StarLeaf is a UK-based company that provides voice and video conferencing services to businesses worldwide, including the manufacture of a range of voice and video hardware systems for conference rooms and desktops, and software clients for mobile users.
Starleaf Portal is a meeting, profile and organisation management tool. Users with different access rights have different views of this. First I have gathered the requirements for the project by talking with product managers, developers and content managers to understand its usage and what parts of the business it impacts.
The problem was that the current portal was unresponsive and the app did not have a meeting management system in place for the launch.
Looking at other products in the business conferencing world I documented the various ways others go about scheduling meetings, recording and displaying profile information. I did heuristic reviews of their platforms and presented them to the product managers and the lead UX Designer. I have looked at previous personas that were made by the marketing team and talked with existing designers about out users profile. I have asked the data team to provide me with insights in usage and what user tracking systems they have in place to understand what kind of data I can use in creating personas.
After this I’ve had a workshop with dev, product managers, designers and content managers and presented the newly created personas that were informed by all parts of the business and previous user interviews. I invited the meeting to collaborate by answering different questions about 4 different personas. I organised as well a user journey workshop where I took all the steps users take and created an action map for the whole product journey. I have created the taxonomy for the portal to understand the different pages and the information that was needed.
I started with mobile first because this tool would have a lot of tables, graphs and functions. Using the research I have gathered, existing design of the apps and having the users and business needs in mind I have made the first high fidelity wireframes that I presented to the product managers. After getting feedback I have moved on to a more polished design whilst the developer started to implement. After finishing the design and working close with the developer, I coded the transitions, micro-interactions and animations.
With the help of my coding skills and good communication between me and the developer we managed to refresh the look and functionality of the portal in a couple of months. After this I have created a user test and tested various functionalities on UserBrain tweaking some elements to increase usability. As well, as the company was growing, any new starters I would invite them for a test session to refine the overall usability and experience.
Based on the work I did on the Portal, I have moved to the the WebRtc which is a conferencing browser based app. This app is used for everything from first time interviews to daily meetings and it is the first point of contact for new users.
I was in charge of refreshing the user experience for this app. Because the journey would start with the invitation emails, I took every step of the user journey in consideration to create a unified experience.
StarLeaf provides a diverse set of tools to its users such as desk phones, cloud services and meeting rooms. Their service works across platforms and brands and that was a big factor in the whole project as for example the user would be able to connect with Skype for Business to the StarLeaf cloud.
Looking at competitor apps such as BlueJeans, Zoom, and Google Hangouts I have made heuristic review to understand where users would have potential problems.
To help me understand better, I watched how other users join conferences, and asked them of the potential worries they have about joining a conference, what they hate and what they would want in a conferencing app.
The problem with the old system was that the user experience was fragmented with products looking different from each other. As well the content was tech savvy, not structured for ease of access and complicated.
First I have updated the personas based on research and survey monkey that we sent to our users.
After gathering all the research I have made high fidelity wireframes and presented them to stakeholders and product managers. This opened up discussions on what would be the hierarchy of the information on the Jump-off page.
First I wanted to understand if the whole journey from email to end of meeting is good and created a prototype that went to UserBrain for testing. One of the problem with the first prototype was that it created unnecessary steps such as the name field being one of them.
I have kept the tests running for 2 months, having 3 testers per week and making small adjustments to content design and using inVision for the hole team to collaborate. Testing every single part of the journey and making adjustments based on observations gave us a great product.
As a result we launched in September after only 3 months of working on this product. The results were good and I have set up rounds of testing with new starters to understand potential missed flaws or improvements that could be made.
We’ve also set up Google Analytics on that page so we can see more of a quantitative data. The project was a good success having great feedback from both users and stakeholders.