Dowel
The Dowel is a Slack plug-in, which aims to help your teams and groups to develop meaningful and engaging conversations.
Responsibilities:
UIUX design / User Research / Web design / Visual design
Duration:
Feb. 2021 - May. 2021
Brief
Background
Team engagement and cohesion affect the progress of the project. Companies care about their employees' experience, growth, and culture cultivation. When everything becomes virtual and digital, it is challenging for employees to feel engaged in the team. Finding a greater purpose of work and a meaningful bond in the organization is even tricky.
Problem
Employees feel less engaged when things go on virtual.
Aim
To create an entertaining and joyful way for teams or groups to enhance the relationship and engagement between coworkers or team members.
Research
How is the team formed?
Before solving the problems, understanding how to form a great team is essential. According to the four stages of the team development proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, comprising a performance team will go through five stages: forming–storming–norming–performing.
The first stage is forming, and in this stage, people question themselves and doubt themselves. Interactions become vital since it helps members get to know each other. The storming stage is the most challenging, and conflicts usually happen between team members. It decreases the team performance, and the team energy is put into unproductive energy. Communication should be more accessible and accept individual differences to get through this stage.
Employee’s Journey
An employee starts from the interview, gets an offer from the company, and starts working with the team members. The significant difficulty is that they do not have a face-to-face conversation, know their team, and engage with them since working remotely. Therefore, helping them bond in the group and pass through forming and storming stages is not only helping the company but employees.
How might we create an entertaining and joyful way to help the team to have a better interaction in the storming and forming phases?
To lead to higher performance, the storming and forming phases are extremely important. The ideas start from the daily activities. After discussion with the engineering team, we agreed that use less effort to build the product and test it as soon as possible. Therefore, feasibility is the essence. Word cloud, sharing music, and this or that questions are our three main features.
Final Design
This or that question
The Dowel will pop out several questions that the administrator can create. After every person in this channel completes the questionnaire, the Dowel will show everyone's responses in a visual chart, making people understand the team well.
Word cloud
The Dowel will ask your feeling in a day, and the users can type one word which expresses your mood or feeling. After a period, the Dowel will illustrate the image to everybody, consisting of different responders' texts. Users can know their team's status and start a conversation with someone.
Music share
Users can share the music they like with their team. The Dowel will collect every music link and visualize a clickable chart, which users can listen to immediately and click the love button to express if they like it.
Responsive Website
Users may come to the website from different devices, and we found that most people have mobile phones and laptops to access the websites. Therefore, we decided to create our website based on mobile and laptop.
Design system
We decided to create the website to make users understand our product more. I believe that the design system helps us make our design consistent and allows engineers easy to follow. Since Dowel is a robot to help employees engagement, the type used a more techy style.
Prototype
Visual iteration
After the functions were decided, I explored the ideas of colour, layout, and presentation of the polls to make them clear and straightforward.
Take away
Dowel is my first project that has come to life. It is so exciting that the plug-in works well in Slack. Working with product managers and developers is a long journey, and it includes countless iterations to make a fantastic product. It is also my first time building the website and design system with Figma. All these experiences improve my hard and soft skills.
Communication
In this project, communication plays a massive part. Several limits need to be considered to build the functions in Slack. Therefore, in the beginning, the engineering team rejected some of the ideas due to tech constraints. However, we scheduled several meetings to find a suitable design to create.
Rapid Iteration
Since the tech issues, I iterated different designs and hoped we could achieve our goal. At first, I always wanted my screen to be perfect and delivered to engineers; however, this did not work in real life in the preliminary stage. Designing an ideal screen is necessary when the design is fixed. Delivering ideas precisely and making the designs flexible is what I had learned.