The team halted FIAT develpment towards the end of 2023 to help with the wider division's efforts to move KIM (Knowledge and Information Mangement) users onto new products.
Having recently passed it's end of alpha assessment:
- lots of new research data had been gathered
- improved designs had been built and were ready to be tested with live users
- new features had been prototyped and were ready to show to users
In May this year, with the KIM transition work complete, the team was spun back up with some new members, and FIAT finally went live in private beta.
To-do: design crit
Top of the design agenda was to work through any outstanding recommendations from our assessement. One of those was that we should subject FIAT to a critique from designers outside of our portfolio.
Aside from needing to address our assessment recommendations, getting an 'outsider' view of the product was a great idea.
It would help us to:
- spot things we might have overlooked
- get a fresh perspective on old problems
- see how our designs look to people with no prior knowledge
The crit
We reached out to DfE's design community over Slack and asked for volunteers. We managed to get ten with a good mix of professions.
Pictures of FIAT screens were added to a Lucid board, separated by area page. Some context was also included, like what it does and who would use it.
Next we shared a link with each of the volunteers and sent them an invite to the Teams call where the activity would take place.
On the day, participants were asked to spend a few minutes on each section adding notes or comments as they saw fit. The whole exercise took around 40 minutes.
What we learned
The team received feedback on all areas of FIAT, but most centred on the search page, the 'Details' page and the 'Academies in this trust' section.
Types comments we received include:
- Do we need to hide the information about data sources?
- Why is there no introductory paragraph on the home page?
- Why are the trust names all in caps?
- Why do we call it a "product" and not a service?
- What does would I find under 'Details'? What is in there?
What next
All of the comments have been helpful in some way, and we consider the crit a success. It's given us plenty to think about, and it's always interesting to see how other professionals approach the same problem.
We've collated each of the participants' suggestions and the next step for our team is to work through them to see if there are any we can take forward into a future iteration.