Screenshots of previous messaging experiences.
Conducted preliminary research through existing user qualitative and quantitative data.
I began the project by understanding current user pain points through chat history, data analytic report and feedback from customer success team.
Through the research, some outstanding user problems include:
- Scattered communication experience: Users were constantly switching between different channels (email, text, and in-app messaging) to communicate with us, thus resulting in loss of messages or important updates.
- Who am I talking to? Ben or Gabie: Due to an unique workflow different from industry standard, users were often confused who was their point of contact with Nomad or how to get in contact with us.
- Communication overflow: When every single event triggers an email or text message, users got communication fatigue and thus caused them miss the most important messages.
Map out an ideal user joureny based on exisiting knowledge.
I then visualized the user journey to think through what an ideal user flow could look like based on what we knew and what would be some assumptions to validate.
Brainstorming sketches.
Now that I feel I have had a good understanding of the background and user needs, I started to brainstorm some potential ideas to solve the user problem.
Design critique with the design team
I shared the new design concepts with the design team and together, we did a design critique exercise.
6 rounds of moderated user studies to evaluate the concepts.
I conducted 6 rounds of moderated user studies to evaluate the concepts. Users were presented with 2 different designs in random order and were asked to finish the same tasks through the 2 designs.
Finding 1 - Centralized ≠ Everything
A centralized communication experience doesn’t mean everything will need to surface in the messaging thread. It depends on the type of communication and to surface through the right medium.
Proposal 1 - Communication Suites
Categorize different communication needs and surface them through the right medium.
Categorize different communication needs and introduce a notification center to inform users about an event that does not need immediate attention or personal reply. Prioritize direct messages corresponding with a text or email to get more attention and reduce overall number of emails.
Finding 2 - Active VS. Passive
The 2 different concepts resulted in 2 different behaviors.
From observation, the chat interface prompted users to be more action-oriented while “gmail” like design resulted in a more “passive” behavior despite the fact that users preferred the first design more as it was easier to track application status that way.
Proposal 2 - Organized Application Tracking
Based on finding 2, I proposed an addition of communication touchpoint to help users stay organized with their application status.
Users’ true needs behind liking concept 1 was a way to track their active applications more easily. I proposed an addition to our communication flow where we inform users about their ongoing application status.
Finding 3 - Human touch = responses & attention
Human touch is something that makes the experience more personal and very likely to result in responses as well as user retention.
Together with PM and Engineers, we identified the MVP use cases and sequencing.
At this stage, I felt I was in a good shape of design directions, so I started to have conversations with the PM and engineers based on what we have learnt so far to identify the core use cases and what the potential MVP would be like. And the sequencing of improvements that we want to introduce.
Designed a new proposal to incorporate with operation team's current work flow.
Once we have identified the MVP experience, I then began to work with the operation team to incorporate this new experience into their workflow and what were some optimization we can do to improve the existing operation experience (that was within scope).
HI-FI Design & Usability Testing
An animation example I did to communicate with engineer teams for development.
Before I finalized the design, I conducted 5 rounds of usability testings with our users. Once I felt confident from the results of the usability test, I started to work on final pixel-perfect designs and animations to work with engineer teams for development.
