Team collaboration and chat application.
Komunikator is a business tool that creates a collaborative environment and improves task accountability amongst teams.
Role
Product Design & Strategy
Timeline
Sep 2019 - Mar 2020
Motivation
Increasing productivity and efficiency
The idea behind Komunikator was to build a product that could streamline internal communication channels of a business and enable managers to stay updated on the operations of a product or team at scale.
01 Product Thinking
Working in intense collaboration with founders from various industries, scheduled weekly planning meetings and follow-ups to understand business/user requirements, defined priorities and understanding product goals.
02 User Experience & Interface Design
Using design methods and co-creation workshops to identify opportunities and then transform them into easy to use solutions. Created an interface design and further collaborated with an engineering team, to develop the product in regular sprints.
Main Practices
Business requirement gathering, user interviews, brainstorming, wireframing, interactive design, rapid prototyping, usability testing, cognitive walkthroughs.
Problem
Most businesses communicate through messages or phone conversations, even today. These channels are error-prone, disorganized, and do not provide accountability. It also becomes a nightmare for managers to track employee operations, and person-to-person communication is prone to forgetfulness and misinterpretation.
Current solutions like WhatsApp, Teams and Slack, are designed for communication. They do not address the problems surrounding accountability and collaboration for large teams with a growth mindset.
Key Pain Points:
01 Lack of accountability
02 Mismanagement of tasks
03 Decreased efficient
04 Sub-optimal performance
How can we create a user-friendly business product that facilitates collaboration, motivates accountability and equips business managers with valuable insights for enhanced decision-making?
There is a wide range of users in any business process, and each group of users has different pain points and goals. To better understand these characteristics, we mapped five user personas:
01 Radhika — Sales Representative
02 Manish — Manager
03 Tanisha — Executive
04 Anam — System Admin
05 Kamil — HR Manager
User personas of our three main user groups (Employees, Managers & Sales Representatives)
We created a UX Design process with consistent 1-week iterations. To ensure we were defining our product strategy optimally, we collaborated with industry founders constantly during the entire iteration, which made our process faster and more efficient.
Monday - Tuesday
We had meetings with founders every Monday and through user interviews, surveys and analysis, we could narrow down on the user requirements and prioritize tasks according to the users and business goals.
Tuesday - Wednesday
We brainstormed and organized co-creation workshops to come up with the key features to implement in our product. Further mapping the features using user flow diagrams, we honed our product design.
Storyboards created during one of our workshops
Thursday — Friday
We created low-fi prototypes to iterate and communicate the thought process and strategy to the stakeholders. After stakeholder reviews and taking their feedback into consideration, we moved to a well-defined pixel-perfect and polished version of the interface, to be tested with end-users.
We created a set of tasks to test the usability and efficiency of Komunikator. Users from different user classes were asked to perform the same set of tasks while we monitored the outcome. Our user testing attempted to answer four basic questions:
01 Will the user try and achieve the right outcome?
02 Will the user notice that the correct action is available to them?
03 Will the user associate the correct action with the outcome they expect to achieve?
04 If the correct action is performed; will the user see that progress is being made towards their intended outcome?
Read Case Study
Issue No. 1
The Issue Faced - Users were finding it difficult to navigate through any particular page we asked them to go to.
The Issue Identification - We identified this issue to be with the lack of naming at the bottom navigation bar icons.
Proposed Solution - This problem was easily resolved by adding name tags to respective navigation icons.
Issue No. 2
The Issue Faced - Users were unable to distinguish amongst various flag associated with each card.
The Issue Identification - This issue was traced back to a lack of familiarity with the icons.
Proposed Solution - We tackled this issue by proposing an initial walkthrough and also stripped down the number of icons in use by replacing them with relevant lettering (e.g Responsible Icon - "A star before" was replaced by an overlay of “R” on the user’s profile).
Issue No. 3
The Issue Faced - It was difficult for the users to navigate through media options (Finding a particular media file).
The Issue Identification - We associated this problem to difficult navigation in the media panel. Also, the description of media presented to the user was limited.
Proposed Solution - We proposed tab-based segregation of images (Images, Voice, Documents). This made it easier for the users to find documents by type. We were also able to accommodate more description based on the files type.
01 Ideate + Design + Validate
Working with short feedback loops and intense collaboration with stakeholders exhibited the progress made at the end of each iteration. It became easier and quicker to find and fix design flaws, ensuring an efficient design process.
02 Designing Our Own Process
This project enabled me to connect with people and learn more about the challenges in their life. I was able to design solutions that would make their life easier, and it helped me gain a new outlook towards Product Design.
Since its launch, Komunikator has found its way into a couple of business operations. The most notable being at Entod Pharmaceuticals, where 500-1000 of their employees carry out the tasks and discussions on the app daily. Some metrics that were reported by Entod:
Over 67% offshore employees reported a improvement in collaboration amongst their team.
Entod users 65% less dependency on emails and WhatsApp.
28% fewer follow-ups were needed to be taken for an allotted task.
The average user at Entod spent an average of 1.26 hrs daily on the app.
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Made with lot's of love and a little bit of magic
© 2023 Swapnil Shinde
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