2018-09-21 00:00:00 +0000 - Chaeny Emanavin
Tl:dr - CDPH was working on a tight deadline to provide a visualization of the burden of disease data across several criteria such as location, disease type, etc. The OI team worked with the team to produce a bug tracking process to identify, prioritize and address the issues. The team also provided high level product management methodology training.
OI Staff: Elizabeth Colegrove, Bhupinder (Pindy) Kaur, David Kootstra, Joseph Lott, Jeremy Rabideau
CDPH Champion: Julie Nagasako (executive sponsor), Michael Samuel (data scientist), Katey DeSanti
OI Director: Chaeny Emanavin
A data scientist, working under the CDPH Fusion Center, developed a dashboard for the visualization of the burden of disease in California at a granular level, designed to enable reporting by geographic location, type of disease, average years of life lost or specific cause of death, as well as other measures. The dashboard had been in development for some time, but had not yet been tested among the broader community of intended users (county epidemiologists, data scientists). CDPH was actively preparing for this testing event, working to wrap up loose ends and polish the dashboard prior to a roll-out to a broader community for testing. Executive management assigned a project manager to assist in task identification and project management. The project manager proposed several tools and approaches for task identification, milestone definition, and tracking. Unfortunately, none of these had fully met the needs for the chief data scientist, either seeming too burdensome, time-consuming, or inefficient to use. CDPH came to the Office of Innovation, requesting assistance with the identification and adoption of a tool for project management to enable a successful roll-out of the dashboard for controlled user testing.
Our discovery work focused on stakeholder interviews, including the primary data scientist, assigned project manager, executive sponsor, and ancillary developers who had been brought on to support development or bug/defect identification. We also conducted a journey mapping workshop, trying to identify the steps necessary for CDPH to arrive at successful release of the tool for controlled user testing. Through the discovery process, primarily through story harvesting with the principles, we came to recognize that the problem statement as originally framed (a tool for project management) was not the primary blocker to a successful roll-out of the dashboard for controlled user testing. The issues were more oriented around adoption of these tools. Additionally, the development team had been viewing the upcoming user testing as an opportunity for further defect identification and repair.
We utilized a card sort process to develop the customized bug tracker for CDPH. Throughout our interview process, we utilized empathic listening. We conducted a journey-mapping workshop in order to identify steps (and blockers) to successful release of the dashboard for semi-public testing. We also provided guidance and training to the Fusion Center team in user-experience testing, and shared tips and strategies for harvesting, sorting, and collating user-experience testing feedback, as well as methodological approaches for converting testing findings into actionable user stories that can be used to drive future development and enhancement of the tool. Guidance on how to administer the Unified Theory on the Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) template to both remote and in-person testers, and quantify and tabulate feedback gleaned from both populations was also provided.