Dowel
The Dowel is a valuable Slack plugin designed to facilitate and enrich communication within teams and groups by fostering meaningful and engaging conversations.
Responsibilities:
UIUX design / User Research / Web design / Visual design
Duration:
Feb. 2021 - May. 2021
Brief
Background
Team engagement and cohesion have a significant impact on the progress of a project. Companies prioritise their employees' experience, growth, and cultivating a positive work culture. As work becomes increasingly virtual and digital, it is challenging for employees to feel connected to their teams. Furthermore, finding a greater sense of purpose and meaningful connections within the organisation becomes even more difficult."
Problem
When work transitions to a virtual setting, employees frequently experience a decrease in engagement levels.
Aim
To create a fun and engaging way for teams or groups to strengthen relationships and camaraderie among coworkers or team members.
Research
How is the team formed?
The formation of a team is a crucial aspect to consider before tackling any challenges. According to Bruce Tuckman's four stages of team development, a high-performing team will progress through forming, storming, norming, and performing stages.
The forming stage involves self-questioning and doubt, and it is important for team members to interact and get to know each other. The storming stage is the most challenging, as conflicts may arise, leading to decreased team performance and energy being diverted into unproductive channels. Overcoming this stage requires open communication and acceptance of individual differences.
Employee’s Journey
From the interview process to receiving a job offer and joining the company, employees may face challenges in getting to know their team and bonding with them, especially when working remotely. Helping them build relationships and navigate through the initial stages of team formation is not only beneficial for the company but also for the employees themselves.
How might we create an entertaining and joyful way to help the team to have a better interaction in the storming and forming phases?
In order to achieve better performance, the storming and forming phases are crucial. Ideas stem from our daily activities. After discussing with the engineering team, we agreed to put in less effort to build the product and test it as soon as possible. Therefore, feasibility is essential. Our three main features are word cloud, music sharing, and "this or that" questions.
Final Design
This or that question
The Dowel will create a set of questions for the administrator to use. Once everyone in the channel completes the questionnaire, the Dowel will present everyone's responses in a visual chart, providing a better understanding of the team.
Word cloud
The Dowel will periodically ask users to share their mood or feeling using a single word. Afterwards, the Dowel will display an image featuring the different responses. This allows users to get a sense of their team's overall mood and start conversations with others based on their feelings.
Music share
Users have the ability to share their favorite music with their team. The Dowel collects all music links and displays a clickable chart for users to listen to immediately and rate by clicking the love button.
Responsive Website
Given our analysis, we've observed that visitors to our website predominantly use two types of devices: mobile phones and laptops. This insight has led us to prioritize these platforms in our website design and development process. By focusing on optimizing our site for both mobile and laptop users, we aim to ensure a seamless and user-friendly experience regardless of the device being used. This approach allows us to cater effectively to the majority of our audience, improving their interaction with our content and services.
Design system
We made the decision to develop a website in order to create a better understanding of our product for users. I strongly believe that the implementation of a design system is crucial in ensuring consistency in our design and making it simpler for engineers to follow. Given that Dowel is a robot designed to enhance employee engagement, we have incorporated a more tech-inspired style in its design.
Prototype
Visual iteration
Once the functions had been determined, I delved into conceptualizing the use of color, designing the layout, and refining the presentation of the polls to ensure they were easily understandable and uncomplicated.
Take away
I am thrilled to see my first project, Dowel, come to life. It's truly exciting to see the plugin working seamlessly in Slack. The process of collaborating with product managers and developers has been quite a journey, involving numerous iterations to ensure that the product is truly exceptional. Additionally, working on building the website and design system using Figma for the first time has been a valuable learning experience. These experiences have significantly enhanced both my technical and interpersonal skills.
Communication
In this project, communication plays a significant role. We need to take into account various constraints in order to develop the features in Slack. As a result, the engineering team initially dismissed some ideas because of technical limitations. However, we scheduled multiple meetings to come up with a feasible design.
Rapid Iteration
After running into technical issues, I experimented with different designs in order to achieve our goal. At first, I was aiming for a perfect screen to show to the engineers, but this wasn't realistic in the early stages. It became evident that creating an ideal screen is crucial once the design is completed. I realized the significance of effectively communicating ideas and developing adaptable designs.