Overview
In a nutshell, it is a playful application which can measure productivity performance with transparency helping each team member to improve during a project team interaction or add new purpose to their career growth.
ACCORD’s shape from six leading words:
Assurance, Commitment, Communication, Organisation, Relationship, Determination connected by neuroscience and people experiences.
Player research through a real scenario
- Georges – 63 years old – London – Married – Client Manager
- * Charlotte – 38 years old – London – Single – Head of Product Design
- Katherine – 46 years old – London – Married – Head of Product Management
- David – 26 years old – London – Single – Product Designer
- Praveen – 34 years old – Bangalore – Single – Research and Development
- Pranay – 42 years old – Bangalore – Married – Lead Analyst
- John – 48 years old – Singapore – Married – Salesman
- Venkatesh – 54 years old – Dubaïe – Married – Client Manager
To make it more realistic, from our workspace, we have documented about scenarios that we have lived through and decided to follow a standard meeting of 2 hours who will be lead by:
- Charlotte – Head of Product Design. *
We went through the meeting motions and consider, from our own understanding,
- Is the leader of the meeting knowledgeable?
- yes – mark 8 or 9
- Is the industry specialist in the meeting clear in his/her explanations?no – mark 5-6 , yes – mark 7,8 or 9
- and so on..
For one individual, it is not really needed to reach 9. However when we are a 9, we feel very happy about everything you do and with everyone you interact. In reality, it is not true. What we want to monitor is the ability to be in a team that overall stays above 7 on average. Some days will be good, others will be the opposite.
The nice thing is that in the beginning people will score randomly and after 10-12 times, the truth comes out, in the sense that if let’s say Charlotte scores you a 2, and the others a 7, you can easily tell there is something that needs clarification. It means expectations are wrong.
We would not go into the personality profile of the players, at least not in the first instance. The product creator’s envisioning that the application can integrate with company Learning and Development systems and competences growth maps to help the continuous development of the employees.
Review of problem
Overview of the meeting:
We have received a new requirement from the client “CHEMLUBE”.
The subject of the conversation is how we design the navigation from the list screen when the user needs to be able to see on a first priority all the contracts who won’t be renewed automatically. From that new design the user will be able to track and manage contracts in a most appropriate way.
Meeting minute:
- This feature will impact “Techoil” application Georges is worried that the feature won’t fit for his clients. He has to ask questions and schedule another meeting with Management and R&D on what would be the issues.
- The process is complicated and Pranay wants to make sure that we have understood the path well, so he had to explain the process ten times before being understood by the team members.
- John was excited by the new project and wanted to add a new feature to the application. Points have been noted and it will be escalated to the upcoming meeting.
- By lack of time Charlotte adds to schedule another meeting with Katherine and needs to confirm that we should have a workshop of 3 days.
- The client is expecting to have an update as soon as possible and Venkatesh is worried from that period of time given it won’t permit us to deliver as discussed.
As a product designer David understood that we have a new requirement but he still doesn’t know when and where to start since management haven’t agreed on anything (Assurance, Commitment, Communication, Organisation, Relationship, Determination).
Below is the scoring:
| My Score | Their Score | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Charlotte | 4 | 4 | |
| She was not able to lead the meeting less than two hours as planned and David’s late for the current assignment. | He didn’t assist me during the meeting. | ||
| Katherine | 8 | 5 | |
| Helped me to be involved in that meeting by asking me UI and UX questions. | Too shy and has to get out of his comfort zone during meeting. | ||
| Pranay | 4 | 7 | |
| I had difficulty understanding his english during the meeting. | He was curious and had been asking questions so I felt that he was interested in what I am saying. | ||
| John | 5 | 8 | |
| Not focusing on the main requirement by adding unrequited features so I have lost focus on the main requirement. | He thought that from the point taken during the meeting I was happy to work on them. | ||
| Venkatesh | 5 | 4 | |
| He was grumpy maybe because of the way meetings were turning off and shouting at everyone. | He was just pissed off with everyone so he has added a score of 4 to everyone because the meeting didn’t go as he thought. | ||
| Praveen | 7 | 7 | |
| Answering in a correct way all questions asked during the meeting and even suggesting having another one for other questions. | He was supportive during that meeting. | ||
| Georges | 8 | 4 | |
| It was a great move to think about the impact we may have of implementing the feature for his clients. | No need to involve another asset while he can do other assignments. |
Point of view
We know and have noted from that meeting players cannot guess what is on their mind. You can see everyone in the same team and in all the teams we interact with directly.
When a new project comes along, we will see other people’s evolution so we are aware of how best to be part of the team. This is about individuals becoming better at what they do and how they interact.
Belonging to a team always impact the way a person can perform. And as an individual, you don’t want to put yourself under unnecessary pressure if we understand how others respond to situations.
Objectives
The integral approach of the product is taking inspiration from natural environments interactions focusing on what it means to adapt to and adopt a digital working perspective.
We have seen it in that scenario of people from different cultures working remotely from different places. The team is able to cooperate and work towards the same objective at the same time by keeping the effort to perform the stand up meeting with team members.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges was to ensure that the players will enjoy rating their colleagues in a playful way during an ongoing project. From there we had to define different aspects of the application for a better experience.
Define what could be the scoring path and how the scoring works.
Looking for the best structure with a proper hierarchy.
By following the standard of a mobile view we had to consider all the constraints we may have.
The application could be used in any kind of environment non-work settings.
As a reminder, I have already a heavy workload to do and I do not want to have this feeling of working again while using the application so, from there we wanted the scoring part to be natural and playful.
Thus, we have had to keep in our mind that when we are using an array of buttons, it’s important to indicate priority.
As you can see below we have started to define priority by adding contrast and different kind of shape with different types of shape which could be the most important element to interact in the screen:
Furthermore we have given a correct order of how and where to show information on the screen starting from the top to the bottom.
One important point was also that we wanted to accentuate the person we were going to rate. By doing so it will help us to define the mood of the question and remind us of the current category we are into. Without hierarchy we won’t be able to guide players.
What if the question is not understood and we want to skip it?
Pardon me!
Could you please repeat your question?
Players could be a Chief Officer or a Junior employees who just join the company and
Yes we have different types of players,
Yes we may need time to think about it,
Yes we may feel uncomfortable with the question,
We needed to make sure that all players would be able to reformulate the question in a way that they won’t doubt themselves.
Moreover for budget purposes, we have decided to go with the classic keyboard and have started to enhance the user interface. For instance we have added colors and hierarchy to show where we are in the process of rating.
Henceforward we had to anticipate what if the players want to see the previous chosen rating?
In this phase losing focus on the main target was crucial. We didn’t want players to go back to the page they were previously looking at to see the last score they have given or even considering clicking anywhere else on the screen in addition to the end of the ongoing project to find out players abandonment rate increasing unacceptably.
How to add emotion with motion?
Enhance a better feeling while the player’s rating.
We wanted a good reason to play on a visual and give a meaning of what they have rated for them to quickly understand what is the given score.
With conviction we knew that adding emojis won’t be appropriate for every type of activity due to several factors but emojis are fun, cute, playful, youthful. It was exactly where we wanted to land in terms of the branding.
Needless to say, tearing down the tension between colleagues was our main objective. By doing so it will help us to get more attention from the subject line because these small funny icons who will be in motion will be spicing up the experience.
DO NOT FORGET we are not working. We are trying to resolve ongoing issues by having fun.
At this juncture it was the great time to increase the User Interface.
As a reminder we have had to try different ways of placing elements on the screen but something was still missing.
We wanted the player to feel comfortable rating his partner and at that point during the demo we have had the feeling of using an unfinished formal application.
Our main challenges were still not achieved.
So from there we have started to ask ourselves questions:
- Are we still following the Brand?
- Do we have enough consistency and contrast?
- Does it look simple and easy to use?
- Do we have enough refreshing white space?
- Have we defined the correct hierarchy for each section?
- Do I want to play with it?
Our final User Interface
By asking ourselves questions we have finally come to our senses and decided that the first visual design for the application will look like as below:
Extra challenges
How will the dashboard of scoring look like if we have more than 5 people? Then if the player didn’t rate how it will look like?
How to make sure that the needed criteria will be seen in a proper manner? If we have more than one criteria, how many do we need for one player?
The meeting organiser chooses the criteria for the team. There will be a menu of choices – collaboration indicator, Deliverability, relationship index, trust, team cohesion, et cetera.
The choices are known by all participants. We can score on a single agenda topic when the topics are large or the entire meeting, depending on the meeting purpose.
How do we keep track of Interplay?
We can have access to the tool anytime and be anywhere.
So let’s imagine something bad happened during the day;
Will I be able to add a score during that period of time and will it be shared during the meeting only? If the old added score is kept in my history as a note and situation has changed can we compare it during the stand up?
In both situations yes we are able to do so. The reason is simple: the score represents a journaling exercise for evolving relationships. As soon as I connect to my application, I’ll send you my template for journaling decisions. The purpose of continuous development is met. Now, the meeting organiser who decides the objective can decide to always score publicly. It does not stop you from logging your own purpose to track. As an example, it can be “purpose is to track my interactions with my line manager” – and score how you feel, similar to a recurring meeting in outlook – you have a conversation/meeting, you log a score – for each attribute of the 6, or a selection.
A new player added on an ongoing project, what about it?
So, players will be able from their dashboard to track their histories from past and ongoing projects.
So let’s say that from An old project team members are: Me(David), Charlotte, Venkatesh, Georges.
Project went well and has been approved by Venkatesh. 👌🏼
So during the stand up and at the end of this project we will give a correct score to everyone isn’t it? And I believe I will receive the same.
But as a “note” some of us know that it went fast because most of the people were too busy to bother with this feature and didn’t give the correct input. That believe it’s coming from me and team members won’t be able to put their ego aside.
So.. On the ongoing project: Me(David), Charlotte, Pranay, Georges
We had to upgrade the feature months later but with a new player into the team, Pranay. Venkatesh is requested into another project. Charlotte is in charge and unfortunately now the project is not going so well. 😒
Everyone is blaming each other: It seems that things have been approved in the wrong way and we may need to redesign everything.
Conclusion
By using the ACCORD Pulse application the benefit of seeing progress towards achieving the common goal and what makes the way hard or easy will be helpful to drive a project until the end.