How to co-design an outdoor activity platform and app in 18 months, remotely

The challenge: develop a cross-team web project remotely

The need: create from scratch an online platform focused on recreation and tourism

The Department needed to create a digital platform to allow its tourists and residents to discover outdoor sports and nature activities that they can enjoy in many places of the region. The specifications were extensive: in particular, the aim was to create an interactive experience for the user, while also working with England on the tourism aspect, as part of the European Interreg project.

The context: working remotely with multiple partners

The project started in February 2021, in co-development with the 5 administrations of the community (the Pas-de-Calais department) and 3 external partners, such as the departmental Olympic committee, through workshop sessions with 10 to 15 participants each time.

Given the pandemic at that time, it was impossible to meet face-to-face in a room with the various stakeholders involved in the design of the project. Therefore, an online medium encouraging the participation of each stakeholder was required, in order to work and move forward together despite the restrictions.

The solution: combine the features of Klaxoon's Board with methods like the persona

The choice of Klaxoon’s Workshop Platform

While he was used to leading workshops with traditional sticky notes and meeting room boards, Sébastien, like many of us, had to turn to digital tools during the Covid crisis in 2020. With his team, he studied several solutions, and they settled on Klaxoon.

Why? "First of all, because it's more than just a digital whiteboard. It also allows you to do Quizzes, Adventures, Polls, Sessions that combine a whole bunch of activities. And also because it’s a local French solution, which is already used by most of the departmental councils here (editor's note: more than 40), so it's pretty well established. And then, we were ourselves convinced that it was the most suitable tool compared to the other tools we had tested before.”

Sébastien chose Board to conduct the project. He organized several remote workshops, each time with about 15 participants from the department and partner organizations. Starting from scratch, it has taken just 18 months for the project to get the finalized platform live!

The methodology for developing the platform

To build Escapade62.fr, the design team needed to fully understand users' needs, to imagine themselves in the shoes of future users and order offer them the best experience when they connect.

• The team started by defining their personae: “We drew up a list of personalities together; for example, Jérémie the mountain biker, Véronique the sports beginner, etc.” This gave them a series of personas with a whole list of data.
• “The next step,” continues Sébastien, “was to ask ourselves who is the target of our product and to agree on this target, and then to go into detail for each of the personae.” For each persona, the team then identified their frustrations and motivations, and asked themselves the question “How will we meet their needs?”. Sebastian explains: “We did this work on about ten typical personas that we felt were important in relation to the objectives we were aiming for, in the targets we had previously defined.”
• Next comes the user journey: for each of the typical user, the team asked themselves what their “journey” will be through the app. They imagine the best user experience for each persona, from the home page, through their searches, filters, results view, etc. 
• The team also used the Remember the Future method, which allowed them to look back on the app’s successes, to find areas for improvement before going live. The combination of the different methods used in the workshop allowed them to have the most complete and detailed picture possible.

Choosing the platform publisher with Board

It's not insignificant when Sebastien Ramon explains that the project was carried out from A to Z in Board. It didn't stop at the project co-development workshops:

One particular thing about what we did with the team working on Klaxoon, is that it's what we used afterward to contact publishers.

Sébastien and his team shared the Board with the two competing publishers, so that they could review the full project.

Once the publishers responded, the team created a new Board with the criteria for evaluating those publishers. This was done asynchronously. “We assessed them together,” continues Sebastien. “We put in a whole bunch of information about what the publishers had done before, what they were able to commit to, and what they weren't able to commit to. And then, we all voted.”

In Board, Voting Questions are here to allow the team to vote for a publisher. Having all of these criteria laid out in front of them, right on the Board, helped the team with their voting. It allowed them to choose the vendor that met the most criteria, while anticipating the missing criteria to make sure they covered all the project's needs.

We wouldn't have realized these things if we hadn't conducted this workshop.

The result: a successfully completed project, along with other lasting team rituals

The main benefits Sébastien Ramon noted when using Klaxoon in this way are “the way of successfully bringing people together, unifying them, making them work together, making them ask questions, in other words, making them creative through the tool.”

And as the consultant highlights:

Klaxoon also allows us to keep the value that was produced, and to be able to reuse it at the next workshop. You don't lose the content, so you can build on what already exists. And that's really interesting.

Another significant benefit is the ease of working remotely with Board. "The entire team never physically met with each other until the app was delivered, and yet that wasn't a constraint at all. On the contrary, it reduced travel time for some of our colleagues working from other departments, or external partners.”

Sébastien uses Klaxoon on a daily basis, through methods he quickly adopted with Board

Beyond project management, Sébastien very quickly embraced Klaxoon for the team management aspect. Indeed, his team's role is to create cohesion, synchronization, and to be able to make assessments. Here are his top 3 methods for team management (3 methods you can find in our template library):

• The Niko-Niko calendar: “Every morning when teams sync up, it allows them to share their mood, say if they are doing well, or not so well, if they have something to share with the team. It comes from Japan, and it allows us to know the state of the team's morale. That's important in our team.”
• The retrospective: “Teams reflect on their activities and missions, identify obstacles and drivers to find actions that will allow them to progress.”
• The morning team meeting or daily meeting: “It allows us to manage daily tasks, priorities, etc. This way, we can also keep in sync as a team on what we are doing, in order to have an overview of the topics we are each dealing with, and to properly identify any difficulties that each of us may encounter, so that we can act efficiently.”