Hello guys, here I am, to share a brief case study that I’ve done recently for an UX interview.
Here’s the context:
I applied for a product designer job at a French start up company, they’re specialised in creating new features under Microsoft SharePoint environment. I passed an interview with their product manager and he gave me a 2–3h case study to do at home.
The project goal was to create a component that will allow their client to communicate automatically on their newcomers. And also to prepare the wireframe of this new WebPart. Don’t need to go very far in the UI.
There’re also several project requirements:
• Identify several use case
• Address all aspects of the feature : Users, Clients, functionality
• Create a modular component that can adapt in several display
• Organise your work to transmit it to the dev team
Now let me walk you through my design thinking process for this case study.
Design thinking process
Before I started to solve this problem, I created a short roadmap which helps me to have clear ideas on my directions. As what the project manager has already said, I don’t need to go far with the UI part. I decided to work from empathize the users till create the mid-fi wireframes. As the work itself should only be done within 2–3h, obviously I don’t have time to do a large-scale survey or even testing on each steps.
So I defined some minimum viable deliverables throughout my design thinking process, which you can see in this chart below.
Understand the market
Well, to be honest, I’ve never worked under SharePoint digital workspace before. I didn’t know how it looks like nor its competitors. So I conducted a quick market research of SharePoint and also some of its direct and indirect competitors that I googled online.
I compared their features and as we can see from this analysis, SharePoint is like a combination of intra-net and digital workplace. Which means it has a potential to gather many different powerful features inside of it.
Some qualitative data
As I mentioned before, I didn’t really have the time to conduct a survey. But it’s essential for a UX designer to have insights from the users, because what we’re trying to solve or creating are based on users’ needs and pain points.
So I decided to do a quick interview with my friends to gather as much information as possible. I then talked to 5 person from different industries and different countries about their opinion on displaying new employees in intra-net.
Here’re some quotes:
“I only want to see display of new comers who will be in my team, otherwise it’s irrelevant to my work. It could be useful to see this organisational chart when you click on their profile.”
Jessie, Business Analyst | Lotus AutoMobile“Well, I always prefer to have a choice. I’d like to customize it by myself whether I want to know or send messages to new comers or not.”
Fang, Marketing Director | Fashion
Key findings from affinity diagram
I really appreciated the feedbacks from my friends, they’re quite new and surprising. I categorised them into 3 different groups by needs, pain points and feelings.
This helped me to find out these data driven key findings:
•80% are interested to see new employees displayed.
•60% think they prefer to have the option to only see people who are related to their work.
•20% want to be able to greet new comers with AI programmed welcoming messages.
Define
With all the information I collected, I then created this user persona — Friendly Anna, she wants to connect to new employees of her company but also she prefers to have the option to see people who are related to her work.
Problem statement
Colleagues need to find a way to be informed of the new employees who will work with them and their work related information because they don’t know who are new to the company and how to connect with them.
Ideation
At this step, I need to ideate possible solutions based on stakeholder’s requirement and also users’ demands. From the stakeholder’s part, communication is the essential feature to have. As far as what we’ve learned from the users, a display shows basic information of new employees and a personalisation option seem to be very important.
For each pillar, I brainstormed some possible features, for example, we can have AI welcoming messages input or it could have a suggestion based on new employees’ department.
Low-fi sketch
I had these assumptions before I design the low-fi sketch:
•Users already onboarded on office 365 account
•Users already chose the related department on settings
•Users can click the profile image to send msg
Mid-fi solution
Here comes my mid-fi solution based on all the research and information I have had during my design thinking process. You can see the explanations of every atomic of my design below.
Final thoughts
I’m quite happy with the outcome, especially given the time constraints. It was not easy to put together a research-driven digital solution in 2–3 hours but I think I was able to illustrate the core user experience and feature value proposition.
With more time, I would:
• Do a survey as well to avoid biased insights.
• Test my design with users, and iterate based on feedbacks.
• Design a filter to allow people to choose departments that they want to see new coming employees.
• Go further on UI part and to implement it into the Sharepoint digital work space.
Hope this brief case study can give you some ideas on how to succeed yours in the future!
