Unifying the User Experience

Designing a Cohesive Experience Across Devices

Background:

PGi saw the price of selling traditional audio to customers compressing and the growth for audio and meetings bundles beginning to slow. Also, selling meetings products to enterprises targets only a percentage of the businesses workforce. After meeting the evolving challenges of enterprise collaboration for over twenty five years, PGi saw an opportunity to build on its GlobalMeet platform and introduce an easy to use unified communications tool with video, web and audio collaboration.

The Business Challenge:

Provide a unified experience for communication and collaboration that bundles calling, messaging, meetings and presence.

Call, chat, video conference, and start interactive online meetings from anywhere.
Consistent experience across desktop, web, and mobile
Improve knowledge workers productivity
Replace existing PBX systems with a cloud offering.
Sell in to a growth market in to the entire organization while lowering the total cost of collaboration and communications for the customer.

Design’s Challenge:

We knew the UCaaS strategy focus would change our business model and the design problems being solved and also change the user audiences our products target. It was clear that we had much to learn through discovery and research. We began the design process by analyzing UX for UCaaS competitors across mobile and desktop. To define our product, we rapidly crafted wireframe models for both mobile and desktop to test internally with product and engineering stakeholders, and externally with users. Both internal and external tests were time-boxed to maintain forward momentum. As we designed, we actively set up benchmarks for measuring UX success.

Our approach to creating a unified experience:

Partner with product and marketing leaders to leverage market analysis and data

Competitor analysis and tear down of existing solutions
Set metrics that define success
Work with product and development partners to craft our first hypothesis based on requirements
Prototype, test and iterate on designs
Build upon and leverage GlobalMeet’s design system to create consistent experience across devices
Deliver our highest confidence lowest risk proposals
Ship beta and collect data. Continue to iterate to reach success metrics

Early research:

Discovery
What did we need in our MVP to be competitive
Understanding what our technology partners could provide
What could messaging look like in our platform

Understanding Messaging behavior and rules:

Where messages can be initiated
Contacts
1 to 1 vs group messages
Scope of supported messaging features
Deleting messages
Notifications of incoming communications
Status - "Always on"

My Responsibilities:

Design team management
Design direction
Product strategy
Critiques & reviews
Resource recruiting and hiring
Product & engineering leadership partner
Reporting to executive leadership team
External design agency direction

The Design Team:

Therese Mushock, Leif Andersen, Andrew Stewart, Ben Anderson, Taa Sittisomsap, Rishi Kaneria

Agency:

Unfold - External design agency brought on to increase design velocity in the creation of design system components and the Home section of our desktop UC app.