SEEKER
Challenge
How can the Trello App be improved to encourage use within and cater to the developer community?
Solution
Zeroing in on the developer (dev) community and more specifically the QA role, there is a significant opportunity to reduce time spent searching for information across platforms. This is the main function of the 'Seeker' Power-Up where users can easily search and save information across Trello Power-Ups.
Approach
METHODS:
- Contextual Inquiry
- Cognitive Walk-Through
- Affinity Diagramming
- Prototyping
TOOLS:
- Pen & Paper
- Sketch
- Craft (Sketch Plug-In)
- Invision
Devs in the Wild
Contextual Inquiry
Observing developers in their element is a Discovery Channel show all on its own. A story of survival fueled by caffeine, these multi-lingual beings are surrounded by bits, bytes, gits and sprites. They communicate via call-backs, stand-ups and Slack. It's truly a universe all its own... don't forget the ever present rubber ducky.
Operating within a dev team, the QA role (at a high level) focuses on: 1) performing tasks related to QA Tests and 2) finding information. Efficiency is key in this role. The caveat here is in the time spent searching for information with a Go/No Go launch meeting on the line.
“Jira is awkward because it’s not always clear where things are.”
Exploring The Tools
Cognitive Walk-Through
Trello is a tool used and improved by developers to help teams work collaboratively. Although 'used' and 'improved' by developers, there is not a significant adoption of the tool within the community and key links and task expediters are buried within menus in exchange for a 'clean interface'. This 'clean interface' increases the time to learn the tool and and time is a precious resource.
Affinity Diagramming
Additional research showed that many of the tools and platforms used by developers outside Trello: Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, are all owned by the same parent company Atlassian. A number of pay-to-play Trello Power-Ups allow synchronization across platforms.
“I don’t love it... we haven’t had time to really learn how to use it...”
Find What You're Looking For
The Seeker Power-Up provides value to QA's and devs alike by taking the hassle out of manually scanning and searching for information across integrated platforms and multiple tabs/windows/monitors.
- Seeker scans for information across integrated platforms and provides search results in Trello's list and card format.
- A key task related to search (filtering) has been removed from nested menus and placed within the page menu enabling find-ability.
- Cards can be bookmarked allowing a quick reference when working in any Trello board.
Stretch Goals
At this time, Seeker is a high-level initial prototype concept. Additional capabilities being considered with this Power-Up include:
- Opportunity to rename cards
- Opportunity to add a Master bookmark board
- Opportunity to allow extraction of pieces of information vs. the entire card
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