Injury Tracking App

Application Design

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A federal agency that regulates workplace safety and health sought to develop an application to capture existing paper-based employer recordkeeping for work-related injuries and illness using online web forms, batch uploads and APIs to commercially available and custom recordkeeping software. The data collection was intended to supplement the currently-required paper recordkeeping; large companies were required to report electronically.

Challenge

The scope of the initiative was to develop the data collection website and basic internal OSHA management reports on the collected data. The user management and registration process was developed with the goal of requiring minimal manual intervention for OSHA/DOL and relied on company representative approvers for validation of new users.

The Team Dynamic + My Role

This was an initiative which, out of all my experiences, was the closest to running pure Scrum methodology. We had a defined product owner, ScrumMaster, and development team. We utilized Trello to prioritize and track task progress and engaged in typical Scrum ceremonies. As a member of the development team, I led user experience strategy and design on this project.

I worked extremely closely with all members of the Scrum team and with program leadership. The Scrum Master (who had an interest in UX) and I worked together very closely with our product owner to present options, to listen in on stakeholder calls, and to lead JAD sessions. I leveraged my front-end development background to work with our developers in assessing features for feasibility/level of effort, implementing stylesheets, and participating in whiteboarding sessions.

Strategy + Solution

Okay, so we had a couple of initial roadblocks...

  1. Our product owner, a political appointee, was COMPLETELY excited about the idea of a UX strategy. However, the agile process described during our initial project kickoff was not capable of supporting the level of depth desired for UX. Before any UX activities began, I developed and conducted a presentation focused on implementing Agile UX to educate our project management and our product owner on how to effectively use my skill set to iteratively improve the product.
  2. User research was not accounted for due to budgetary reasons as well as access to stakeholders, so I took the opportunity to develop as much of a structured approach as possible, using best practices to guide product strategy and design. Plans for user testing were not developed until well into the project.
Takeaways/Results

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