THE CHALLENGE

Improve government and business professionals’ access to timely and quality government insights.

THE OUTCOME

A web-based platform and mobile application with services in News and Alerts, Legislation Tracking, Regulation Tracking, Data Analytics, and more. 

Overview

Bloomberg Government is a subscription-based web and mobile service that provides comprehensive government information and analytics for professionals who interact with, or are affected by, the government. It delivers aggregated data, visualization and analysis tools, and breaking news alongside original analysis from policy and contracting experts. BGOV helps government and business professionals make decisions more effectively and efficiently.

Problem Statement

How Might We improve professionals’ access to timely and quality government insights?

Government professionals struggle to make sense of various sources of data, news, and information to support timely and effective decision making. Business professionals affected by government regulations and decisions struggle to gather information from various open data sources and often do not have the tools to synthesize them into meaningful insights to support business decision making.

Users and Audience

• Government Relations Professionals
• Government Contracting Strategy & Business Development Teams
• Federal Agency Officials
• Congressional Staffers
• Business Professionals

Team and My Role

As part of a ~100 startup team incubating within Bloomberg, I was one of 7 Business Analysts on the software delivery team. I orchestrated research, design, and development efforts for two products: News and Alerts, Data Analytics.

Collaborating with 2 Subject Matter Experts (proxy users), 1 visual designer, 1 representative from data team, and a rotating team of software developers, I was responsible for gathering and detailing business, technical, and user requirements, prototyping interactions, facilitating co-design and scoping sessions with stakeholders.

Constraints

• Data sources varied in reliability and quality, design needed to remain flexible 
• Bloomberg’s legacy analytics infrastructure constrained user experience options at the web layer
• Coordinations across product teams under timeline constraints shortened exploratory research 
• Competing products and existing user habits constrained innovative features (for example, real time news update feature was constrained by existing media production cycle norms)

Design Process 

1. First, I gathered business requirements from various stakeholders
2. Then I conducted interviews and process observations with two proxy users (Subject Matter Experts): a government news journalist and a data analysis/former congressional staffer
3. I also gathered and documented data and system constraints from the engineering team and data team
4. Then I prototyped ideas for interactions on paper using low-fidelity prototyping tools 
5. Next, I socialized prototypes with key stakeholders, and combined business requirements, user requirements, data and system requirements to narrow down interaction design options
6. Next, I worked with visual designer for hi-fidelity representations of key interactions, especially data visualizations
7. Next, I worked with business stakeholders to scope and prioritize development work into iterations and participated in tasking sessions with engineers to adjust scope as needed
8. I supported development and testing through iterative development sprints
9. Finally, all business analysts conducted feature showcases for organizational stakeholders within Bloomberg

Retrospective and Lessons Learned

• When working with a data-centric product, it is essential to stagger data sprint ahead of design and development sprints
• It is a challenge to balance user, business, data, and system constraints, but do-able
• Co-design sessions are great for surfacing cross-functional constraints
• Frequent, detailed, and proactive communications serve to glue together a cross-functional team 
  
• When in doubt, encourage and help each team member visualize their assumptions
• Know when to get out of the way and to let accidental discoveries speak for themselves