Activity “Now” view
The Brief
Firstline Workers form the backbone of many of the world’s largest industries and this workforce represents considerable untapped market opportunities for Microsoft. The goal of this project was to maximize firstline worker efficiencies, streamline communications and deepen connections through Microsoft Teams.
My Role
I led the design and execution of this project rederfining the activity module of Microsoft Teams to be optimize for the requirements of front line workers while still remaining a powerful hub for organizing the communication of information workers.
The existing design
The activity app on Microsoft Teams is the user’s primary way of triaging their notifications throughout the M365 ecosystem and accounts for over 40% of the apps active usage. The existing design of the activity app was optimized for the usage patterns of information workers whose workday communications are far more complex as compared to front line workers who work on a more linear schedule. Even for the information workers, we had received feedback that the amount of information that surfaced in the feed could get quite overwhelming at times resulting in a fear of missing out important content.
Identifying signal vs noise
An open card sorting exercise was run with active Teams’ users to determine the associations they formed between the different activity types that showed up in the current feed and also some of the newly proposed activities and to get a sense of the order of priority between these.
In the initial phase of the task, user’s were asked to classify the cards into as many groups as they wanted followed by a task that narrowed it down to two distinct groups.
Learnings from the card sort
This study gave us insights about the order of priority in the user's mind.
Activity items that directly related to the user or that needed a clear action from them. (meeting invites, voicemails, missed calls, personal mentions, replies, team expiry update)
User’s wanted to be notified immediately for these activities.
Amongst the newly proposed activities there were several activities which demanded immediate attention from users but also lost relevance beyond a certain timeframe.
These were activities like meeting reminders, shifts, tasks, team expiry, errors etc.
Amongst the newly proposed activities, there were several activities that demanded immediate attention from users but also lost relevance beyond a certain timeframe.
These were activities like meeting reminders, shifts, tasks, team expiry, errors etc.
Talking to the customers
As the obvious next step we reached out to some of our existing customers to gain insights about their interaction with technology.
The key difference lay in the way these two groups handled their communications.
*Names and images are representational
Observations
User Persona
1. Information Workers (IW):
Work on multiple device form factors.
Communication happens in bursts during the workday and continues even after the workday had ended.
Their key expectation from the app was to be able to separate out important communications from the lower priority ones.
Communication pattern
2. Firstline Workers (IW):
Uses Teams primarily on mobile.
Communication is linear, action-oriented and on a need to know basis.
Excess communication outside of their role is not useful and can be confusing.
3. Firstline Workers Mangers:
Hybrid persona that switches between both desktop and mobile.
Communication style matches the pattern of either FLWs or IWs based on the time of the day and has a mix of the communication requirements of both
Key challenge : finding the common threads
The biggest challenges of designing a solution for the opposing use cases was managing the difference in information complxity required by them. While one group needed to just see the next set of tasks they had to complete, the other group needed a predicatable list of communications which they can their prioritize actions on. With the limited screen space in mobile it was important to identify the hierachy of information in a way that made sense to both groups.
Early ideation
During the early phase I led an exploration of a wide array of divergent UX approaches and analysed each option on the basis of their merits and demerits.
The “Now” view
During the early phase I led an exploration of a wide array of divergent UX approaches and analysed each option on the basis of their merits and demerits.
Motion explorations
Card arrival
Scroll behaviour
Card state change
Establishing the principles
In order to determine the principles of what deserved a place in the “Now” section, it was important to establish a set of principles around the same. In order to achieve this we looked at the data from the user study earlier and combined it with our own understanding of each individual feature and after several rounds of iterations inc collaboration with 3 different teams we set them down as follows:
A. Critical for the user to know within 5 seconds of opening the app
B. Is dismissable
C. Must have an expiry period after it becomes stale
Based on this the following were determined as the scenarios that belonged in the now veiw with the following interaction principles:
Shift card
During the early phase I led an exploration of a wide array of divergent UX approaches and analysed each option on the basis of their merits and demerits.
Urgent messages
During the early phase I led an exploration of a wide array of divergent UX approaches and analysed each option on the basis of their merits and demerits.
Task card
During the early phase I led an exploration of a wide array of divergent UX approaches and analysed each option on the basis of their merits and demerits.
Taking a step back.
While designing for technology and business use cases on the tightrope of timelines it is easy to forget who our customers are as indivuduals. Once we had landed the primary user experience and had made sure we had a usable product at hand I decided that it was time for the team to pause take a step back and consider the emotional aspect of designing for a group of people whose job functions were quite different from ours. The idea was to go back to our earlier research insights and delve deep into the emotional experineces of FLWs as individuals.
Who are the FLWs as individuals?
Branding explorations
While designing for technology and business use cases on the tightrope of timelines, it is easy to forget who our customers are as individuals. Once we had landed the primary user experience and had made sure we had a usable product at hand I decided that it was time for the team to pause take a step back and consider the emotional aspect of designing for a group of people whose job functions were quite different from ours. The idea was to go back to our earlier research insights and delve deep into the emotional experiences of FLWs as individuals.
Branding for Now cards
While designing for technology and business use cases on the tightrope of timelines it is easy to forget who our customers are as individuals.
Simplified interaction
While designing for technology and business use cases on the tightrope of timelines it is easy to forget who our customers are as individuals. Once we had landed the primary user experience and had made sure we had a usable product at hand I decided that it was time for the team to pause take a step back and consider the emotional aspect of designing for a group of people whose job functions were quite different from ours. The idea was to go back to our earlier research insights and delve deep into the emotional experiences of FLWs as individuals.
