Communicate more while working remotely: research and prototyping of a solution.
Rapid research, ideation, and prototyping of a solution to the most frustrating part of a remote collaboration — communication.
As a UX designer, I was tasked with creating a solution for a collaboration application that would add value to users by helping them connect and collaborate more effectively.
Client
My client OptiMize is a non-profit trying to leverage community to allow members to work together remotely, in a way that adds value to their process. They want to get more people to use the platform and help users to become more efficient in their daily communication with colleagues.
I was wondering what are the problems users are facing in their current remote communication with colleagues? What would improve their communication process?
Research
I decided to start my research with user interviews, to better understand the challenges in the user’s daily collaboration. I chose this method as the most time-efficient. While creating a research plan I started to think about interview questions. What questions would help me to get the most informative answers?
Drawing a collaboration mind map in my sketchbook helped me to structure my thoughts.
Who would be my interviewee? Employed users and entrepreneurs working with digital products. Working professionals. Adults 25–65 y.o.
Locations of the interviews: at a local museum and on the street.
I needed to know how users collaborate with their colleagues, what they don’t like about their remote communication, and what could bring an improvement to their daily experience❓
Questions
Examples of the questions I asked:
1. How often do you work remotely?
2. How do you communicate and collaborate with colleagues in the office and remotely?
3. What are the pain points in remote communication with your colleagues?
4. What would improve your daily communication experience?
5. Tell me about your most recent group brainstorming experience.
I interviewed 7 people: 3 males and 4 females, age range from 23 to 65. Most of them are working professionals, one student.
While going through my interview notes, one trend stood out to me from the answers. Users were expressing their frustration about having to deal with so many different collaboration tools every day. They were saying they would love to have “one general application” or “a single tool for both, online meetings and messaging”.
Problem statement
The app should help users to ease their daily collaboration to minimize the effort they put into daily remote communication with their colleagues. The app will bring additional value to their process by offering different options for group communication in one place. Unfortunately, many users find frustrating the use of multiple tools for communication with their colleagues. Users are willing to have all communication tools gathered in one app.
I proceeded to secondary research to check if the problem my users facing was already met. Secondary research showed that the problem was existing: the most frustrating part of remote collaboration showed to be communicating with colleagues.
Solution
My application will bring user’s daily communication to a new level. Instead of using several different tools for communication with their colleagues, they will have all the features they need in one place. My application will allow users to make video calls, sending messages, assign tasks and share files without leaving the application.
Ideation
I started my ideation with user flow to understand how the user gets from the directory to my feature and how will navigation work in my app.
After user flow from the splash page to my feature became clear, I proceeded to sketch wire flows.
Wire flows brought me to paper prototypes.
Testing and feedback
My paper prototype got tested during a testing session. I was able to gather valuable feedback from my users:
- Way to navigate back
- Some of my icons were misleading (phone icon to video icon, envelope icon to chat icon)
- During video call there should be button to open the log
- Too much thing s one the screen -> swipe menu bat up an d down
- Contact list — add small phone icons nest to the name, to be able to call directly to this person
- When assigning tasks -> note to your inbox
- Today’s window — responsive, trash, check out
💡 During feedback session people really liked the idea to be able to create a task during the video call.
Clickable Prototype
Taking feedback into account I created a clickable prototype in Balsamiq (see GIF below) to allow users to interact with the product.
The original prototype can be clicked through here.
Next steps
Here are my suggestions to the client based on my research, feedback, and prototyping.
