Hi, I'm Erin

Lead Product Designer  |  Symphony 2017

Overview

Symphony is a secure communication platform used by financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. It combines chat, voice, and video conferencing into one platform, allowing users to stay connected, even on the go, through its mobile app.

Area of opportunity

Symphony has a dedicated strategic focus to enable users to leverage their mobile app to make communication on the go easy, convenient and secure. How might we ensure users compose and send a new message to the right recipients?

Main objectives:

• Enable users to send a new message to an individual (1:1) or in a multi-member message (MIM).
• Allow users to send messages to collaborative groups (Rooms).
• Implement an email-like model where users can compose a message before selecting recipients.

Core functionality

• Find contact(s)
  
• Create room
  
• Create IM/MIM
  
• Send message
  
• Send attachments
• Compose a long message

User story mapping

At Symphony, our user researcher initiated the transition towards a data-driven design strategy. Collaborating closely with her, I helped identify the primary needs and focus areas for our mobile users. For users on the go, three main activities emerged as essential:

• Messaging on the go
• Staying connected on the go
• Taking meetings on the go

Design process

The design process followed:

• Research, competitive analysis and user input
• Wireframes - (Designer review)
• Iterate on Wireframes - (Product Manager review)
• Light-weight Visuals
• Prototyping & User testing  (validation of designs and collect feedback)

Competitive analysis

To started the project an evaluation of other leading chat apps took place(Whatsapp, Messenger, Line, Google Hangouts… etc). Understanding how each app started a new conversation and how they distinguished the creation of 1:1s vs rooms. From this exercise I was able to identify best practice and emerging trends in the space.

Existing experience 

In the existing experience users would enter the new message creation flow from the "+" action in the upper right corner of the home screen. From the drop down users could do one of three actions: 

1. Create a new 1:1 

2. Create a new room

3. Write a post

Based on the competitive research there were 2 areas of focus for the redesign. One was to bundle actions 1 and 2 (screen A) in order to eliminate the dead end that screen C created in the users experience. And the second was to allow users to compose a message before creating the IM/MIM/room. 

Early concepts

In the early ideation phase I worked through about 6 concepts, that I tested through hallway testing and though our biweekly company testing series that pulled 5-7 internal users cross different parts of the company to test early design concepts. 

Wireframe A

This concept was crafted around the CEOs idea of a user composing their message before picking recipients.

Through early testing, it turns out that not many users have this need in their mobile workflow. Testers correlated this paradigm to what they would expect if sending an email.

Wireframe B

This concept was craft from the research done on other chat applications.  Users would be taken to one screen, they could add recipients and also compose a message on the same screen. Creating a room was a secondary action for the users to take but allowed them to move back and forth from IM/MIM creation and room creation. 

Artifacts

• Click to view  Moderator's script
  
• Click to view  Usability Tracker - results of each user
  

Learnings and Highlights

Testing went really well and we received great feedback on the UI. Overall with the 12 tasks that we tested, we had an 86% task completion rate, which gave us validation that we were heading in the right direction.

• Click to view  Results Summary