Architect Continuing Education Reporting Tool

User Experience Research & Design
UX Designer / NCARB

Overview

It has long been NCARB’s goal to offer a tool that helps architects manage their continuing education (CE). With competing priorities and a constriction on resources, stakeholders wanted to understand, end-to-end, the complexity of designing a tool to meet the customers needs. To help them decide whether to build in-house, or identify a third party solution, I was put to the task of discovering our customers needs and present my findings to executive leadership and senior management. My research and designs would be used to inform a strategic plan that would later be presented to the Board of Directors.

Key Stakeholders

Background

Architects in the United States often acquire licenses in multiple jurisdictions as it is common to practice across state lines. To maintain those licenses, architects must fulfill CE requirements each year.

Each of the 54 jurisdictions has unique CE requirements, while other architectural professional associations like AIA and USGBC also have separate CE requirements for membership. Tracking CE hours becomes particularly complicated when an architect holds licenses in multiple jurisdictions.

Challenges

CE Auditing
Upon renewing a license, an architect is subject to a random audit where they may be required to submit evidence that they've completed all CE requirements.

Renewal Cycles
Each state renews at different points in a calendar year, which adds significant administrative complexity and makes it even more difficult to track requirements. 

CE Requirements
Requirements vary based on jurisdiction and architects must submit CE hours separately to each jurisdiction and professional association as there is no data sharing between entities. 

Manual Processes
Because an architect must submit similar information multiples times in non-uniform format, human error and missed deadlines are more common and occur at an increased rate.

Current Solutions
Excel is the most commonly used tool for tracking multiple jurisdictional requirements which provides no assistance in easily understanding overlap and shared CE requirements.

The CE Landscape

Competitive Analysis
Research shows that AIA, LEED and other CE course providers are already using online platforms to track hours. Among these online solutions, architects found some of the features helpful such as:

• Automatic reporting

• Visual progress trackers

• Lists of completed courses

• Downloadable transcripts of completed courses

• Search and filters

• Email notifications

• Course suggestions and other course offerings

The Mind of an Architect

User Research & Insights
Interviews and observations revealed significant overarching patterns in the architects’ processes. I analyzed the findings and summarized key pain points and user goals:

Getting to Know Rick

Personas & The Power User
Upon interviewing and observing architects with varying experiences and needs, I quickly discovered that not all architects behave the same. Most architects only hold 1–3 licenses, so for them, tracking CE isn’t so difficult. I discovered that the threshold for number of licenses that made tracking CE particularly difficult was 4 or more. Those architects became the power user category—the type of users who are in serious need of a better solution.

Designing the MVP

Feature Prioritization
After analyzing the research and insights, I explored ideas for features that would help architects easily track their CE requirements. I compared those ideas with the key user goals to prioritize a list of features we could focus our resources on first.

Some of my decisions included:

• Address the core needs first, such as selecting states to track, displaying jurisdictional requirements, and manual upload of completed courses.

• Other non essential features like auto-reporting for CE vendors may be a high priority, but would take much more time and effort to achieve.

• Mobile would come later, as observations revealed that a web first approach is more conducive to the users’ needs at this time.

Organizing the System

Information Architecture
To understand how best to build out the key features of the solution, I developed a card sorting exercise with the goal to learn how architects would expect the tool to be structured. I ran the exercise with 3 architects. Each organized the information slightly differently, although a few commonalities arose.

Architects:

• want to see a breakdown CE requirements for multiple jurisdictions and where they overlap

• prefer a visual to show progress (data visualization)

• need the ability to manually upload CE course information

Exploring the Solution

Sketching & User Flows
I began sketching ideas for how the components of each feature might be organized on screen based on the architects’ categorizations of the information. To support the sketches, I developed user flows to describe the interactions on screen. Low-fi prototyping allowed for a quick feedback loop with the architects, which validated whether the features I was proposing would address their core needs.

Defining the Solution

Wireframing & Annotation
Once my initial designs were validated, I chose to create a wireframe of the key features with annotated functionality and interactions. I presented the wireframes to the architects, and they provided valuable feedback which I used to iterate on the design. This was also useful when presenting the value of the features I had chosen to create to key stakeholders.

Bringing it to Life

Prototyping—Presenting to Stakeholders
After multiple iterations on key features I was ready to bring the screens to life in a clickable prototype. I designed interactions based on a few use cases that would demonstrate how key features would function and ultimately serve the customer. When presenting to stakeholders, I demonstrated the complexity of the problem and how the solution could look and function. The presentation sparked important conversations around business goals, serving our customers, and the best approach to getting a working solution out in a timely fashion.

The Outcome

The insights and recommendations I presented influenced the strategic direction that key stakeholders would ultimately present to the Board of Directors. Based on my research and findings, an explanation of the essential user needs, and demonstration of product functionality, leadership decided that building a custom solution would require time and internal resources that the organization wanted to focus on other priorities. Management chose to seek-out existing software that would offer most of what I had presented as key features for the product. A partnership is now underway to deliver a solution as an extension of the services NCARB provides for architects and state boards.