Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Product Team Lead
Project Duration
- February to June 2021
Team
- 1 Product Designer
- 1 Junior Product Manager
- Tech Lead and 6 Engineers
Background
Rapid growing team without management and collaboration tools
As an interior design platform, Collov was focused on expanding its team of interior designers to keep pace with the rapid increase in customer base. Cross-functional teams were tasked with completing hundreds of cases weekly. Previously, they relied on various spreadsheets, an internal case assignment system, and task management tools. However, this workflow and system setup proved to be unsustainable for a team that is expanding quickly.
Business Objectives
What were we trying to achieve?
- Support fast growing interior design team
- Reduce average case turnaround time
- Sustainable workflow that reduce number of tools involved
User Goals
What are the users trying to achieve?
- Streamlined workflow for design case pick-up and management
- Support cross-functional teammates and use cases
- Centralized space that reduce cross-platform collaboration
Constraints
What restrictions did I have to consider?
- Required manual steps that for quality reasons
- Features development needed to be phased on new platform
Responsibilities
What was I responsible for?
- Led user research to understand user behaviors and patterns
- Architected the new workflow
- Led end-to-end interaction and interface design
Understand how teams split tasks and collaborate
In Collov’s fast-paced setting, there was no clear workflow for handling and allocating tasks upon receiving customer design projects. I observed that the design lead and operations team were juggling various tools and engaging in frequent communication with colleagues. To grasp their key interactions and challenges, I initiated a research project with the interior design team, closely observing their processes.
Designer workflow research analysis
Insights from shadowing
By shadowing dozens of interior designer and gathering insights, I learned about how they picked up design cases and split tasks. Some of the key challenges in today’s workflow were:
- Tasks assignment is one of the most time-consuming and manual phase.
- Designers had a hard time to manage their daily tasks in current system, especially when they need to request for more time on the tasks.
- Each revision required design coordinator to check and assign the tasks, which created unnecessary waiting time for the manual process
- Sourcing check created major revision works and delays.
Meanwhile, design managers and team leads had a hard time to visualize designer’s performance or readjust during peak seasons. Some of the key pain points were:
- Interior design team used 3 different platform to track the case, which made the information scattered all over the places.
- Data are limited and not visualized clearly on team performance and growth overview.
- Team leads had to manually assign task time to each project or client.
- HR also relied on the statistics to calculate commission and payroll manually.
The Challenge
The workflow, especially case assignment and sourcing was extremely manual and inefficient. A centralized platform is needed that share information and accommodate flexible views for various roles in interior design team.
User flow
Mapping the experience
Based on the interview, I mapped the standard workflow on a interior design case. By separating customer interaction, automatic system, backstage interaction, and external system, I was able to visualize how different user groups interact with each other and identified bottleneck on the workflow, especially on case assignment and product list sourcing.
Reimagine the workflow
To create successful process on a long-term basis, I take the user scenarios from the discover phase and imagining how they will deal with case management in the future. I created and validated the new workflow with interior team lead and designers. By redefining how a case is handled, the pick-up and task assignment procedure could be mostly automated and simplified.
User research feedback
Validating and iterating on design
During each round of user testing, I was able to ask users what their impression of the designs were. Many of the questions in my user research script revolved around asking were the system easy to navigate, what information was helpful or not helpful, and features users wanted to see on top of the ones I had designed in the prototypes.
Design case dashboard
Redesigned dashboard allowed designers to quickly visualize active cases, manage progress, and review their KPI and earnings. The case card gave clear information about the progress of the case, current task to do, and cross-functional teammates on the case. With user’s feedback, I adapted the color coding on roles of teammates and tasks.
In-platform collaboration
The personal case space allowed designers to communicate with teammates, preview case information and updates, and stay updated on customers’ messages. This empowered designers respond to updates without leaving the platform.
Quick case pick-up and assign system
Instead of waiting for to be assigned, designers can pick up new case on their own, while team leads and head of design still can reassign the case. The task assignment is automated during revisions, which streamline the workflow from initial moodboard to rendering.
Data visualization for team leads
The platform also embedded the visualization on key performance data for team leads, head of design and other administrator to help manage the team performance and individual performance. This allow the dashboard to be flexible for various roles in interior design team.
Positive feedback and improved efficiency
Users expressed that the new platform with streamlined workflow and clear visualization on case management helped eliminated the manual process today. They said the way the data was presented was much more organized and they enjoyed how easy they can preview cases for tracking updates.
“This is so much easier…I like how I can easily jump into the active cases and start working on it, instead of spending hours figuring which cases I am assigned or have updates.”
Prioritizing for development efforts and impact
By working with stakeholders, I created weighted score spreadsheet based on user value, business value and technical effort size, for each feature to manage development phases. Utilizing the roadmap, the team was able to deliver the product based on the roadmap on time.
Design system and handoff
During the final design, I also created the new backstage design system which was later used in all backend tools. The new system has adopted same rules from customer end with different color scheme.
Impact
Improvement after launch
The whole system has been fully launched on July. Since then we noticed major improvement in staff training, design efficiency, and team management. So of the key impacts are:
- 42.94% improvement on design case process time, dropped from 27.34 days to 11.74 days per project.
- The onboarding time for new interior designers dropped from around 3 weeks to 1 week.
- Satisfaction score based on interior designers raised from 3.4 to 8.3.