People Search Feature

What's the best way to really see someone? Just stop looking...

(UI / UX Design/ User Acceptance Testing) 

The StandOut platform is a performance management tool whose main selling point is its ability to give team leaders line of sight to behaviors within their own teams, see what they're working on, track their engagement, and gauge performance... so far so good.

The Opportunity

What was missing was a quick and intuitive way for team leaders to add team members from across an organization to their teams. This was a major hurdle to overcome, as the ability to build cross-functional teams is imperative to an organization's success in today's world. Moreover, the team leader needed a way to get a quick view or a snapshot of the team member before adding them to a team.

The Approach

We needed to move rather quickly on this project, which in and of itself is not usually a problem. However, some team changes meant that I would be seeing this project through from concept through completion, for better or worse. I decided to start brainstorming after reading the story and going over it with my Product Manager.

Possibly my favorite variation of the SWOT analysis diagram. It gave a structure and order to my initial sketches, useful traits once the transition to wires begins.

These are some of my initial sketches for how the search field would animate, but that concept was scrapped, as I didn't have a dedicated UI developer on the case. The development team was a bit shorthanded and a full-stack developer was all that could be afforded to me for this project.

Here I started exploring what the flow might feel like to the user. I wanted something straightforward and easy to use. I also wanted something cool, but had to keep in mind my limited resources / capabilities on this project. So, always being mindful of time and constraints, I chose to work in stages.

I think my mechanical wires here really helped the developer understand what I was going for. The fact that he would rather be doing a back-end ticket instead was not lost on me.

Here's a nifty animation that made it in!

The Solution

We hit all our targets and developed some assets that we would be able to reuse when we tackled Create / Edit team. The conditions were not ideal in the sense that I did not have a dedicated front-end resource, but we delivered a thoughtful and more robust flow for the user to add team members. I feel this iteration relies too heavily on modals, so in that sense I'm not all that happy with it, but I couldn't wait to give this another go in the near future. Time to write some stories.