lauramlive

Design Goals

I worked closely with the GoToMeeting and GoToTraining Android designers, as the design approach for this effort would impact their mobile offerings. We identified three goals for the redesign:

1. Focus on Attendees. For all of the products, the majority mobile user base are attendees as opposed to organizers. We ensured that our design decisions reflected the scenarios that our attendees would most likely find themselves in and addressed their most common pain points. (As an example, most attendees watch the screen without as much interaction as an organizer. So, having the toolbar automatically transition to full screen after a few moments of inactivity is especially important to attendees of the session.)

2. Incorporate Android conventions as appropriate. Wanting to take advantage of the inherent user expectations that come with Google's visual design language, we aimed to maintain many of the common components (floating action buttons, side panels, flexible toolbars, typography) and guidelines (depth & hierarchy, motion, bold use of color and illustration).

3. Maintain Citrix Visual Style. The redesign should still feel like part of the Citrix suite of products. To support that, we maintained as much Citrix branding as we could, specifically iconography, tone of voice, illustration style and color scheme.

Gathering User Data & Ideas

Technically, this process started a year prior when I was working on the GoToMeeting for Android app. During that time, another colleague and I embarked on the following research:

• Scoured NPS and app store verbatims to identify trends among user comments.
• Conducted brainstorming sessions with designers and product teams to amass ideas for app improvements.
• Reviewed Hack Weeks and side projects  that were appropriate for our efforts.
• Collected actionable outcomes from both internal and external mobile research.
• Documented new ideas based on the above items, as well as recently (internally) completed Jobs To Be Done research.

From this information, we created a long list of ideas which we separated into three buckets: High, Medium, and Low priorities. We lobbied for high priorities to be include in the app redesign, while Medium and Low priorities were not as important (from a usability perspective) and may also have required additional research. Ultimately, the user data & ideas we focused on for the redesign supported the following user pain points we identified:

• Users feel like it takes too long to get into session. We addressed this by automatically connecting users to VoIP when they joined the session. (Data showed that the majority of mobile users joined via that audio mode anyway).
• Users aren't sure if they are in the right place once they join the session. We improved the initial screen that users see when they join the session (and the organizer has not started screen sharing). Leveraging Android conventions, session information is easier to read and understand.
• Users aren't sure how to report a problem if it occurs. We included a "Send us feedback" option available at all times in the app.

Sketching

Once we identified our top priorities from a design perspective, we began to sketch these ideas out (see the first set of sketches below). Our explorations spawned smaller ideas, especially around interaction.

At this point, the project was de-prioritized for GoToMeeting, but resurfaced when I began work on GoToWebinar for Android a year later. With the mobile designers from GoToMeeting and GoToTraining, we continued our sketching exercise to align our product apps as much as possible (see the second set of sketches below). 

Redesign Implementation

The product teams had an aggressive time of about three months to implement the entire app, including any visual and interaction design updates. Before that clock began, we presented our aligned design thoughts to the product team to ensure we were still aligning with business goals and any technical considerations could be ironed out. Once the team felt confident moving forward, I continued with high fidelity designs and worked with the GoToTraining designer to conduct usertesting.com sessions for quick user feedback.

We did meet our target deadline, but chose to release only to a small subset of our users so we could monitor the app's quality via NPS score, crash analytics, and user feedback. 

Handouts

With the redesign, we supported a product-wise release of Handouts, which allows organizers to provide documents for attendees during the session. Below is a prototype I created to demonstrate the user flow and icon animation to the product team.

Revisiting the design

The redesign is now available to 100% of our user base, which means that the NPS score and quality of the app remained stable and eventually improved. After that release, I conducted a couple of user tests to validate additional design elements:

• An icon test via mechanical turk to validate the view webcams and leave a session iconography.
• A usertesting.com test to observe users asking a question, viewing and hiding the webcam feed, and leaving the session.