Problem
Talk about pain points. If a private defense company has consultants that work with confidential information, they're going to be audited by the Department of Defense. Which means they'll need to see every trip, every transaction, every coming and going and more for Every. Single. Consultant. Which could be hundreds. And usually it's only one person pulling this information together from sticky notes, Excel spreadsheets, and emails.
Ugh.
So I worked together with a bootstrapped, very early stage start-up to create an MVP that would help people avoid this particular nightmare.
Solution
Working in the Lean UX mindset, I huddled with the product owner and our developer to define assumptions and hypotheses. There was no analytics or competitive analysis to do since it was a new product in the space, so we started with an online brainstorming session and used Realtime Board to create a User Story map.
We were fortunate to have actual future users in our session with us, which also contributed to our proto-persona. After bucketing our user stories into groups, we began doing quick use cases and rapid iteration wireframes, each time consulting our in-house group of potential users. It was pure Build - Measure - Learn.
We then moved quickly to simple UI solutions, and iterated our ideas with our developer at each step, creating live prototypes for our users to interact with and test. We got into an excellent rhythm, and after multiple rounds of testing (and in less than 2 months) we had a functional and well-received MVP from which to build off of.
Success!