Challenge:

PricewaterhouseCoopers ranks as the second-largest professional services network world wide. A key focus of their business is providing insightful, well executed strategy and tools to businesses to solve their growth challenges. As part of that offering, pwc focused on a key issue with many businesses today, namely employee growth and retention. As part of their initial research, the results highlighted that companies that upskilled employees through empowering knowledge were able to increase workforce productivity and ultimately increase resilience. It was with that knowledge in hand, they approached our Los Angeles team to create the platform in which users were provided the ability to personally grow and benefit not just themselves but their company. Bringing our expertise of customer engagement, our team was tasked with creating not only a way for users to find information, but to see where their knowledge gaps may be, and to monitor true progress on their journey of growth. Knowing that users would be making a personal commitment of time, the team set about creating a seamless web and app experience that would not only be a valuable knowledge resource, but would encourage users to consistently stay engaged.

Solution:

With a project of this scale and avenues of execution, our very first step was organizing how team members would maintain open levels of transparency. By formulating a design task responsibility list as well as a daily sync, the team was able to work in parallel on their individual components while still bringing creative ideas to the larger project. This project in particular had multiple hands working collaboratively within a single shared design file to both layout concepts and experience paradigms while maintaining a single unified visiont. As timeline was also crucial for delivery, the client creative team also had access to the working design and was able to watch layout take place in real time. As the mobile expert on the team, I was responsible for both creating flows and wireframes while also providing navigational guidance to the larger team. As mentioned, it was a key requirement that the navigation remain seamless between web and mobile products to reduce the user learning curve. It was from this starting point, the team was able to collectively make navigational experience decisions appropriate for both variations of execution. During the life of the project, work and progress were shared twice weekly with the key stakeholders and client development team, where notes and documentation was created. Having everyone in constant alignment allowed the team to work quickly, revising seamlessly when technical challenges presented. As this software was to be essentially a large tagged content distribution system, we also worked with the client to provide strategy on content management and how their back end systems could approach tagging for user display. My past experience with large data set handling in apps such as the PGA TOUR as well as Con Edison were helpful in providing contextual approach strategies. Outside of the larger project, it was also important for the stakeholders to provide progress and schedules to their department heads and as the app focus was a new exploration for them, I was able to set design schedules and build a feature delivery timeline. In the final stages of the design process, once mobile had been completed, I then shifted attention to assisting the web team in creating wires and layouts for the mobile website experience.

Result:

Since completing the design project, the client has since built and deployed the software to their network. It has been presented in numerous keynote addresses as well as been given very positive feedback from their network of customers. Outside of this client engagement, as result of the interoffice collaboration between Los Angeles and Mobile, many new projects have been tackled together including building full design systems and audit assistance.

Highlights:

While mobile app design has been a focus of my career since the announcement of the app store, this project allowed me to not only provide my expertise but to also return to my initial design roots in customer experience on the web. With this project specifically, the web and mobile experiences were intended to feel seamless, encouraging a company's staff to take part in growing personally. Being focused on working professionals meant that what was being provided was going to be utilized as both a personal career growth tool and a measurable company resource to put the right people where they can thrive. As with any new tool, it is important that we not distract from the day to day, but make working life better through guidance. My past career path allowed me to do this for companies like Vantiv, where we created back-end tools to streamline their employees' days and task loads. From that project, I was able to witness the total cost savings by removing wasted time as well as seeing the positive impact it had on employee satisfaction about their place of business. With this endeavor, I was able to retain that feeling of accomplishment while also expanding that growth to a whole new platform.