WorkChat
Lead UX/UI design effort at When I Work to introduce a new communication platform into the product.
Initiative
As internal teams received consistent customer feedback, it became apparent to our stakeholders that communication between employees and employers continued to present itself as a pain point, getting in the way of achieving smooth scheduling and shift management. By introducing WorkChat, When I Work was able to offer a solution to ease communication issues and ensure employee privacy.
Core problems
- The communication methods were varied and inconsistent, creating extra work for both management and staff members.
- Current communication methods exposes employee contact information to other staff members, creating opportunity for abuse and harassment.
Goals
- Quick to market with growth in mind
- Track usage for analysis and feature enhancements
- Create a solution that's easy and familiar
- Introduce a work-specific communication platform into the scheduler-a tool already being used by customers
Role summary
- Define flows and functionality for mvp and feature enhancements
- Create interface from wireframes to full design execution
- Ideation and collaboration with Product Manager
- Present concepts to engineering team and core stakeholders
- Collaborate with dev team on SDK capabilities, limitations and implementation
MVP
The initial MVP included 2 phases:
1) Get a single group chat thread created
2) Evolve chat to have 1-1 and group messaging capabilities
With a high focus to getting WorkChat quickly to market, we defined the basic feature requirements and utilized the chat SDK to get a workable feature in front of our small business customer base with little development effort up front.
Combining business objectives, SDK capabilities/limitations and competitive/visual research, my goal was to create a chat feature that fits within what the core users are accustomed to using; alleviating confusion and providing familiarity.
Group and 1-1 flow:
Feature enhancements
With an effort to make the product an essential utility for the hourly workforce, delivering value through intuitive and personalized experiences is crucial. Future feature ideas focus on contextual and automatic functionality such as rich text format messaging, smart groups and predictive messages based off of the users schedule.
Following the initial kickoff with the development team, the Product Manager and I started defining the next set of features. Analyzing data and discussing with internal expertise, we found dropping a shift was one of the more common user actions and had a fairly simple workflow. I proposed we use this as our first enhancement, building toward rich format messages.
Results
By successfully introducing WorkChat into the current product, When I Work was able to offer a valuable solution to solving a core organizational issue our customers face on a regular basis. Internal teams will continue to track usage, gather customer feedback and track performance in order to inform feature enhancement decisions and prioritization.