Background
Innovation is unpredictable. It can happen anywhere, and everyone could be an innovator. In a large corporation, there are quite a number of employees around the world. It is very important as a company to motivate the employees to be innovative and brave enough to try their ideas which maybe even not their daily work-related. Benefiting from the synergy, employees are encouraged to try something new and the company may be able to keep vital. In order to achieve this goal, a tool was built a few years ago. But at that time, the product was designed mainly as an information collecting tool which means users cannot really use this tool to share and develop their ideas, and the experience is very user-unfriendly. This project focused mainly on re-defining the process and design a really useful tool for internal users.
Research
In order to understand the pain points deeper and clearly, a few field research studies were run internally in the headquarter. Lots of user insights and feedback were gathered. For a better understanding and ideation, these user insights and pain points were transferred into user needs.
Wireframe & Initial Responsive UI Design
With these findings, I translated the user needs into a UX direction and created a wireframe to describe the possible flow. In addition, I also added the initial simple UI design within the wireframe. Since one of the top findings is “flexibility”, a responsive design was also created in order to offer the possibility for the user to access the tool whenever there was an idea popped up in mind.
Visual Moodboard
Since at the current stage this tool was only designed for internal usage, it’s not necessary to follow the brand guideline. But a clean design with passion inside was very important to catch users’ eyes and also easily use but still feel being encouraged. In this case, I used a pre-set semantic cloud to define keywords for the visual language. And based on the keywords, a visual moodboard was created to guide the visual design afterward.
Final Design & Specification
Using the wireframe as the main structure, a high-fidelity design was created following the visual moodboard. I also used a very thorough set of specification system to deliver the high-fidelity mock-ups and specs to engineering. All layout surfaces were checked and aligned to the pixel to deliver the cleanest experience possible.
Constant Testing/User Research
User testing and research were still constantly run with different users. The iteration of current design and new features will be adapted in the design refinement, reflecting user feedback and potential future needs.
Storytelling & Innovation Journey
To make the tool really work as it is designed, an innovation process was also created to support several idea owners to develop their idea further. In order to communicate the process in a proper casual way, I created a storybook to describe the whole process from the very beginning “have an idea” to the end “product launched”.