VANCOUVER
TOOL
LIBRARY

Personas

Before ideating on a solution, the team wanted to figure out the needs of the individual users of VTL. For this purpose, user personas were created from various walks of life. After establishing their needs and background, triangular diagrams were crafted to group them in terms of technological know-how, experience with tools, and support network for their crafts. This allowed the team to understand where potential users came from and how to accomodate for their idiosyncratic needs.

Experience Map

The next order of business was to visit VTL and get a first hand experience of user interactions with their services. The team met the volunteers who talked about the areas of improvement that VTL needed to work on. Taking all those facts into account, the team created a User Journey Map of the sign-up and check out process. This map outlined what worked with the user journey, area of improvement, and painpoints that the team could actively build upon.

Two pain points were noted: Mainly that the user was overwhelmed by the sheer variety of tools on display, which made the process of finding their own tool very confusing and stress inducing. Additionally, the sign up process was laborious and had too many steps. The user had to fill out a physical sign up form and the volunteer had to add them in the organization's data server.

Frequent users of VTL did not have the same problem with sytem logging as they were already signed in. However, they also had concerns regarding VTL's draconic filing system. From these insights, the path moving forward was much clearer.

Participatory Workshop

With initial ideas patched together, the team reached out to VTL to get greater insight into the problems that were being tackled. To this end, VTL's general manager was contacted and a meeting was set up where he would perform various activities devised by the team that would get him to extrapolate further on his painpoints. The following activities were conducted in the span of 1 hour.

Survey

The introdoctory activity, the participant was asked to answer a variety of question to gain a more diverse palette of perspectives

Rose, Bud, Thorn

The participant wrote his thoughts on a number of prompts pertaining to scenarios in the VTL, for aspects that are currently positive (rose), problematic (thorn), or have potential to improve (bud).

Priority Matrix

The Participant takes 5 minutes to plot the best ideas on a chart with x-axis representing usefulness and y-axis stating difficulty of implementation.

Final Design Concept

Storyboards

The following storyboards were created to present to VTL stakeholders.

Design Artifacts

Many high fidelity mockups were designed and prototyped for presentation. The following are the most pertinent of them all.

Reflection

While the team was pleased with the final iteration of the project, it was agreed that the process would have been significantly expedited if the participatory workshop was done first. Certain insights regarding VTL's restructuring efforts were made which would have been particularly helpful if the team knew about them before hand. Nonetheless, the final iteration was completed and polished with great anticipation. Currently, Vancouver Tool Library's short staff has made is difficult for the team to pitch the design concept in the near future. Once an appointment with the stakeholders can be made, this article will be updated to share results.