Background

In 2014, I accepted a position with the mobile communication company Acision (now Mavenir) to lead the re-design of a social communication product for iOS, Android and Web.

Product name: FuseMe
Target audience: US, UK and Singapore Millennials.
The Ask: Translate usability and field research findings into design improvements while finding ways to incorporate their current monetization strategies.
Role: Senior Product Designer
Working with: Product owner, VP of Marketing, Development and presenting to C-Level executives of company.

Getting Started

The discovery phase began with reviewing all the usability and market research reports to fully understand the pain points and opportunities.

Top issues to solve:

Testing results revealed that users wanted a quick method of navigating to the important areas/sections of the app, intermingled with the content the application is delivering to them.

Home Screen:
Provide more intuitive navigational access to Messages, Feeds, Contacts, and Channels.
Messaging and Chat:
Reduce steps. Simplify inititating a call and or chat with a contact
Fix Call/contact history ...confused usability participants
Fix “Add a Contact” task flow to show the individual they are currently in a chat with.
Add ability to “Label” group chats
Simplify "create a group chat"
Help:
Provide an easier and more intuitive setting started flow with quicker access to help screens.
Channels:
Allow users to share individual articles from within the channel thread. We may need to reconsider how we deliver these different items, and rethink the channel experience but more granular control with enhance user engagement.

Personas

Based on the past usability and market research, I set up three personas. We referred to them throughout the entire product development process.

These were created before the re-design was started as a way to stay aligned to previous input received by research and stakeholders.

Competative Analysis

Completed a competitive analysis, reviewing direct and indirect competitors in the current market for this type of product.

WeChat and WhatsApp
- Referenced directly by company leadership as a direct competitor of current SMS income both in US and internationally.

Yammer, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Atlassian tools:
- Reviewed for social feed, channels and lcoud based file sharing.

eVoice, Google Voice, Vonage, Skype, Join.me:
- Reviewed for virtual numbers, voice and video calling and screenshare.

User Flows

I mapped out the interactions to simplify the user-flows to help them reach their goals with the least amount of steps or friction.

Intitiate a new call or chat
Create a new group and give it a custome name
View and respond to a new chat

Information architecture

Provided a visual representation of the product's infrastructure, features, and hierarchy.

This helped provide a more thorough understanding of scope of work requested.

Wireframes

Annotated wireframes were then created following an order of priority provided by the product and market leads.

Updates included:

Intuitive icons and navigation solutions were created to resolve pain-points isolated in previous research.
Alternate paths provided to users who wanted to make a call from a chat, create a group, tag a conversation or share their screen.

UI Design

After review with development, marketing and business, the visual design phase was started and measurement were provided for handoff.

Followed branding guidelines provided by marketing.
Was sure al designs passed AA accessibility guidelines.
Delivered a style-guide, measurements and flow diagrams matching each epic assigned to me in Jira.
Prepared designs for iOS, Android and responsive web.
Was able to provide enough detail for NY, DC, UK and Ukraine development teams were follow with little issue.
The final designs resolved multiple navigational issues and simplified the initiate call and/or chat task flows.
The addition of a freemium sticker model (inspired my WeChat and WhatsApp) was one of the monetization strategies.

Launch

The fuseMe mobile app was launched in the spring of 2015, while the responsive web prodcut was scheduled for Q4 2015.

Learnings:

My team and I also presented at SXSW that year. We were able to identify differentiators and competative advantages with other prodcuts in that space (Slack, Yammer, Skype).
With the help of the VP of Marketing, we were able to persuade our leadership to focus on the enterprise communication industry.

Moving forward

Unfortunately our company was purchased later that year and our new leadership chose to sunset the prodcut and close our office.

I fully beleive if we were able to move forward and continue to test and launch features focused in the enterprise communication industry the product would have been successful.