Overview/Challenge

Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) is a platform in which your workplace communicates. This incorporates team messaging, project management, collaboration tools, and more. Viewpoint Enterprise is a dashboard application that tracks, measures, shows trends, stats and other important analytics. Competitive applications literally had no graphical interface and were mostly glorified spreadsheets. Our primary challenge was to create a highly intuitive and impactful experience that wouldn’t require a data Scientist to understand it. The primary user for this product are managers of social or community, human resource, marketing and IT.

Process Insight

As with most projects and as part of the process, I always ensure there is a competitive and inspirational analysis completed as we start to dig into the requirements phase. This helps all parties get aligned with regards to trends, competitive applications – who’s doing it well (or not) and perhaps finding a unique opportunity for a feature or function that doesn’t exist. Typically, when an approved wireframe goes to UI, there is a healthy amount of interpretation – For example, maybe the wireframe has a progress bar at the top. A UI designer may decide that it’s better suited as a progress ring and it should be hidden by default until there is activity. The takeaway is that good UI isn’t just putting color and skin directly over a wireframe – there are strategic interpretations that happen throughout the process. This project was a bit of an exception. Over a two week period, the team and client had numerous whiteboard working sessions iterating and refining the wireframes to an unusually high level of detail. In the end, there was still a healthy amount of interpretation but they ended up looking closer to the final designs than they would have with our typical process.

Influencer Detail Screen

Project Artifacts/My Role

Artifacts are what helps get us to the finish line. They inspire, inform, advise, and align while all serving as a catalyst for brainstorming, iterating and refining our ideas into great experiences. Below are a few that I cherrypicked for this project including some inspiration, an alternative influencer screen, onboarding flow and more. My role was to own and drive the vision from concept to final product. Inward facing, I worked closely with the creative team to help them explore and push their ideas as far as possible. I also served as a bridge between the various disciplines to ensure consistency and open communications. Outward facing, I and a senior member of my team worked closely with the client ensuring our strategy and vision were aligned. This fostered lots of trust and trust helps motivate the team to explore and produce their best ideas.