2019
Mosaic
ROLE
UI/UX Design, Design Lead
Overview
Mosaic is the productivity tool that provides firms and businesses an efficient way of managing ever-growing number of projects and team members. As a first designer on the team in 2015, I was fortunate to take part in the endeavor to revolutionize team and project management and be involved in an exciting journey that took us where we've never imagined as the product has scaled.
Objectives
Key Results
- Decrease the number of back and forth of emails by increasing transparency
- Cut down unnecessary meetings
- Increase team's productivity and efficiency
- Better workload management
- The number of emails a member receives and sends has decreased by 24% average.
- Time for a Monday meeting has cut down by 30% (avg 35 mins from 50 mins) since all members have all team members' latest status updates in hands.
- Managers spend less time assigning tasks and distributing workloads.
Problem
Many organizations and teams which rely on traditional spreadsheets to administer their work are struggling from lack of proper communication and task management. Currently, existing tools that aim to aid that problem are either limited in functionality or have complex dashboard interfaces that intimidate people to get their hands on. There are additional overheads associated with team meetings, delegating or assigning work and, searching for project related information.
A singular tool that can handle communication, project scheduling and budgeting and task management in one place would solve a lot of these issues and Mosaic envisions to help these organizations to track projects and foster effective communication between teams reducing time, scheduling and tracking overheads.
Discovery
People use the product differently depending on the role, tasks or expertise. To understand the workflows of our different types of users, my co-designer and I tried to gather as much insight as we could about the parameters that affect their work, and how that, in turn, affects the company. The goal was to understand the following
- Identifying the internal hierarchy of the company
- Generalizing the primary focus of each role
- The bottleneck of each user's current workflow
- How to empower users to focus on their work and improve their productivity
The organization structure in a quintessential Architecture-Engineering firm
The structure of a project: a building inspection
Pain Points
While surveying people, we've studied that these are their pain points:
“With all of our communication over different channels, things get lost in transit or are missed out. It’s difficult to keep track of the latest requirement or expectations. A singular channel to manage projects, task assignments, documents is required”
“Going back and forth over email hampers productivity”
“If one project goes off schedule, the rest of projects get off schedule and we need a way to manage that"
Insight
After the initial contextual inquiry with different members of participating organizations, the following insights were obtained:
A Generic Overview
- Managing small teams becomes very cumbersome when there are a lot of projects
- Higher management needs an overview of on-going processes and projects
- Employees want to plan their assignments which change on a daily
Project Management
- Each employee and manager work on multiple projects simultaneously
- Project schedules depend on one another
- Owners need an overview, managers are concerned with scheduling and budgeting, workers deal with the execution
Task Assignment
- Employees note down each day's tasks on paper
- Tasks are weighed in terms of deadlines and priorities
- Tasks are reviewed and approved, after which they're considered done
Communication
- Many things get lost in email threads and text messages
- Some tasks and projects updates need to be tracked and communicated in real-time
Concept
The insights gained from contextual inquiry and user interviews, we've created the information architecture and low-fi concepts for primary use cases. We began to conduct heuristic analysis with the low-fidelity mockups which were then paired up with a cognitive walkthrough.
For each primary use case, we asked the following questions:
- Will the user try to achieve the right effect?
- Will the user notice that the correct action is available?
- Will the user associate the correct action with the effect to be achieved?
- If the correct action is performed, will the user see that progress is being made toward the solution of the task
User Groups
Owner
Needs
An overview of the company
Wants
Track the progress of the company
Experience
12 YEARS (Entrepreneur)Usually in the office on a desktop
Tasks Performed
Check the progress of projects- Check-in with project managers for issues
Project Manager
Needs
To report to owners immediately if there is some issue
Wants
To coordinate projects and delegate work to subordinates
Experience
MBA in Operations, 5 Years Work Experience. Usually in the office on a desktop or a call
Tasks Performed
Connect and coordinate work with project members- - Assign tasks and track their progress- Analyze findings to make important decisions and see performances.
Engineer
Needs
Needs a list of tasks to perform
Wants
to report findings and update seniors with project status
Experience
PE License, 2 Years Work Experience, Bachelors in Structural EngineeringUsually in the office on a desktop or a call
Tasks Performed
Taking pictures and reporting status on job site- Completing assigned tasks before the deadline
Wireframes
Solution
A project management solution that reduces the effort spent by team members on low value, administrative tasks allowing them to deliver business value promptly. A platform allowing to view, plan, manage and track all the work done across the company efficiently.
For this solution, Mosaic consists of three main spaces: Home, Team and Project.
Home Space
Overview
Home manages the day to day of each user.
Who uses this?
Every Employee
What is this?
It’s the central dashboard allowing users to see all the tasks assigned to them, and all the projects they are a part of. This includes projects across different departments. Everything expected of an employee exists on this screen so it’s easy to know what is expected and what needs to be done.
Team Space
Overview
It the grouping of various projects by teams. You can see the project updates by the members working on it. Over iterations, we've included other project-related elements to display, such as project activity, timeline, and progress.
Who uses this?
Project Managers | Stakeholders handling projects or teams
e.g. Human Resources, Financial, Design
What is this?
This space shows a particular group of projects which can be department or activity-specific. This can also be a giant project broken down into its constituent parts.
Project Space
Overview
Clicking into a project from Home or Team space opens up the Project. Each project has several modules that are project-specific including task groups, notes, timelines, budgets, etc. Users can manually add any ongoing updates to this project for anyone to see.
Who uses this?
Stakeholders | Project Managers | Employees
e.g. Website Redesign project, Building #2 Parking Lot Restoration
What is this?
This space contains tasks can be assigned to members and aggregated notes containing all the documents of the project. There are specific modules called views that can be added to provide extra functionality as per project requirements. Each module performs its specific function.
Usability Testing
We tested the product at various stages of the project - hi-fi prototype, beta testing on pilot server and the final live product.
Test group consisted of 3 architects and 4 engineers from AEC firm in New York City to get feedback on the functionality, workflow intend, and interactivity of the product. They helped us find usability issues early on and identify edge cases for us to study. They also helped us run QA session after the feature delivery with prompt feedbacks and reports on issues.
Conclusion
While Mosaic has shipped a set of features that will satisfy day to day tasks on most teams, our team didn't stop there. We have received much feedback from customers and they were open to sharing their pain points and needs. After a series of discussions on how to make Mosaic better and reach to the broader audiences, we've mapped out the roadmap with exciting new features: Timesheet, Workload planner, Company Dashboard, third party integrations, and more administrative features.
Of course, there are many areas that I'd wish to improve on. For example, missing a full library of design components in a single source of truth caused us to spend much more time creating the same solution over and over again and the app suffered inconsistency of elements here and there. The design system has become the hot topic among designers along the way, it'd be the perfect solution for those problems (So I've built it).
Now that I have become a former employee of the company, Mosaic won't stop to fully become what it first envisioned at the start, I can't wait to see how it evolves in the future.