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Roadmap for the USEITI website

This wiki is home to planning and roadmap documents for the USEITI website. This website team follows user-centered development practices as best it can. As such, it follows a hypothesis-driven design and development cycle.

Why is this important?

When we set out to build something (in this case, a website), we have a vision for what we need, but we also know that we need to actively learn from the people who need the solution as we are creating it. To build a solution that works, we must acknowledge that we don't really know what it will look like in the end. The most important thing, then, is to articulate what we think we know, build a little thing to validate those assumptions. Maybe the results of this test show that we need to change our approach a little (or a lot). Maybe the results show we were right on target and we can move forward confidently.

Either way, by building these small learnings along the way to a final product, we've replaced our massive risk (ie, building the entire project and finding out at the end that we got it wrong) with many smaller risks, ever-adjusting towards our goal outcomes along the way.

And note that we are driving towards outcomes, not things. For example, an outcome might be "We want to increase the number of visitors to XYZ Science Center." We might have been hired to create a website to do this, but through the course of our building and testing find out that the most effective way to meet this outcome is not to build a website at all, but to hire a communications manager who can run social media campaigns. Did we "deliver a website?" No, not at all. By that measure we "failed." However, through iterative, learning-based development, we accomplished the more important goal: delivering on a desired outcome.

USEITI Project Roadmap

• Problem Statement
• Project Hypotheses

Current Sprint

We are working on the following hypotheses in the current sprint:

We believe that: providing a clear site architecture
Will allow all types of users to understand the scope of what useiti.doi.gov contains, and allow them to find the information they're looking for
We will know we are right when: we watch different types of people use our site and they are able to easily find what they're looking for

Our usability testing for this sprint is here.

You can track our progress this sprint here.

Previous Sprints

We archive learnings from sprints in the research branch of this repo. Each usability test cycle has its own folder with its research plan, test assets and results.

Any memos on broader user experience research will be in that research folder as well.

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Participating in USEITI development

You can add a new issue to bring a bug or suggestion to the attention of the development team.

You can also email the team at [email protected].