I spent Thursday and Friday of last week with my lovely colleagues in Vancouver. Some things to note:

• The Vancouver office is awesome, especially the art (h/t David Ascher’s wife)
• Thanks to Jennie and the rest of the YVR team for making me feel welcome around the lunch table!
• Luke promised to play guitar but he never did :(

Here’s how the two days went down:

• Sabrina and I started off by having a morning meeting with Michelle via Vidyo. This produced several clarifying insights including the use of “portfolio” as the key metaphor for Clubs pages in the MLN Directory. This helped shaped our conversations during the rest of my visit.
• Sabrina and I then reviewed what we already know about our audience, our programs and offerings, and value adds for the user.
• We then sketched out a model for an engagement funnel

• Then we got to work on the MLN Directory model. We came up with streamlined sketches for the various content types, thinking in terms of mobile-first.
  • Member profile:
    • See field listing
    • Implied functionality: certain Leadership roles might be auto-applied (e.g. if the user owns an approved Club page, the system can apply the “Club Captain” role), while others might require an admin interface (e.g. Regional Coordinator, Hive Member). We’d like to allow for flexible Role names, to accommodate local flavor (i.e. Hive Chicago has specific role names they give to members).
  • Club and Hive pages:
    • Club page field listing
    • Hive page field listing
    • A key insight was that we should treat each distinct entity differently. That is, Club pages and Hive pages might be quite different, and we don’t need to try to force them into the same treatment. We also recognized that our MVP can simply address these two specific types of groups, since this is where our programs are focused.
    • We decided that focusing on Reporting for Clubs would be the highest value functionality, so we spec’ed out what that would look like (wireframes coming soon)
    • For Hive pages, we want to re-create the org listings and contact cards that the current Hive Directories have

• We also met with Laura de Reynal and David Ascher to hash out plans for the audience research project. More on that soon, but you can see our “most important questions” at the top of this pad.
• The issue of badges came up a few times. First, because we found that the plan for “Club Captain” and “Regional Coordinator” badges felt a little redundant given the concept of “roles.” Second, because we saw an opportunity to incentivize and reward participation by providing levels of badges (more like an “achievements” model). Seems like our colleagues were thinking along the same lines.

All in all, it was a really productive couple of days. We’ll be getting wireframes and then mockups out to various stakeholders over the next heartbeat, along with hashing out the technical issues with our engineering team.

Feel free to share any comments and questions.

http://hannahgrams.com/2015/08/24/vancouver-trip-summary/