Desktop app refresh
WEBEX PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
MY ROLE
Interaction designer
KEY CONTRIBUTION
Identify the issue
Arrange the user test around the new design direction
Deliver the interaction solution for desktop application
ABOUT PROJECT
One of the most interesting give aways from our user research is, lots of our customers have no idea on how to using the productivity tools desktop panel. The impression of the panel was useless since it looked like a collection of shortcuts.
In fact, this desktop panel had most of the feature they were looking forward like meeting list, incoming meeting notification, etc. It's worth to rethink the design solution if we can increase the adoption of the desktop panel.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
01. Risk management
One of the biggest push back for this new proposal was coming from the engineering team. For some technique reason, the new proposal changed the infrastructure of the panel which might brought some risk.
02. Cross design team collaboration
When we started the design proposal, we were in the middle of the re-design of the design library. At the beginning, we had to adjust our proposal every time there was any change on the library. We reached out to the team and discussed the strategy of how to collaborated with them for alignment.
Research
This is the original version of productivity tool desktop panel. It seems pretty clear that user can start a meeting , join a meeting or schedule a meeting from this panel.
However, from the standpoint of user, it was so confused with so many actions listed on the same page. No primary action recommended, no indicator of what will happen if clicking any of these actions.
UNDERSTANDING
I aggregated the list of features supported in current tool and mapping with user journey independently. There are 4 critical user journeys we want to support by this panel:
01. Attendee joins meeting
02. Host starts meeting
03. Host changes settings of a schedule meeting
04. Host schedules a WebEx meeting
EVALUATION
I created a low-fidelity prototype and run a cafe study to evaluated the design solution. 7 of 7 participants has no issues to complete the tasks assigned in the cafe study.
Compared with the original version:
01. Increased the average time of joining a WebEx meeting .
02. No significant increase of schedule meeting.
03. Increased the average time of start an instant meeting
The cafe study also pointed out the ambiguous around WebEx settings and meeting settings. I iterated on the settings after the cafe study.
LESSONS LEARNED
User data is better than thousand words
To get the team on board for this UI refresh, I studied the user feedback for past 3 months. These data helped to illustrated the major problems and set the direction.
User data is better than thousand words in the process of pitching.
Apartment from the design iteration, there were several things I want to call out in the process of pitching on engineering team and collaborate with design system team.
Communication is more important than iteration
We had a hard time for visualized the interaction solution since we jumped in this project in the middle of the re-design of design library.
As an individual designer, I could not catch the updates from the design system team in time which required more iteration as we expected for finial delivery.
Never wait the PRD for design solution
The success of the UI refresh reminded me that as the design owner, we should never wait the PRD for a design enhancement proposal.
As a designer, I should never stop to propose concept for improving the user experience. In most cases, the team can implement the improvement eventually.
SOLUTIONS
Here is the updated WebEx productivity tools panel, which had been released in 2015 with thousands of positive feedback from our customers.
