Design Task

This was part of a sponsored project studio with NC State College of Design and a local company. We were tasked with devising a way of dealing with a project managed for collaborative team. Because the nature of the company, what the project could be could be very proud and it was ultimately left up to the individual teams. Within that collaboration, we were to explore different methods of making the process easier, more efficient, and user friendly.

Design Process

We began with mapping out what a project manager would do as a way to ensure that his/her team meets their deadlines. This is shown in the map and refined map before. This map was ultimately included into a larger map for everyone in the class to use as a reference. Also, to get us into thinking about how collaborates environments currently exist, we each explored various collaborative working environments and categorized them based on what features they offered and how to allowed for that communication to occur.

Once we saw what was out there, my teammate and I, started conceptually testing out various aspects of collaboration and participation within an advertising campaign.

Archivable Communication

Our solution was to devise a collaborative working environment that allowed for all the members within an advertising campaign to work asynchronously. This was done with creating an archiving system of every part of the campaign process. In addition, it opened up for creatives who my not normally converse with other producers of advertising collateral to discuss what was and wasn’t working to engage the consumer. We saw that this platform could be a live feed environment to allow for a campaign to change more rapidly, especially on such platforms as Facebook and twitter. Our persona, Franklin, was a project manager at a grocery store which was running a food drive campaign. He had many team members working on his campaign. Our system gave him the opportunity to chat with people both privately and globally as well as draw on assets and send back for revisions. At any point if someone missed a part of the conversation, all they need to do is to slide over to the archive window and review what has already been said or drawn on global assets. All of this to help a project manager complete the most successful campaign possible.

What happens next…

Conceptually speaking, I found that there was a lot of potential in this idea. Design-wise, I felt that the UI came off as blocky and could use thinner lines and more control of color. The bars helped the idea of things sliding in and out of place but in a UX environment that would be much more difficult to code and control. Some of the screens could have been combined into 1 or utilized long-form scrolling. The initial idea was for this to live on an iPad but it could use some exploration for how this could live in a phone (or app), webpage and possible how people could view this content in AR or VR. In either of those environments this could turn into something more like a campaign console with the project manager rotating in his/her chair checking on one thing after another.