Summary
Scispot is an all-in-one digital toolkit marketed towards biotech startups. My team worked on a request manager feature, empowering users to seamlessly share tasks and documents with their teammates directly within the platform.
DURATION
March - April 2023
MY ROLE
User Research, UX Design, Prototyping, Testing
The Problem
Leaders face challenges in managing and collaborating with their teams.
Scispot offers a toolkit to biotech startups and science labs, simplifying research and company development. The platform enables users to manage their protocols, experiments, and documents electronically. Despite this, Scispot lacked team-management tools within the platform, making it difficult for scientists to guide their teams and work collaboratively with their others.
Research Insights
"It's difficult for me to delegate tasks and ensure that everything is running smoothly."
Lindsey, Biotech Startup Executive
"I need to be able to quickly assign tasks to specific team members and set deadlines, but Scispot doesn't make this process easy."
Satshabad, Manager
Market Research
I looked at popular team management platforms such as Monday.com and Smartsheet. Understanding common ways other team-management platforms enable users to supervise their team gave me an understanding of common feature patterns.
Being able to assign roles to users and project tracking was a feature that many Scispot users could benefit from - and the focus of my design.
Monday.com Dashboard
Smartsheet Dashboard
Both platforms use a table format to display information about the task at a glance. Monday.com divides the tasks by each week or each day to organize the information and make it easier for users to prioritize their tasks.
Goal
Create a feature which will enable users to work with their teams and get word done efficiently.
In other words, create a request manager within the platform which allows users to send requests/tasks to other users within the company. The request manager would allow users to attach Scispot pages to them, such as electronic protocols and experiments.
Key Requirements
Construct the product in a scaleable way.
As we were constrained by time, we knew we could not build everything we wanted to for the initial release of the request manager. I aimed to design the request manager in a scalable manner that would seamlessly integrate with Scispot’s current functionalities. This meant using existing components in the Scispot design system, rather than creating new components.
Requirements
After discussions with my team, we decided to focus on these affordances for the MVP design .
01
Assign tasks to other users
02
View the teams' progress on tasks
03
Send the necessary documents for the task
Drawing insights from other popular team management platforms such as Monday.com or Smartsheet, and speaking to a few of our current users, I developed a user flow that I believed would align with the requirements that I previously outlined. In addition, I had to ensure the flow was simple enough to develop within the deadline of 3 weeks. After feedback from engineers and the PM on my team, and multiple iterations, this was the user flow that we all agreed on.
From this user flow, my team collaborated in Miro to map how the information should be structured within the request manager. We explored multiple navigation patterns and their impact on the overall system. We went through several iterations as we aligned on a solution that balanced consistency and scalability.
Finally, I felt confident to start to ideate and wireframe some designs. This is one of many ideas I had gone through.
Wireframe of Dashboard
Wireframe of Request
This design was well liked by developers on my team since it was simple, and only used existing design system components.
1st Variation of Dashboard
1st Variation of Request Preview
Conduct user testing sessions.
With my initial designs done, I quickly transitioned to user testing. I aimed to identify any points in the user flow that needed improvements. I asked our participants to “think out loud” and voice their frustrations or satisfactions as they created a request.
Creating requests takes too long.
Assigning users to each “to-do” and using tags seemed unnecessary.
Leaders need control over requests.
Team leads would like more control over what requests are being sent through the company.
It's hard to tell what each role is.
Users couldn’t tell what each role was by the name alone.
It's hard to keep track of requests
Once a request is sent, participants have trouble understanding where the request goes.
Final Design
Gather findings to help guide the next iteration of design.
After learning more about the participants' satisfaction and frustrations through user testing, I worked to make improvements to the overall design and experience in the Figma prototype.
Simplify and remove unnecessary steps.
Add an Approver role for teams.
Add descriptions to each role.
Add an audit trail and feedback.
Reflection & Next Steps
Active user participation is crucial to creating a truly exceptional product.
All assumptions about the users should still be thoroughly tested by the users themselves. I found that user interviews and research really helped to guide and validate my design process when I was stuck.
Explore alternative designs and user flows.
Due to the time constraints imposed on the team, I had limited opportunity to explore alternative designs or user flows. Given more time, I would have liked to minimize the amount of "explanations" or descriptive text required to guide users through the product. In the future, I would like to conduct more explorations to test different user journeys and designs that may be more intuitive.