Having worked in professional services myself, this challenge was a perfect matchup for me. Managing multiple clients - the pressure and difficulties that come with it - was no stranger to me.
Hi! I'm Maayan, Head of Design at Ovvio and in this piece, I will be talking about the mission we took upon ourselves as #OvvioTeam to make life easier for professional services employees. And more specifically, I'll be giving my insights into our research and conceptualizing process from a designer's perspective.
How did it all begin?
Ovvio SaaS platform was designed by engineers and strategists with a shared concern for the lack of work management solutions in the market. I joined this great team to improve usability and overall experience, and started the redesign -of course- with deep research!
Our defined users, employees from professional services sectors, have a hectic work environment and an impossible rhythm. Keeping track of multiple team tasks, their priorities and progress; as well as client and team meetings that create new agendas every day is a huge undertaking for each project. In this type of work schedule, using a work management solution that is absolutely right for this purpose is crucial.
With all that said, it was clear that the platform needed to be simple, straightforward and meaningful.
The Mindset: Keep it simple, make it meaningful.
What if by using intuitive UX modules we could help the professional service industry save time and money?
To extend my familiarity with the subject from my previous work experience, I started with understanding our users’ journey alongside a market research. I used design thinking tools to create empathy maps and conducted interviews to extract all of the user pain points. The research and prototyping stage took many different methodologies and steps, including:
Product discovery, subject matter expert interviews and user interviews, to better understand the personas, tasks, and workflows.
Prototyping and creating wireframes.
Validating prototypes through user testing and approval from stakeholders.
High-fidelity design mockups with a unique design system that matches our brand and story.
From problem to definition
Our potential users work mostly on Microsoft environment tools; together with my favorite app - an actual paper notebook (or notes) and a pen! With this in mind, I went into researching the current behaviors and tried to adopt and implement them into our interface.
Another challenge was to design a software with a diversity of solutions for different personas, in different positions, with a variety of needs -all in the same platform, while keeping it straight-forward and self-explanatory. Well... Good luck to me ;)
It’s all about embracing simple mindset shifts and tackling problems from a new direction.
I focused on two main user personas -
The "Project manager" and the "Team member".
The initial goals were:
To increase productivity for mid-low managers
To increase collaboration and improve communication in project teams
To allow more work time and less fussing around…
Problems are always "Opportunities". Just a different perspective.
To finalize the discovery phase I came up with 5 main opportunities and used the HMW (How Might We) questions method to phrase the next steps:
Project success depends on the communication between team members. This might be tricky when working with multiple teams on multiple projects, communication and data failures might occur.
1. How might we reduce the error range caused by communication failures?
Receiving tasks from multiple sources can cause confusion, perplexity, and disorder.
2. How might we help team members in keeping all missions in order and on schedule?
Reporting to multiple people in the process, requires time, which is a rare resource…
3. How might we reduce the time required to update and stay updated on project status, organize and transfer data between all people involved?
Managers are often unsure which part of the process in which project is complete and which isn’t.
4. How might we empower managers to feel confident that each part of every project is fully done?
Managers often don’t know what the workload is on each team member. This can cause overload on some, which will have an impact on projects’ timeline.
5. How might we enable a high-level view of multiple projects and teams' status to ensure projects stay within their schedule?
Aiming for solutions
Here are the 5 main building blocks of our intentional UX flow and ever-growing UI design world at Ovvio!
1. How might we reduce the error range caused by communication failures?
Collaboration. Well, that's one of Ovvio's fundamentals... Automatic and immediate collaboration for each new note. Assigning tasks as part of taking meeting minutes and having them instantly be shared with your teams and clients. Moving tasks from phase to phase or from one team member to another in an instant. All live and breathing.
2. How might we help team members in keeping all missions in order and on schedule?
Task/Note tabs: By separating the different kinds of data, team members can easily focus on the missions on their table without getting lost in all the documentation of the project.
Views and filters: Allow each user to choose what they want to see and how to view their data.
Pinned tasks: Users can prioritize their own workload by pinning the tasks they want to accomplish at a certain time frame. No other team member can see their preference, however it allows to "clean the noise" and offers a focused workflow.
3. How might we reduce the time required to update and stay updated on project status, organize and transfer data between all involved people?
Drag and drop or Instant tag update: Move tasks from phase to phase or from one teem member to another in instant. Everyone in the shared project will see it live. Relevant assignees will get notified.
4. How might we help managers to feel confident that each part of every project is fully done?
Kanban view by status: Managers can choose to view data in high level; a simple filter by project/s in columns by status, will give a quick view of all tasks and their current condition.
Simple "Check box": Each task can be 'checked' by a simple click which automatically changes the status tag to "Done". The more simple and intuitive the action is, it is most likely to be done. Team members are swamped and the idea is to keep it simple and save time, rather than add more to their hectic schedule.
5. How might we enable a high-level view of multiple projects and teams' status to ensure projects stay within their schedule?
Advanced workspace menu: Workspaces can be projects, clients or any other way of categorizing work flows. Having an advance workspace menu, which is always visible, allows an organized art-board showing as much projects as one chooses to view at a time.
Advanced viewing and filtering: Allow each user to choose what they want to see and how to view their data. Kanban or list, grouped by any tag from status or assignees to a unique tag determined by the organization.
Next up is: Pt.2 - From definition to solution, a road through ideation and prototyping to materialized UI, translating our superior features into benefits for our core users!