A design vision sprint for the counselor experience

To begin day two, we discussed and finalized our design principles from the day before. We landed on:

1. Seamless: Craft connected and frictionless experiences by removing obstacles.

2. Accessible: Prioritize inclusivity in support of various abilities, experiences, and preferences.

3. Trustworthy: Demonstrate clarity, compassion, and consistency for reliable interactions.

4. Adaptive: Create intuitive, flexible, and dynamic systems that deliver the right information at the right time.

5. Empowering: Provide tools and resources to counselors that promote wellbeing, growth, and confident decision making.

We then spent the rest of our time hearing from more Knowledge Experts, this time writing down How Might We's (HMW) as they spoke. We asked the group to think in terms of these HMW's rather than jumping to solutions. If they heard something from the presentation that seemed difficult or confusing, ask how might we solve that issue. For example, if someone noted that volunteer counselors often feel isolated and disconnected from other counselors, one could ask, "How might we provide inclusive and accessible ways for volunteers to connect with each other?"

Day three consisted of more HMW's, but specified for each stage of the counselor on-shift experience. Everything from signing-on to taking their first chat of the shift to getting help from a supervisor.

The second half of day three and the majority of day four was spent doing what many of the participants were most excited about — brainstorming ideas and solutions based on the HMW's we created. We asked folks to remember the design principles we had agreed upon when thinking of ideas.

We then went around and had people share some of their favorite ideas, grouping similar ones as we went along. At the end of that day, the team and I created buckets of similar ideas into specific themes. This would be helpful for the final day of the sprint.

To conclude the week, I began the day with an activity I called, "Inspiration Station." Each participant. had an area on the board to add some of their favorite examples of delightful UX. We posted screenshots and explained what we liked about a certain app's experience or a feature it provided.

From there, we went into our last big exercise — sketching. We had people pick a bucket/theme from above and sketch out what a possible solution might look like. This was helpful to translate ideas from words to something more visual. This way, as the only designer at this organization, I could take these ideas as inspiration when thinking through the actual design process.

Finally we wrapped up the day by letting folks know what would be coming next. I would go into design mode, creating screens based off of the problems we identified and the possible solutions we came up with. As a group, we would meet again to go over the designs and begin roadmapping these new features so we could make this vision a reality over the next few years.

The very next week, I jumped into design mode. I took all of the ideas from the previous week and began mocking up designs for a new Counselor Dashboard (one of the big ideas that came from the sprint) and the On-Shift Chat Experience. I started with low fidelity mock ups to get buy-in from our selected stakeholders, eventually progressing to high fidelity.

Here are some of the main features I wanted to highlight in these designs:

1. A new counselor dashboard
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2. Utilizing AI to create smart "nudges" for important time-related protocols (starting the Risk Assessment portion of the case record, taking a second chat, searching for resources, etc).
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3. Communication with supervisors and other counselors in one place (currently they bounce between Salesforce and two different Slack instances)

After feedback from these initial designs, I went in and to polish the designs with more care, using actual components from the new design system (oh yeah, I led the charge on creating a brand new design system while all of this was going on... 😅). You can see a couple of those screens below.

From there, the other vision sprint leaders and I presented these designs, as well as a "next steps" or roadmap on how we will get there. Overall, the entire group that participated seemed extremely excited seeing all of their hard work and ideation culminate into these visuals. It's going to take a long time before we get to this "ideal state" but we're already working on implementing some of these features in smaller batches.