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experience designer ( UX, IxD, ID, Usability )
Sector :
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UX / UI / USABILITY
SwyxIt! Instant Messaging Application
My Work :
Business Communication
Swyx Solutions GmbH
6 months
Designing Instant Messaging Solution for Desktop as an integrated solution to Swyxware applications.
Research, Ideation, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Layout Design, UI Design, Assets preparation, Prototyping, Preparing Ui Guidelines for dev. team, Review reports on implementations for iterative improvement
Swyx was a company concentrated mainly on voice communication over IP and data visualisation systems related to this field, but it was making new investments on more integrated communication channels such as Instant Messaging, video conferencing and collaboration solutions especially after becoming a part of Enreach Group. This project was a part of this new strategy and future-oriented improvement of the company.
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In this project, I worked with Product manager and Product Owner of the project closely and had an iiterative process with the development team in an agile structure.
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Research
The Swyx IM project was my second project in the company' during which time I was still working as a part-time designer. The topic was new to me. Thus, my early research was a big exploration on the topic, which covered a general research on current IM solutions, the best practices and in the area, reading and thunk on the differences of "chat" in standard and business contexts, etc. I also explored current Swyx products and tried to understand the mental models and brand identity that are provided in those applications, to be able to follow and reflect it in the new application.
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The next step was trying to understand the users and customers of Swyx products. Swyx is a B2B company and the target market of Swyx is SME companies in Germany. B2B strategy at Swyx doesn't make a big difference in terms of design considerations, since we need always consider the end users. A good percentage of Swyx users were people working in service or call centers or employees doing their jobs mostly on phone, but the new strategy of Swyx was already extended the user groups to almost all sectors coming from telecommunication, manufacturing, IT to medical, etc. There were already company personas built and I used mainly those to structure possible user needs, habits, contexts.
Challenges
The main challenge in the project was that my being the first and only designer in the company. Since being a part of Enreach group, they has been already started to work with designers remotely, but this was very limited, and many of my team mates were not having a workflow that included designers and clear design processes. I needed to open up a space for design inside their standard workflows and also to show them what the design accountabilities and concerns are. As I was the only designer I needed to take the initiative of refining the workflows and processes.
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A second challenge was directly project related. I wasn't the designer who started with the project. One of the remote designers already made a quick start with this project, and created a rough layout. And the implementation was already started in the light of this main layout, which I was not allowed to change because of the time concerns. So I needed to define all sub screens all interactions, placement of all the content and components according to this predefined lay out and try find solutions following it.
SwyxIt app in the market at the time
The early layout provided at the beginning
Because of having a B2B structure and especially because of time & budget constraints, I was not able to have direct contact to end users. However, I needed to create a product that would be easy to understand and use for the current users of the Sywx products. To try to understand them, besides checking the style guides previous researches and products of Swyx, I made organised or arbitrary meetings with current colleagues who have a rather close contact with customers that are receiving end user feedbacks. This helped a lot in constructing an idea on the needs of users and possible needs.
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Strategy
Considering all the data and knowledge that I gathered, I defined my aim to provide a "minimalist", and "task-oriented" product that would work in sync with other applications of the company. I started with defining the main user flows aroun d the main user goals.
IxD & Visual Design
After defining the needed screens and steps, I started detailing the early rough layout of the main screen which followed composing the main interactions, links to other screens, behaviour and detailed flows. As I was also responsible for the UI design of the product, my visual explorations were also developing parallel to my interaction design processes. Although making the process much complicated, it helped in evolvement of visual solutions next to interaction needs.
Sample screens from the final design
As we were working in an agile management structure, after designing the main concept and general structure of the app, I started to work directly according to the backlogs of the sprints and started to provide designs needed in each different sprint by a different team. In those next steps, we were working on detailed interactions, additional features and improvement of current details. I provided a lot of feature specific solutions, and presented them in various ways according to the needs of the topic or the people that I am working with. Topics like, sharing various media types, integrating additional features, integrating our solutions to other applications, improving search functionalities, etc... The improvement of the product is continuing in an iterative nature.
Storyboard on the design solution for integrating Swyx Meeting solution to the IM solution
Some parts from a guideline shared with Development Team
A sample review that I prepared before a release
This project was very important for my career where I closely worked with German colleagues, and was able to create a new workflow inside the company that covers also design processes in an iterative manner. I was able to finish the project in the necessary time frame with positive results although working part-time for most of it. I think, I was also able to show (at least raise a question in minds on) that design can create great value for companies if it is included as an important part inside the work processes. At the end of this project, when I got allowed to work full-time in Germany, started to work as a full-time designer in the company and the group.