Why Aren't They Collaborating and Moving Projects Forward?
Project Overview: Role labels is a functionality feature that allows users to apply a label to showcase which responsibility they are playing on the project. This project was done at Productable, a innovation management SAAS platform for large organizations.
Team: The initial project team consisted of 5-7 people. 2 engineers, 1-2 designer, and the managing stakeholders.
My role: As the Product Designer on the project, I researched, designed, collaborated, and handed off the designs to engineer team.
Duration: 2 weeks
🤦🏻♂️ Who the heck is playing what!?
Entering this project, the problem was very clear. No one knows who’s playing what role on a project, leading to confusion among users. This also lead to a low amount of collaboration amongst the users on their projects, which then led to slow project finishes, outcomes, or no funding to push forward.
🏁 The goal is clear.
To improve project outcomes, it’s essential to clearly communicate each person's role, identify the project lead, foster more in-app communication and collaboration, and ultimately achieve faster project results.
🧐 Initial thoughts.
- Free text might be a huge problem?
- How might we display the role label picked by the user on the team members list?
- How should I add Role Labels with (Lead) without having the users confuse themselves?
- How will we display Lead?
🧯 Drinking from the firehose.
But before even doing or thinking of designing, I knew I needed to drink from the firehose and understand more about role labels and what they meant to the DOD and how it can help benefit their project speeds and increase collaboration.
So I started with an interview with one of the Stakeholder who had expertise in this area. This is what I learned:
💡 Aha moment
After carefully analyzing all the information. I knew that free text would not be the route to go. This removed what could’ve been more of a confusion towards users with many differ role labels.
🧠 Decisions need to be made.
After obtaining helpful information from the Stakeholder, I began to brain-dump and organize how and what would be best for MVP. I knew the plan was to show what role someone was taking on the project.
JTBD (JOBS TO BE DONE)
- As a project owner, I want to add a new member and make him Lead to make the project process move faster.
- As a project member, I want to request a role change to allow my colleagues to know and understand what I’m doing on the project.
- As a project collaborator, I want to make myself change my role and make myself lead so that my colleagues know that I have the monkey on the project.
I began by writing down crucial JTBDs to help grasp and understand the journey and desires of the user. Not only did it clear the understanding of the flow a user might take, but opened my eyes to the different ways (3 to be exact) they might achieve the end result.
🛣 Staying between the lines
After obtaining helpful information from the Stakeholder, I began to brain-dump and organize how and what would be best for MVP. I knew the plan was to show what role someone was taking on the project.