THE PROJECT

Bateman Group is a technology PR firm based in San Francisco with an East Coast office in New York and remote employees in Oregon and Ohio. With the company expanding at a rapid pace, Bateman Group worked with a software development agency to create an internal smartphone app for its growing company.

A few weeks after launch, Bateman Group found that very few of its employees were using the app.

CHALLENGES

  • Conflicting business goals and user needs
  • Technological constraints of the original design
  • The absence of a clear value proposition

Key Goals:

  • Identify the causes for low app usage
  • Redesign the visual interface
  • Decrease lengthy task flows
  • Improve overall usability

ACTION

This project allowed me to use a variety of techniques to gather the most valuable information. Some techniques I used to get to the final product include:

  • Conducting in-depth user research with:
    • Contextual inquiries
    • Ethnographic research
    • Surveys
    • Usability testing
  • A SWOT analysis and feature assessment
  • User stories and storyboarding
  • A full redesign of the profile and directory functions

RESULT

After analyzing the user research, sketching and testing different iterations of the app, I proposed the following solutions:

  • Adding "swipe for action" interaction to the directory to decrease the length of the call and email task flows.
  • Rearranging the current navigation to live at the bottom of the screen for easier access to important features.
  • Redesigning the user profile interface to give users a more creative way to express themselves to their colleagues.
  • Adding an onboarding experience for first time users to clearly detail the value and functions of the app.

Full disclosure: Bateman Group decided to pull the plug on the smartphone app before the changes I proposed went to development.

Design Process

Discover

CONTENT ANALYSIS

During the content analysis I reviewed current task flows, assessed possible points of user frustration and developed a list of hypotheses that I later tested.

The analysis revealed a number of possible user frustrations including lengthy task flows and a confusing feature hierarchy.

Selected screens from the original Bateman Group app for iOS - home screen, directory and employee profile.

My Hypotheses:

  • If I add "swipe for action" interactions to the employee listings in the directory, users be able to complete important tasks faster.
  • If I redesign the employee profile interface to be more customizable, users will be able to get to know their co-workers better.
  • If I design an onboarding experience, new users will understand how to use the app quicker and will utilize the app more regularly.

USER RESEARCH

With my hypotheses in mind, I interviewed 6 Bateman Group employees about their work habits and current interactions with the Bateman Group App.

Key Findings:

  • Employees are always on the go.
  • Employees don't feel connected to co-workers in other locations.
  • Currently, employees are searching their email inboxes for the contact information of their co-workers when they need to call them

USER TESTING

Preliminary user testing helped me understand how users were already interacting with the app. I used this info to support or refute my hypotheses and uncover other sources of frustration or opportunities for experience improvement.

From my testing, I found that users had issues:

  • Understanding the features of the app
  • Navigating through the app
  • Making phone calls quickly (Some users spent upwards of 15 seconds trying to complete this task)

Define

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT

After discussions with Bateman Group leadership and Bateman Group employees, I created two personas to better understand who I was designing for.




Over-Booked Oliver

Oliver is constantly in and out of the office and needs to contact his team members back in the office frequently. Currently, Oliver will email or text co-workers when he is out but hates searching his contacts or emails for phone numbers.

Behaviors

  • Out of the office at least 50% of the time
  • Uses his smartphone to communicate with team members, reads emails and complete tasks when he is on the go
  • Uses apps like Twitter and Medium in his spare time

Goals

  • Oliver wishes he could find team members in the directory quickly and call them immediately
  • Oliver wishes he could organize the people he calls the most into a group



Newbie Nancy

Nancy is a new Bateman Group employee, based in the San Francisco office. While most of her teams are also in SF, she's had email exchanges with her co-workers in New York. Nancy will hopefully have the chance to meet her New York colleagues in the future, but for now she doesn't have a relationship with any of them.


Behaviors

  • Works primarily with San Francisco co-workers
  • In the office at least 90% of the time
  • Uses apps like Slack (for Desktop) daily to communicate with team members

Goals

  • Nancy wants to express herself to her new team members, even if she won't meet all of them in person
  • Nancy wants to learn more about co-workers in other offices

USER STORIES

I boiled down the needs and goals of Oliver and Nancy into a group of user stories to better design features for them.


Here's one of Dan's stories:

"As a busy PR professional, I want to stay connected to my teams so that I can conduct business seamlessly whether I'm in the office or not."


And one of Nancy's:

"As a new employee, I want to get to know my co-workers so that I can form friendships at work."

TASK FLOWS

Before I started sketching screens, I designed new task flows for making phone calls, sending messages and editing a profile. Below is my proposed task flow for making a phone call.

Design

Armed with a pretty solid stack of research, I moved on to sketching and wireframing.

I designed recommendations for a new employee profile interface, an interactive directory and a new-user onboarding experience.

SKETCHES

WIREFRAMES

Lo-Fi Wireframes



Hi-Fi Wireframes

Deliver

PROTOTYPE

Hi-fidelity prototype of the onboarding, profile and directory interfaces

Debrief

The last step of my process is always a quick debrief. During this time I reflect on what worked, what didn't and how I can make my workflow more efficient.

CONCLUSIONS

While it's unfortunate that the project never made it to development, I enjoyed working with the software development team. In the future, I'd get them more involved with the actual design and research processes.

I'd also do a better job of understanding the constraints before I started the work. This time around I paid a lot more attention to business goals and user goals and didn't consider technological constraints as heavily as I should have.

RECYCLE BIN

One of the most interesting parts of my design process is going back and reviewing all of the ideas that didn't make it into the final prototype.

A couple of those ideas include:

  • The ability to create multiple teams from the directory.
  • Two floating buttons in the directory that would allow users to view employees in either the San Francisco or Brooklyn offices:

LESSONS LEARNED

Design processes have to be flexible. While it would be nice to move fluidly from step 1 to step 2 and so on, new constraints can easily throw you off course. The test is in being resilient and keeping your pace instead of being slowed down.

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