We decided to focus on building a confluence plugin. Analyzed how a plugin works in confluence and what are the possibilities.

The user research clearly revealed us the scope of this project and there are many ways we can help users to tackle the problems. Having to work on a strict time frame, we had to prioritize the features for an MVP. We used MOSCOW method to do this.

User flow

Sitemap

We focused to make use of confluence navigation pattern, while improving the existing flow.

Usability Analysis

We conducted 3 maze tests and 2 card sporting’s covering more than 50 responses.

There was some noticeable response pattern from user side

Only users who are skilled in confluence could use the wireframe as we proposed, and they found it as a real value addition.
Non confluence users could not complete the task as planned.
Users were not sure how the page based system works and some of them are not familiar with wireframes.