Collaborative working tool for organisations
Overview
Watch this video from another platform:
​Introduction
This project is initiated by RMIT University in cooperation with Siemens in Melbourne. The research is related to a real and current case of Siemens, Teamcenter. Staff from Siemens provided us insights and feedback. In this studio we dealt with various aspects of Service, User Experience and Interaction Design. The goal of this project is to improve working processes as well as collaborative tools for organisations, which increases firms effective and faster working.
Industry Engagement
Siemens
My Contribution
In this group, I am the one, whose strength is user research, project management, graphic design, academic writing and video making. Hence, I was responsible to make the entire graphic & written materials, such as expert research document, presentation slides and group folio based on our collaboration. I also organised the schedule of each research steps according to discussion as well as other team members’ schedule and capability, and made the animation video.
Team Members
Mengru Zheng – UX Researcher
Guanjie Ding – Business Strategist
Jianhao Tan – UI Designer
Process Methods
Relevance
At early stage of research process, we explored how emerging technologies are influencing the way of organisational collaboration in academic perspective. We analysed a bunch of literatures about digital transformations and organisational working tools and softwares, then built a matrix to categorise related issues.
Research Question
How should we decrease communication cost and enhance collaborative efficiency among multidisciplinary departments?
Insight
Digital transformation could leverage collaboration outcome by organising communication channels correctly
Our Vision
We aims to decrease communication cost among different department and achieve higher work efficiency by filtering unnecessary communication
Problem Finding
During problem finding, we regarded expert interview as the most effective way considering our own networking. I have work experience both in large company and start-ups, and Guanjie founded his own company. So we conducted con-call interviews with 12 experts who work in different industry. Quantitative data and qualitative data are collected through this process, as a result, 4 main problems are categorized, namely knowledge gap, unclear responsibility allocation, data extracting and format exchanging.
Market Place
Competitive Products
As per information gathered from previous expert interview and online survey, we mapped current competitive products to seek our target position. This step aims to reframe our selling point and design criteria.
Potential Client
After analysing organisations in different scales, mid-scale companies are regarded as our target group according to their situation, problems and needs.
SWOT Analysis
When we found our target position and potential client, we brainstormed potential attributions of our own project and organised them into SWOT analysis table. Our selling points should be not only strength but also opportunities, compared with other tools in current market.
Ideation
​Concept
Communication platform based on industry process
​Description
We create communication channel based on industry process, so that we could filter unnecessary communication and information by bridging related project and people in charge.
Initial Wireframe
Originally we tried two directions to visualise how a platform can link communication channels for people in charge, packaged with visualised data & files based on execution process. The first direction was to use wires to link people in charge, and the second direction is to use blocks to categorise different industry progress.
​Quality Assurance
We conducted 4 secondary expert interviews from service and UI fields, and ask them to assess both directions of initial wireframe whether these concepts could solve problems mentioned before, namely communication accessibility, knowledge gap, responsibility allocation and data extracting.
​
Besides quantitative data, valuable feedbacks include:
1. Visualising relationship and logic between different departments is helpful.
2. In realistic project the link could be more complex for the whole lifecycle if we visualise all links at first when we log in.
3. Avoid overlapping too much information in one screen could decrease anxiety during use.
Iteration
According to experts’ feedback, we combined the advantages of both directions. Subsequently we developed wireframes in more details and iterate users’ interaction with different screens. Testing with cards is the most flexible way for our discussion, especially when I focus on UX and communicated with Jianhao (focus on UI) efficiently. For usability testing, we also revised several versions in Adobe XD.
​Outcome
At the end of this project we proposed an interface prototype to industry mentors. They gave us lots of positive feedback and encouraged us to develop it in commercialised environment, if possible in the future.