Callings and Trainings is a dashboard and learning experience created for the purpose of providing training and statistical data to aid the user with their responsibilities as leaders within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Role: UX Team Member

Audience: All people within the organization that have leadership responsibilities, ages 16+.

Problem: People who are given leadership responsibilities within the church have little to no onboarding experience to help them learn their responsibilities. Training content for each responsibility is scattered across the (main) parent site making it hard to find and learn from these resources. As a result, people don’t know their responsibilities, spend too much time trying to figure them out from disparate sources, or create their own ideas of how they should fulfill their duties, which creates many inconsistencies.

Goal: Design an experience that accomplishes three goals: 1) Reduce administration time for leaders so they can focus on spending their time helping people face to face, 2) Make training resources easier to find and learn from, 3) audit existing content and create new training strategies to provide a quality learning experiences for the users.

Process and Outcome: We began by collecting business requirements from stakeholders, gathering existing user feedback, and conducting focus group interviews. Our goal was to begin to understand the problems we were tasked with solving.

With this initial information we were able to gather, we found out that people were having a difficult time figuring out how to fulfill their individual responsibilities that had been assigned to them within the church. They were also spending too much time dealing with data entry and technological issues that came with their responsibilities, so much so that they weren’t able to spend as much time helping people because they were spending too much time entering in data in the church’s system and trying to find resources across the site.

To help us formulate our solutions to these problems we began by creating personas, conducting several affinity group sessions to sort out IA, taxonomy, and content issues, and further identified gaps in our current experience. We used all this information to created journey and empathy maps. All of these resources would be our guiding star during the project.

We then proceeded to sketch, wireframe, and create some hifi mockups of our strongest ideas. With these ideas we began to conduct a series of testing and iteration sessions with users until we had narrowed our thinking down to a couple concepts that we felt confident about. With those concepts we created testing and research plans with our UX researchers, which our team took to different parts of the globe for usability testing and focus groups. The church has a vast international membership so it was important to us to understand how people in different countries fulfill their church responsibilities and to test our concepts with them. The findings truly helped us to realize all the places where we were missing the mark and which things were succeeding.

We were then able to regroup as a team and adjust our course according to our findings. We decided that we needed to optimize the experience so that it was lighter on the technology end to be able to accomodate low bandwidth countries and to help new converts adjust to their new church experience. So we shifted from a web to more of a mobile approach.

We soon created and released a long term beta so we could continue to learn and iterate to make the best product. Over time we learned that leaders truly needed a dashboard experience to help them reduce their time with data entry/administration tasks, provide quick access to their frequently used tools, and displace time sensitive information for each leader.

We then began the process again of sketching, wireframing, and creating an MVP that we could test. The MVP experience came equipped with various widgets including a calendar, connection center, and training widgets. Our hope is that as we test and receive feedback over time, we can begin to add more personalized widgets that could be displayed on the dashboard according to who the person is and what positions they hold in the church. Our next iterations will include statistics and data vizualization models to further help our users to feel unburdened in their responsibilities.

Overall, through much testing and iteration, we have began to see how our concepts are helping to achieve our initial goals and has opened up the vision of what we will be able to create in the future to further enhance this experience.