UX / USABILITY

Unified Mobile Client for Infinity

Sector :

Company :

Time :

Challenge :

Business Communication

Enreach

1 year +

Designing both iOS and Android Native Applications, which would be one of the important parts of the Infinity Project of Enreach that is the unification project of all companies within the group.

My Work :

Research, Strategy, Ideation, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Layout Design, Wireframes, Flowcharts, Various charts and maps for idea visualisation, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Guiding UI Design processes, Using Enreach Design System, Search and application of and applying native patterns, Following and improving epics and stories and working in an agile structure by providing solutions for backlogs, Attending to refinements and reviews, Aligning with desktop and web teams to provide a consistent solution across platforms, Working on and defining UX design patterns that can be included in the Design System.

As this is a still ongoing project that is not released yet, I will be able to give limited information on the results, but will more concentrate on how I am working in the project and what types of responsibilities I have.

Infinity project can be defined as a unification project for over the 15 companies that are a part of the Enreach group. All these companies spread around Europe are marketing their own solutions at the moment, but through the infinity project the product families will be unified and with a sister project the brand identities of these companies would be joined as Enreach only. I am working on the mobile projects of these product families as the leading UX designer.

Research

The research part of the project was a conducted in combination with another project that was concentrating on creation of the brand identity and a brand strategy. In a bigger project together with some support from outsource teams we worked on providing a service design strategy.

At the beginning, we did interviews with our customers and also end users in different markets and countries. I supported this research by conducting or attending as tan observer to the interviews made in Germany. I transcribed these interviews, reviewed them and prepared Empathy Maps as the first step of analysis of the gathered data.

Empathy maps prepared after interviews

My reviews and empathy maps were utilised as the data from German market. All the data from different markets were gathered for defining Customer journey maps and Personas and Company Profiles for the whole group. Together with an outsource research company, we made workshops to combine and analyse these data and understand problems and needs of different user groups and potentials that our various companies can provide.

In our current product designs and projects we are working on this research data gathered and analysed during this period.

Biggest challenge in the project was needing to consider different companies, their customers, their markets and the end users of all these different companies. The researches and analysis of them provided a good conceptual background, but we needed to understand them with the details of their products and solutions. Because of this consideration, we made expert reviews on current products of different companies in the group to be able to understand them better. Personally, I did reviews of several products, which also resulted in improvement of the current solutions, which would be in the market at least until the infinity products' releases.

Sample screenshots from Expert Reviews

At the beginning of the Ideation Process, I designed a map that I named as Goals-to-Functions Map. My aim was to

Define User Goals in interacting with such an application
Define the necessary functions that should be provided by such an application to be able to respond to these goals
Think on the ways these functions might be provided to the user Define possible menu groups in such an app and their relation to each other in possible different use cases
Provide a map which can help thinking on the possible use scenarios

This early ideation map was defined as the main concept map for all mobile and desktop clients. A map that lists all the possible goals of users and relates them to possible feature sets. The next step was answering on "how?", which guided us defining the main navigation and information architecture. In the light of the previous exploration I prepared our product's early flow charts for mobile.

Goal-function map

Early flowcharts

Design Strategy and Idea Mapping

Design in Agile Processes

In this project, I was working both with iOS and Android teams in an agile structure. I was working in close contact with Product Mangers and Product Owners. In shaping processes of epics and stories I also provided support to them, which helped also conceptualisation of more user-centric products.

In detailed design processes after a general design ideation, I followed epics and stories to shape detailed flows and screens, in continuous contact, discussion and alignment with PM, PO and developers. Our main workflow

starts with me by understanding and exploring epics and stories, exploring design solutions with sketches and with additional research processes. Later on, I vizualize those solutions as wireframes and user flows for both iOS and Android apps seperately as native applications.

I am sharing my solutions with our design lead and other designers for feedback. In the next step, I present important topics to PM, PO and development teams mostly in refinement sessions and gathering feedback over them. I make changes if any is needed, before handing them to UI design processes. I am also conducting sometimes guerilla testings to validate my concepts. After early UX design process, I am guiding UI design processes and development processes in terms of UX concerns, e.g. providing further documentation or clarifications if it's needed. Lastly, I am also providing feedback to implemented results in review sessions.

IxD in Action

As mentioned my detailed design process starts mostly with sketches and paper prototypes especially if the topic is rather complex one.

I am preparing various versions of visuals such as wireframes, flow charts, sitemaps or tables according to the needs of the projects. In some cases I use low-fi (with wireframes) or hi-fi prototypes (if UI screens are already designed) to explain the interactions, detailed behaviours of design elements, or to explain detailed building blocks of complex components or screens.

Another big challenge of the project is that we needed to provide consistent experiences with both desktop and web applications, since the users were supposed to use both platforms in different contexts.

As the general strategy was 'mobile-first' design and implementation, I need to predict as possible the adaptations of the mobile solutions to the desktop app. While working on mobile solutions, I do sometimes sketches and wireframes for desktop applications. Additionally, I work with PM, PO and designers of desktop clients in close communication, share the mobile solutions with them and discuss to consider also the desktop requirements.

As mentioned earlier, this project is still ongoing. So, I cannot share yet more details about design or project results. However, I can say that taking an important role in one of the most important projects of one of the most biggest companies in business communication, and trying to solve complex problems by working within several teams at the same time in an agile structure is certainly a challenging but invaluable professional and personal experience for me.