An integrated Message center on the 2nd screen
Deep inside a designer’s mind, there is always a dream to truly innovate and create a feature user loves. When I worked on the 3rd party application integration of the HTC U Ultra 2nd Screen project, I came out an idea I think it may be the one I can be proud of — An integrated Message Center on the 2nd Screen. This can be the feature I worked and felt pity the most for its not releasing. I asked myself, is there anything I can do better? It comes to me a lot of wondering and learning about leading a team and being a good designer.
2nd Screen project is driven by the HW capability, we have the small display panel first and then we work our best to make is useful. This is not an ideal model, but it happens. The advantage of having a 2nd Screen are clearly the capability of multi-tasking and quick actions. But how to enable the multi-tasking in good sense and have different quick actions in different context is the key. They are some good features can be done by our own, quick dialler, an always ready currency converter when in travel, a zoom gear for a smooth zoom when in video recording… But to deep integrate with 3rd party apps is much harder, especially when we have only 3 months to ship this project.
One day, when I was jumping between my several IM chatrooms, an idea suddenly came to my mind and I know this is it. We can leverage the Android Notification system to show chatroom bubbles on the 2nd screen for user to navigate between chatrooms quickly. At least in TW, people can have more than one IM app and I don’t need to say how frequent a smartphone user chatting with IM a day in different chatrooms. The notification list calculates and rearranges itself with new notification, we just need to filter out supported IM apps and show the chatroom profile photo according to the order of the notification list. Yap, I do simplify how this feature can be done a little, but it’s useful and feasible, I was exciting. This feature was chosen as the KSP of the device, then to work on other important topics, I was asked to hand-off this topic to my team member who is in charge of all other 2nd screen features except to the 3rd party application integration.
I was busying on several other important topics, and I barely don’t have time to follow up this topic. When I was able to check the status again, this topic is ready to be dropped. The project team tried to grow this feature up, user can long press on a chatroom bubble to take a peek without worrying the read with no reply issue. But they went too far and left no enough time to do everything fundamental good. I really wanted this feature can be done, but it was too late.
When I looked back on this design journey a few months later, I got some insights and learning. I don’t think I do a bad job as a designer on this task, but as a leader I failed. I do care my team members, I don’t put too much pressure upon them, I make sure our discussion is inspiring, but I don’t spare enough time to them, I was too eager to be a good designer as well. My team members were mostly very junior on UX design at the time. I thought if I took those heavy topics my own, this can have them more time and room to grow. I tried to be a nice leader but it’s not actually nice to them. I feel sorry for the feature which was not able to ship, I feel sorry to my members for not having enough time to mentor them, but I am glad I do learn things from this journey, and I feel I can be a better leader next time :)
