Learning Management System/Experience Platform Alpha: Sprint 4

We’ve finished Sprint 4! The team have described this one as “a sprint of two halves” which sums it up really well, as three of us have been off for a week’s leave at the same time. We’ve come back and regrouped, and the rest of the team have ploughed on to keep the delivery going in that time – go team! Here’s a rundown of the last sprint.

Steering Group

We had our third Steering Group meeting and did a quick introduction covering off the work we’ve completed this sprint, as well as asking for more information on the topics we requested information on in the last session. This feedback on the evaluation matrix, content audit information, user testers contact details and the names of the GDPR subject matter experts go a long way to making our next steps easier for both content and platform sides of the project. We also discussed the possibility of checking out other platforms to ensure that we’ve taken the opportunity to see the best on the market. We’re aware that this will impact timescales, and we’ll be doing some work on this going forward to plan out what this will mean for them.

Learning Pool

We had our demo with Learning Pool, and it was great to walk through the platform, and understand the capabilities of the system from the expert. We’re in the process of getting feedback on this from our demo group and marking up our requirements document to see how many of the needs were covered. We’re going to be looking in the next sprint at setting up the user testing for the site, as well as mike picking up the UX audit for this.

Democratic Services Content

Rachel is finalising content and has scheduled workshops for the Planning and Welsh Language Standards courses. She has also been planning ahead and finalising the workshops for Future Generations Act and Speaking to the Public and Media courses as well. During Sprint 4 she delivered a presentation on key messages and learning objectives to the Planning Authority Wales meeting to over 30 people. The planning teams fed back their thoughts which have fed into the next steps for the work.

One of the questions asked at the meeting was if it was possible to have a module which worked for all 22 local authorities. This was a really good question, and the answer is yes. These courses are aimed at councillors from all councils and so far the content creation and testing findings have proven this can be done.

So far, with 5 courses tested (massive thanks to Tom!), this is what our councillor audience are saying:

• the content and order is appropriate
• we like the scenarios and examples we can identify with
• the question difficulty level is about right

Corporate Content

During this sprint, we parted ways with our content designer for the corporate content. We’re now working with our agency to find a replacement to ensure the timescales don’t slip for this work too much. We’ll be prioritising this for the next sprint to make sure we get someone in place and ready to hit the ground running. In true agile style, we’re still working on the content playbook and the audit for this work in the background until we find our new team member.

UX work

After having demos from Thinqi and Leaning Pool we have now started to review these demo sites for Accessibility, UX/UI design, WCAG level AA and .GOV recommendations and best practices. We’ve found UI components, buttons, links, active states, iconography, spacing, fonts, patterns and colour contrast inconsistencies which would suggest the need for a Design system to be put in place to combat these issues. We’ll also continue the review once the sandbox is in place for both Thinqi and Learning Pool.

Learning@Wales have also asked us to review the All Wales Academy for Local Government for their UX audit and update their review content and copy in the audit which we’ll be looking at this sprint.

UR work

The user testing for democratic services course content continues to tick along nicely. 5 of these courses have been user tested now and we’ve gained some really useful feedback and insights from each testing session.

We are also working with the platform providers to set up testing areas, or ‘sandboxes’, so that we can start arranging some user testing of all the platforms. And as soon as we have a new content designer for the corporate content work we will begin setting up user testing sessions for the corporate courses.

In Sprint 5 we’ll be focusing on if there are other platforms we should consider, what this means for testing and UX work, as well as finding our new content designer. We’ll be continuing with the Democratic Services content work, and we’ll be knee deep in the testing for the Thinqi platform and planning the testing for Learning Pool. It all starts with chunky sprint planning on the Monday and away we go!