Creating a flexible tool to manage workplace engagement
Epoch seeks to improve employee engagement through event management. Their initial request was visual interface improvements to a minimum viable product. I learned the experience of how people wanted to use the product was different and the product I designed needed to respond to this.
The existing product assumed a linear series of actions, I studied and learned that starting from multiple points was preferred. This is the story of how I brought that to life.
I worked with the founding team on the event creation and announcement feature flows and UI; creating the images you see here.
Who
www.epochapp.com
Duration
3 week agile sprint Spring 2020
Team
3 person design team, engaging full-stack engineer, and founders
Role
UX /UI Designer, UX Researcher, Client POC; Created the graphics you see here
Insights
The existing product assumed a linear flow. My research showed people want a more flexible starting point.
The existing flow required logging information into a table to essentially build an autofil library. This became more cumbersome than assistive when users wanted to start their work from multiple points. I learned this through 1:1 remote interviews and surveys.
Remote testing showed facial expressions and increased on verbal insights
Mapping trends led to insights around the mental model
Paring survey and interview data
Insights to Reality
To mimic how people were already working, I tested schemes where events were like 'documents'.
Treating an event like a document would allow users to treat events as 'templates', 'drafts', and 'existing' events which could be duplicated or reused as the starting point for creating an event. This was key in allowing the flexibility to match their workflow.
If an event is a document the problem was actually how to create an interface for document management. Experimenting with layouts for this required thinking about the hierarchy of information shown, and scaleable ways in which to show that information. Two ideas in my wireframing began to emerge and explored 'card' like elements and folder or dashboard home screens for navigating them.
Distilling down the most important information with expandable horizontal tiles and vertical event cards.
Solution and Reflection
Results
“I’m thoroughly impressed… I think it was really great that you had such a strong understanding of our customers!"
- Jade Choy, Epoch Founder
Next steps for the project are to test through implementation and iterate on the project given real use. This product is ready for development and is considered in the roadmap by EPOCH.
Insights
I was inspired by overcoming unavailable testing by cold calling on folks in the industry and conducting user interviews 1:1. The ability to interpret the process form the target user's perspective while maintaining flexibility opens this product up to a larger use case and growth.
Lessons learned here were around getting focused with balancing the user and business goals early. In future projects, I'll drill down to the essential goals earlier in the process, so as to test objectives and KPIs through the research inroder to more efficently define the problem.
