Rendezvoo

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This project was done at my first designation! Hosted by the McMaster Design League, we were prompted to create a solution for the design challenge.

OUR PROMPT

Many organizations are transitioning to fully remote working opportunities, which lacks face-to-face relationship building. Organizations are bridging this gap by hosting onsite get-togethers in locations around the world. However, the process of organizing these trips is challenging, and time consuming.

Design a solution that helps organizations plan these in person trips.

Timeline

November 2022 (48 hours!)

Role

UX Design
UX Research
Visual Design

Tools

Figma

Planning events with everyone's input

After 48 hours of designing, my team and I pitched our solution to the panel of judges. We designed an app that allows organizers to easily plan around the availabilities of employees.

THE PROBLEM...

Moving towards a remote first work culture.

Since many organizations are following remote-first environment, they also value in person time to build stronger relationship. However, planning things can become time consuming and challenging.

RESEARCH - INTERVIEWING REMOTE FIRST WORKERS

Uncovering the main problem we are solving.

Due to time constraints and the scope of this design challenge, we decided to interview family members who worked remotely to understand:

⦾ Main differences in company culture?
⦾ How often do you meet up with your employees?
⦾ How long does it take to plan a trip for the team?

It’s hard to build connections without an environment that initiates

Shift in the company culture

Most employees expressed that they have not met up with their co-workers since the beginning of the pandemic causing co-workers to be more distant.

Planning a trip has many considerations

It is tedious to manage and difficult to plan a trip that accommodates for all employees involved.

Design challenge:

How might we relieve the burden planning trips and make it more accessible?

... also take into account employee considerations?

DEFINING OUR USERS

Finding the 2 main user groups in the problem space

To better understand how to design out solutions, I wanted to understand the different types of people involved. After brainstorming, I found that these user groups could be defined by two categories:

Organizer

Initiating the trip invite

Participant

Reacting to trip invites

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Gathering existing solutions to help guide designs

To begin visualizing the features we wanted to implement, I gathered inspiration and highlighted the features I liked about certain apps.

Lettucemeet

Notating common availabilities through higher opacity

Microsoft Teams

Calendar view show all events
Visual indicators for meetings (accepted, TBD)

Trip Advisor

Recommend variety of accommodations based on custom budget and location.

Planning user flows and sketching ideas

Using the competitive analysis and brainstorming we conducted, I began to create user flow charts. This step of the ideation process allowed me to better visualize which frames to create, as well as think about the different use cases we could run into.

Rough sketches - visualizing user flows

I brainstormed very rough sketches of how we could visualize these flows so we could have a sense of direction when we jumped onto Figma

Because of time constraints, we did not get the chance to do many low-fidelity design explorations, so instead we simply jumped straight into mid-fidelity designs and consistently asked each other for design feedback as we worked.

The final result

Time constrains that challenged my comfort zone and assumptions

Because of time constraints, we split the workload and began conducting user research while simultaneously beginning the ideation through creating user flows. While one of us was still speaking with our users to understand pain point, I had to begin brainstorming features we wanted to include. This forced me to jump to conclusion and make assumptions.

If I could fully flesh out this project

Because of the time constraints, we weren’t able to fully flesh out as much testing and iterations as we would have liked to.

More explorations

Spending more time white-boarding and playing with different possibilities of solutions and design approaches.

Usability testing & iterations

Hearing more feedback from users to help us inform our designs and also keep my assumptions accountable. Allowing this to drive forward our next iterations

Accessibility

This is something that is of great importance and the next steps would be making sure our design takes into account specific scopes of users and ensuring the platform is easily useable.

Thanks for reading! ☆

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