The Launcher Redesign Project
Co-authors: Mariya Ilieva, Daniel Tsonkov | Illustrations: Yova Bogdanova, Pragya Gulatee
Introduction
Workspace ONE for mobile has grown from a simple app catalog to a diverse app suite, with apps for accessing email, document management, and even note taking. But one Android app that continues to add value to customers is Workspace ONE Launcher, and yet you’ve probably never heard of it! That is because Launcher is an app that users don’t even know they’re using.
Workspace ONE Launcher is downloaded on over 2.5 million shared devices, serving as the device home screen for millions of frontline workers.
The use case is simple: create a uniform device experience across all Android devices that can be managed and configured from our web console.
For years, Launcher served customers well. Functionality such as blocking restricted content and apps made it a necessary add-on to Intelligent Hub for kiosk and single-use devices. We launched Check-in Check-out Mode through Launcher, allowing users to log into the device as themselves and access only the apps assigned to them.
But since its release six years ago, we were yet to update the Launcher user interface. From a product perspective, we were facing an array of issues that we felt could be solved by a redesign.
- Fragmented UI: Over the years, we had released features to improve the Launcher experience, including an inactivity timer and passcode profile. As we continued to introduce features, we lost coherence in the user experience.
- Inconsistency with Android’s design language: Since 2014, Android has changed a lot. Our core UI was designed off Android 6, and starting 2021 customers were beginning to adopt Android 11. Consequently, our app was standing out as being outdated and in need of a refresh.
- A focus on end-user experience: Today, employers focus on their frontline workers more than ever. For us, this means equipping their employees with technology that is both functional and easy to use. Due to the reality of these high-turnover jobs, it is important to employ technology that is easy for new employees to learn and use.
Starting the Process
Our product team knew that the Launcher redesign effort required partnership with UX to get it right. Up until now our relationship with design had been mostly contractual — calling on their help, feature by feature. But this time we wanted partnership from the beginning, and we were lucky to have the UX team participate through the entire customer research process.
As part of user research, we conducted interviews with some of Launcher’s major customers. We created a template in Miro featuring important discussion questions with visuals from the current UI to help guide the conversation. Participants were asked to drag stickies on to the board and type in their answers. Then we discussed each comment in detail. The customers were very engaged during these interviews, and some of them requested a follow up session to continue the conversation. Many customers shared that their users wanted to log in and out using a 4-digit PIN, or by scanning a QR code on a badge. We also found that there were customers whose users wanted their rugged devices to deliver more by way of communication and collaboration.
All findings were documented in the form of affinity diagrams. This helped us identify common usability issues, shared use cases, and feature requests among different customers. Based on these findings we defined two personas, identified the right problems to solve in the next design phase, and prioritized solving the most common usability issues first. To fully understand the usability issues, one of the designers decided to test Launcher herself. She had to first configure her device from the console just like an admin would. There were many settings, and she ended up communicating daily with PM and engineering to ensure that her device configuration mimicked the one customers have.
Many user flows did not make sense at first. For those cases the user interviews proved extremely helpful as they provided context and helped us understand why the current experience was not working for some users.
Bringing in Engineering
It was common practice for us to introduce completed mockups to engineering. While this process was efficient, it often lacked consideration of technical limitations and architectural constraints. So instead, this time we kept engineering close. We formally did this through a joint slack channel and bi-weekly meet ups where both engineering and design could surface their questions.
We conducted a UX audit of the current design that was largely facilitated by the engineering team. They provided background on why previous decisions were made, and how user experience ultimately affected the technical design of Launcher. In the long run this saved us time because our talks always stayed in scope, and the team provided early feedback on the feasibility of specific changes.
Vivek Kumar, Technical Staff, worked closely with the design team, and identified UI elements that could not be easily implemented in our UI architecture.
Some of the early decisions included:
- Foregoing transparent overlays to avoid potential performance issues on less powerful devices. Design was revised to address this problem.
- Limiting customization of native components (e.g. navigation bar) as there is limited support for custom components on Android
- Implementing a dynamic sizing grid to support multiple screen sizes and dimensions
“Design teams focus on usability and the experience aspect of products while engineering teams are more attuned to considering security, performance, and feasibility. By working together, we were able to optimally balance the above aspects and quickly produce the right design. Working with the design team also helped us get a broader picture of the product while improving our understanding of Material design and tools like Figma.” — Vivek Kumar A N, Technical Staff
“It was a great experience. We modernized the whole look and added newer and modern components. We used the latest APIs and methods, something we didn’t do very often before. We made Launcher more robust, and picked off bugs and glitches that would have been ignored before unless an ESC came in. It was great to experience this proactive approach. It was a great learning experience, too. It was also very helpful to work so closely with the UI/UX team and understand how the experience could be improved with the correct practices of UX design. It was pretty amazing to get recognized for it as Launcher has always been kind of a second thought for so long. It felt great to see our work on display to the world.” — Neelabh Parui, Technical Staff
Design
From a UI perspective, we wanted to accomplish several things with the redesign:
- Tackle accessibility issues
- Match design language with Material design standards
- Eliminate inconsistencies in some screens.
Detailed UX research formed the cornerstone of the redesign effort. It provided us with invaluable insights into daily use cases, and shed light on struggles users faced while using Launcher. The redesign process was also a test for Vision, our mobile design library, as we evaluated if it could emulate a near-native experience and interface.
We wanted to lay the groundwork for a scalable and modular user interface that evolved naturally with the product. This meant standardizing components across flows and features that we could reuse easily. We knew that this would reduce development time significantly and provide designers with a solid starting point for future work. The engineering team worked closely with us, and their efforts were a major contribution to the quick and effective overhaul of Launcher.
After the UI was designed, we followed up with customers from the initial research and tested the new experience with them before moving to implementation. This step was crucial since we had a lot to learn about specific use cases and web console constraints.
Project Output
In 9 months, we completed our first iteration of the product redesign. But stating it as simply as that would be an understatement. During this period we completed a cycle of customer and market research, UX/UI explorations, feasibility conversations, scoping with engineering, and release of the final deliverable.
Additionally, we are also glad to have discovered a newfound partnership across our functional teams.
Takeaways
- Following a collaborative process and incorporating research from the very beginning helped us identify the right problems and validate the impact of these future solutions on the product, the users, and our customers’ business.
- Interviewing and testing with customers was key to the redesign. Such initiatives are often hard to organize in an enterprise environment but with the help of account and product managers we managed to accomplish that goal.
- We were able to build quickly because we communicated efficiently even as a global team. A combination of asynchronous communication and scheduled meetings kept the team connected and on the move. This level of communication has worked for our team, but it is important to find out what works best with your team.
- Checks and balances across product, design, and engineering ensured that we were always listening to the customer, the business, and building a quality product.
